Technical Services Monthly Report

July 2002

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

Record loads:

Roberta Winjum worked with Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater, Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Dale Poulter, John Haar, and Mary Beth Blalock to load over 113,000 records for Early English Books, both microfilm and online versions prior to reindexing.

Roberta Winjum, Zora Breeding, Don Jones, Pete Wilson and Nancy Boggess-Korekach also worked with the 1,190 DLC records for inventory items returned from OCLC’s Retrocon service, which were also successfully loaded prior to reindexing.

On July 23, Ann Ercelawn and Roberta Winjum met with Rick Stringer-Hye, Kitty Porter, John Haar, Dale Poulter, Jody Combs and Nancy Boggess-Korekach to discuss plans for Serials Solutions Marc records and how to develop a stronger integration of the e-journals listing with Acorn.

Unicorn Upgrade and Reindexing:

Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater, Pete Wilson, Denise Chavez and Jeff Taylor worked on the CAAG initiated project to look at particular Sirsi indexing policies in order to make any needed adjustments prior to the software upgrade. Pete worked with ISAG’s Acorn and Virtual Catalog Task Force to prepare for implementation of iLink. Several members of Order Services also took time during the month to help in the testing of U2002 on the Test Server, working with LITS to identify some of the "bugs” before U2002 went into Production.

Training:

Ann Ercelawn returned from Pakistan and immediately began Series Verification Training at Order Services. Most of the Order Services Team monograph receivers and verifiers are involved in the training. Ann gave a general overview session and then worked with team members individually to answer their questions and help them get started with the new procedure. Yuh-Fen Benda and Bryan Kurowski also worked with OS staff during the hands-on training and helped Ann to field questions.

Training Coordinators have been busily assigning keys for the New Horizons training software. We are glad that staff are taking advantage of this opportunity.

PERSONNEL:

The Cataloging and Authorities Team has two new staff members and is currently fully staffed. Michael Scott interviewed at the beginning of the month and was hired and on the job by the 22nd. We are very pleased to have him on the team. Many thanks to the search committee members, Becky Atack, Roberta Winjum, Peter Brush, Zora Breeding and Lisa Shipman for their efforts.

The Cataloging and Authorities Team was also very pleased to recruit Bryan Kurowski, formerly of Order Services, to fill the vacant LAIII position. Bryan’s first day was July 15th and he is off to a great start. Thanks to Becky Atack, Susan Bell, Zora Breeding and Yuh-Fen Benda for their work on the search committee.

The Cataloging and Authorities Team said a fond farewell to Joel Norton, our summer student assistant. Joel was a great help to us during a time when we were short staffed

Committees:

Susan Bell has been asked to chair an ERT committee charged with studying Kohlstedt judging of the ALA exhibit booths. Mary Charles has accepted an appointment from the ALA ALCTS Cataloging and Classification Section as member to the Task Force on Name Authority Training Materials. Becky Atack has agreed to serve on Staff Council and will be representing RS along with Sue Davis.

The Staff Forum Committee met to discuss plans for this year’s forum. Roberta Winjum chairs the committee that includes Sue Davis, Jody Combs, and Teresa Gray.

As part of her work for the Image Management Software Committee, Sue Davis attended a ContentDM demonstration. A competitor's software will be demonstrated in August.

Events:

Some staff were able to attend the VU sponsored meet the candidates picnic.

Many of us enjoyed the Bandy Center Open House and the get-together to bid farewell to Carol Partain.

Many staff attended the iLink open house in the Electronic Classroom at the GLB.

LIBRARY ANNEX:

The month raced by with a wealth of summer transfers. Assisting patrons with their problematic or challenging retrieval requests rounded out the month. This included both campus circulations and Inter-Library loan. Leonor Van Cotthem, Linda Davis, and Joe Collins were all involved in filling these requests.

We are pleased to report that many of the Dewey Observatory serial transfer problems were processed. Linda Davis, Leonor Van Cotthem, Joe Collins, and Clint Grantham all spent some time on the Observatory transfer project.

Clint also received 20 trucks of Central transfers, and spent a few hours each week on Not on Acorn material. Linda edited holdings and did withdrawals for the Central, Education, Management, Music, and Science Libraries.

Retrieval:

171 patrons requested Annex materials via the Web.

503 items were circulated to the campus libraries. Of these 503, 30 were PSL's.

2 RS Inventory items requested by ILL patrons this month

42 patrons requested 334 pages of photocopies

33 pages of faxed journal articles were sent for Faxed delivery requests

Storage:

291 linear feet of new transfers were received from the Central, Divinity, Law, and Management libraries. We also received new PCOLL and VCOLL transfers.

RS Maintenance:

4,311 Acorn records were edited.

4 Central titles were re-instated.

335 withdrawals were processed.

16 intra-library transfers were processed for the campus libraries collections.

Visitors:

19 guests visited us in July. Several were here on numerous occasions during the month. Departments represented were: Central Library, History, ITS, Law, Metro Schools, MIS, Sociology, Special Collections, Student Accounts and the VU Theatre Department.

