Technical Services Monthly Report

June 2002

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

Zora Breeding, Ann Ercelawn, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum met with John Haar, Rick Stringer-Hye, and Dale Poulter to discuss our options with Serials Solutions. The decision was made to purchase their records for e-journals in selected aggregator databases. We will serve as a beta site for a subset of these databases during July and August.

Records from the RS Inventory were returned from OCLC RetroCon processing. Currently we are reviewing these records, with the intention that the LC records and possibly some others will be added to Acorn.

Some staff in their roles as members of CAAG or the Serials/Acquisitions Interest Group were able to spend a little time looking at the Unicorn upgrade in the test database.

We participated in another week of the Cost Study, June 10-14th.

PERSONNEL:

Zora Breeding, Becky Atack, and Roberta Winjum served on the search committee to hire a Spanish Cataloger, which got into full swing after ALA. Zora met with a couple of candidates at ALA.

The Cataloging and Authorities Team is very happy to announce that Bryan Kurowski of Order Services has accepted their open LA3 position and will start July15th. Zora Breeding, Becky Atack, Susan Bell and Yuh-Fen Benda served on the search committee. Although Order Services regrets Bryan's resignation, they are pleased that he won't be going far and wish him well in his new position.

Zora Breeding, Susan Bell, Sue Davis, Mary Charles Lasater, Don Jones, Pete Wilson, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum attended the ALA annual conference in Atlanta. Jeff Taylor attended a two-day preconference workshop on map cataloging and Don attended an afternoon preconference on map cataloging. Zora attended a PCC SACO workshop on subject analysis and assignment of subject headings. Pete attended the first meeting for the American South project. Also at ALA, several of us met with Peter McCracken, co-founder and CEO of Serial Solutions. Mary Ellen attended demonstration/focus groups for both GOBI and CM. As usual, ALA reports are in the RS travel folder.

Mary Charles Lasater gave a demonstration and introduction to OCLC’s CatME software, which was very well attended by staff from the CAT team, Order Services, and others in the library.

Sue Davis arranged for Charlotte Lew, Carrie Sprouse, and Roberta Winjum to visit the Fine Arts Dept. digitizing project.

Roberta Winjum chairs and Sue Davis is a member of this year’s Staff Forum planning committee, which has met once to date. Other members are Teresa Gray and Jody Combs.

Several team members attended the last of the OCLC "Steering by Standards" videoconferences, titled "Paper Past, Digital Future: Managing Metadata Standards in Transition."

Some staff attended the Imaging Seminar sponsored by the Staff Development Coordinating Committee and hosted by Suellen Stringer-Hye.

Most staff attended one of the New Horizon on-line tutorials overview sessions. Several have already signed up to begin their training.

Mary Charles Lasater helped with student orientation.

Ann Ercelawn has been asked to serve on the Editorial Board for Serials Librarian.

Mary Charles Lasater has increased her telecommuting hours to include a few additional weekend hours.

Ibtisam Latif has now returned from several weeks of leave. We're glad to have her back.

Some staff were able to attend the very enjoyable library picnic at Smiley Hollow.

LIBRARY ANNEX:

Annex full-time staff spent the majority of June working with the Dyer Astronomy transfers and the massive Central Transfer Project. Our four summer temporary staff members made great progress on the 2nd floor stacks compression-shift.

June remained a busy month with Inter-Library loan requests, particularly photocopying being heavy. Jean Wright’s pace on NOA’s (see CAT report) took some of Clint Grantham’s time. The Education withdrawal project seems to be winding down. The Annex's new blue Gryphion book transfer carts were received.

Gretchen Dodge completed her on site Library Annex work with the Paul Murphy Patents Collection. Thus, all of the boxes of materials have been moved from the Library Annex.

Campus Planning sent more archival materials to the University Archives. The Science Library sent us steel shelving. University Archives also sent over more components of steel shelving.

Retrieval:

194 patrons requested Annex materials via the Web.