Buildings and Equipment:

LITS staff upgraded our workstations, and we had numerous problems with our HVAC system. The Bouchard Company corrected stairwell sprinklers. We lost count of the number of complete power outages in the Hillsboro neighborhood that affected all of our electronics and alarms.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

Training:

Don Jones is the principal trainer for Michael Scott, focusing mainly on cataloging practice. Michael also received training from Susan Bell, Denise Chavez, Bryan Kurowski, Mary Charles Lasater and Zora Breeding. Becky Atack was the principal trainer for Bryan, although others have helped in his acclimation to CAT. Mary Charles has begun plans to give full NACO training to Michael, Bryan and Catherine Gick, Music Library Cataloger.

Special Projects, Etc:

Denise Chavez and Mary Charles Lasater finished the typographical error clean-up project, checking and correcting some common typos in Acorn. Joel Norton added URL’s to the National Academy Press titles added to Acorn since the original NAP URL project of a few years ago. He also added URL’s to titles in Acorn that are available on the CogNet database. Denise worked with Susan Bell on searching the Curriculum Lab materials. This year’s gift textbooks have arrived—200 boxes. Jean Wright continued to work on the Not on Acorn Dewey project. Jean is also working with Richard Stringer-Hye in an attempt to regularize the US Map room and CD-Rom treatment through Marcive. Yuh-Fen Benda continued to analyze titles in the Chinese dynasty collection. Jeff Taylor, with some help from Joel, worked on cataloging the large set of tango CDs from Argentina.

Theses:

Zora Breeding met with Kathy Smith, Juanita Murray and Teresa Gray form Special Collections to discuss some newly re-discovered theses still not on Acorn and housed at the Peabody library. CAT is working out plans to recon the 4000 plus T and TE theses, dating from about 1910-1950.

ORDER SERVICES:

Fiscal Rollover:

We're pleased to report that, with assistance from LITS, the fiscal year rollover went well for both serials and monographs. There was a slight glitch with one of the reports, but this was quickly fixed (by Dale Poulter) and the rollover continued. Nancy Boggess-Korekach has frozen all of last year’s funds against any further activity. If anyone has any comments or questions about the fiscal year end, or suggestions on how we may improve the process, we would appreciate hearing from you.

Serials:

Serials and periodicals have been moving through steadily. Two of the most significant changes for the month of July are that Debbie Williams has begun receiving continuations, and Gina Berry has been processing Russian approvals. Serials and periodicals are current.

Monographs:

Most of the month was spent catching up in receiving of CM, Gobi and regular firms, processing German, Spanish and French approvals that have been put on hold due to year-end. Russian approvals were also processed with Gina Berry's help.

We started verifying & placing orders again, especially for Special Collections."

Firm orders are very heavy at this time of year - there is, on average, a 3-week backlog of receiving of these materials.

PRESERVATION:

Summer vacations and a single binding shipment kept July's production numbers at an average level. The team happily reports no significant backlogs anywhere, either upstairs or down. For the first time in a long time the RS "cage" in the GLB Blue Room was empty before the next bindery delivery. Congratulations to the binding staff for making this minor miracle happen.

Charlotte Lew and Sue Davis (along with Kathy Smith) continued to visit the Peabody library each Friday morning as schedules allow. This project involves reviewing "medium rare" items for collection relevance and condition. During July the trio fine tuned procedures and reviewed 239 volumes.

Sue met with a vice-president of ICI Binderies, a competitor of Heckman Bindery. She agreed to send a sample book to test out a binding method not currently offered by Heckman.

Binding:

434 monographs,

8 rebinds,

525 periodicals,

45 serials for a total of

1,012 volumes were sent to Heckman Bindery.

1,014 new Central paperbacks sorted

428 (42%) Central paperbacks selected for immediate binding

77 paperbacks rebarcoded in preparation for binding

489 Acorn holdings records update as a result of binding.

Marking:

The team labeled:

4,031 items

174 RUSH

248 unbound serials

110 boxes of microfilm

With Lesley Grantham's summer assistance, the marking backlog has dwindled to a mere handful of shelves. Items are labeled within a few days of arrival.

With the microfiche labeling issue now resolved, the team will begin generating labels for microfiche again. The microfiche envelopes will no longer be stamped. Instead, labels will be generated using Word's address label function and enclosed along with the shipment to the receiving library. Government Information has chosen to stamp its own microfiche envelopes, following ergonomic guidelines, since it wishes to continue using stamps. Annex staff have offered to label the microfiche backlogged while the labeling questions were under discussion.

Repair:

151 volumes were repaired with 230 treatments.

A large percentage of the materials belonged to Central, but staff also treated items from Divinity, Peabody, and Special Collections. Charlotte reports that she made the biggest portfolio ever--measuring 27" wide. She also reports that ongoing Access database problems have finally been resolved thanks to the persistence and hard work of Fred Bidel. The problems were unexpected side effects of upgrading from Office 97 to Office 2000.

Charlotte has completed Level 1 of New Horizon's Dreamweaver online course and reports that she learned a lot.