345 items were circulated to the campus libraries. Of these 345 items, 35 were patron specified requests to alternate library circulation desks.

5 patrons used the new Fax Delivery Request forms for 57 pages of faxed material.

There were no faculty delivery requests.

47 ILL patrons requested 337 pages of photocopies.

Additionally, we searched for 54 more ILL requests, but we were unable to lend them. This was because the material was too fragile to ship, or the citations were incorrect.

7 requests from Vanderbilt campus patrons could not be filled. This was because they asked for materials that were not stored here.

Storage:

The 4th quarter 1180's were mailed to University tenants.

245 linear feet of new Annex transfers were received from the campus libraries. These included materials from Central, Law, and Management. We also received Vcoll transfers from the Catalogers and Special Collections. Progress continues with identifying LC Astronomy materials, especially those with 2000 and forward dates to process & transfer out of our 2 ranges of staging shelving.

RS Maintenance:

3,302 Acorn records were edited.

1 Central title and 10 Astronomy titles were reconned.

238 withdrawals were processed and 4 intra-library transfers were processed for the campus libraries collections.

Equipment and Facilities:

An electrical malfunction and pinhead compression leak caused our Sprinkler System to "trip" on Thursday evening, June 6th. Thus, gushing water rushed from the building into the parking lot. No water damage inside the building occurred.

This was the same week that our air conditioning system also broke. This required all of VU's HVAC team, plus 2 specialists from the Carrier Company. Eventually it was repaired -- over the course of three days.

Not to be out-done, the only Elevator we have also required repairs, which became a bit complicated. After working all afternoon trying to repair it, our normal elevator repair person had to actually shut down the elevator overnight until a specialist could arrive the next day.

Visitors:

44 graduate students, faculty, and staff from Arts and Sciences, Campus Planning, Central Collections Development, Government Information, I.T.S., Law, Legal Clinic,

Management Information Systems, Music, Office of the University Librarian, Occupational Health, Office of the University Registrar, Preventive Medicine, Resource

Services, Special Collections, and Student Accounts visited the Library Annex in June.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES TEAM:

The flow of materials has increased due to the year-end ordering blitz. Don Jones has been especially heavily hit by endless shelves of French materials, as well as some in his other subjects. Everyone else is a close second. Don and Pete Wilson have taken over the bulk of the materials that once were cataloged by Rich.

Denise Chavez has agreed to take over searching of Curriculum Lab materials for Susan Bell. Becky Atack has started training Denise for this new responsibility. Sue Richardson worked on lists of unauthorized names in Acorn. Mary Charles Lasater and Denise continue working on lists of common typographical errors. This project will last through July and is planned as a yearly activity from now on.

Jean Wright reports that the initial stage of "Project NOAD" (not on Acorn Dewey) for Central has been completed. This is the comparison of the list of identified US publications with the actual material on the shelf.

Several team members have moved to new workstations. Yuh-Fen Benda moved around the corner to Laurie Power’s vacant cubicle. Jeff Taylor moved into Yuh-Fen’s old station. Becky Atack is planning a move to Norma Riddick’s vacant space, although she has not quite made the plunge yet. Many of us were fortunate to get new flat panel monitors. All have been pleased with them.

Susan Bell is now the supervisor for Jeff Taylor, Bryan Kurowski (when he transfers on 7/15), and Yuh Fen Benda, all but one of the team's full-time LAIII staff.

With the current staffing shortages in the team the education thesis project and the education provisional record project are on hold for now.

A highlight for authority control is access to the LC authority file beginning June 30. As long as a port is available (there is a limit), we can access the LC authority files from anywhere via the Internet.

ORDER SERVICES TEAM:

OS is pleased to report that the 2002 fiscal year has successfully drawn to a close. All necessary rollover reports have been completed (with only a few glitches). Some cleanup and editing of Acquisitions reports remains to be done, but otherwise we have successfully moved into the 2003 fiscal year.

As the fiscal year drew to a close, OS carefully monitored each fund and worked with the libraries to encumber appropriately. OS used CM, GOBI, and traditional ordering methods to order materials. Libraries had the majority of their orders to OS by May 20th; OS was able to bring nearly all the funds close to their full encumbrance early, and continue to place additional orders as money was sometimes released back into the funds as a result of the receiving/invoice payment process. There were 1414 new orders placed in June, 60 gift titles added, and 800 approvals added.

The amount of materials being received in the mailroom has been very heavy, and nearly all OS has been involved in the receiving of these materials. Continuations and Approvals are up to date; Firm orders have an average backlog of 2 to 3 ½ weeks at this point. Receivers were also responsible for cataloging 1075 titles at the point of receipt (the second highest month this fiscal year).

Serial receiving remains up to date (received within 24 hours of receipt). During the month of June, 3734 serials and periodicals were received. Chris Waldrop also reports that we have changed the shipping method for materials being sent to the Music Library. Complaints of lost materials led us to begin shipping Music materials in sealed containers (rather than placing just a few items in open mail bins for routing). This appears to have helped the situation.

PRESERVATION TEAM:

With the completion of another fiscal year, the Preservation Team is proud to report no binding or marking backlogs and workflow back under control--a very different story from the beginning of the 2001/2002 year. Over the past year the team has worked very hard to streamline procedures yet remain productive and service-oriented. Summer binding and marking loads are picking up as usual, but so far materials are flowing smoothly. Temporary summer help has made a significant difference.

Sue Davis and Charlotte Lew have once again joined forces with Special Collections to review and clean a collection of items in the Peabody Library. These materials are in the upper vault area and could be considered "medium rare" items. These volumes are NOT on Acorn. The project will take some time even with weekly visits (our goal); the collection numbers in the many hundreds, possibly more.

Sue Davis accompanied Juanita Murray and Kathy Smith on field trips to two different local Iron Mountain storage facilities. One was designed to house sound and film archives, the other paper records with expected short life spans. Both sites were quite interesting to visit.

Binding:

1,691 volumes processed for Heckman Bindery, including:

855 monographs

29 rebind monographs

649 periodicals

158 serials

You may be interested to know that 24,643 volumes were bound by RS over the past fiscal year, compared to16,770 volumes sent in 2000/2001.

Karen Pillow and Machelle Keen encumbered binding funds for all items sent to the bindery before June 30 except for a handful of Science volumes. It was touch-and-go the last few hours of those last few days before the fiscal year end, but all turned out okay in the end.

Reminder: The single bindery pickup/delivery scheduled during July happens on July 18. Heckman Bindery traditionally closes the week of July 4th.

1,165 new Central paperbacks sorted

450 (39%) selected for immediate binding.

Over the past fiscal year Machelle sorted 8,518 new Central paperbacks with an overall binding rate of approximately 63%.

Machelle, Sheranda Moore, and Patti Skipper updated 261 Acorn records as a result of binding.

Machelle rebarcoded 172 Central monographs in June as part of preparation for binding. Her fiscal year total amounted to 2,122 rebarcoded for Central.

Binding processing staff are keeping current with processing both outgoing and returned shipments. The only backlogs are materials that have arrived in the unit since the last binding shipment. Monographs, periodicals, and serials are all current.

Marking:

The team labeled:

3,450 items

201 RUSH items

127 reels of microfilm

206 unbound serials, and

518 microfiche envelopes

The incoming flow of marking has definitely sped up, but we are still labeling items within one week of receipt.

Annual totals show that the team labeled 51,413 items since last July. During 2000/2001 the team labeled 47,990 items. Another interesting annual statistic shows that the team labeled 2,612 RUSH items since last July.

Repair:

200 items repaired with 265 treatments.

The summer assistants have made a healthy dent in the backlog of spine repairs. The other major thrust was a large wrapper box order, split between Special Collections and Central items.

Repair staff repaired or rehoused 2,120 items with 3,081 treatments since last July.