Technical Services Monthly Report

May 2002

 

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

 

The entire Preservation Team deserves recognition now that the backlogs in Binding and Marking have dwindled down to just a handful of items. Although the year end rush is about to begin for them, they deserve our appreciation for how hard they’ve worked not only to come up with new ways of getting the work done, but also for their consistent diligence, dependability, and cooperation in getting our books bound and marked.

 

On May 21, the RS Inventory was frozen while all the bibliographic records were sent to OCLC for the Inventory Reduction Project.  This meant that no new volumes were

pulled from the Inventory unless there was a Rush Request.  Likewise, no new volumes were added to the Inventory during this time.  When the Inventory was "thawed"

on June 1st, Annex staff began to charge items to a new pseudo-patron number.  All of the former charge numbers that we had used are retired from further usage.

 

The Materials Routing Task Force met with the Tech Services Workflow Task Force to discuss their final report. Many of their recommendations, such as dating each box of books as received, have already been implemented.  Materials Routing Task Force members include Chris Waldrop, chair, Susan Bell, Suzanne Bell, Karen Pillow, and Dennis Sauls. We thank them for their work.

 

The Technical Services Web Pages Task Force, Ann Ercelawn, chair, Charlotte Lew, and Angel Bruner, submitted their design prototypes to the Tech Services Workflow Task Force. They will be meeting with the TSWFTF to discuss the recommendations in June. 

 

Mary Ellen Wilson, Sue Davis, Zora Breeding, and Roberta Winjum met with Dennis Clark to discuss changes in the handling of Music materials upon the arrival of their new cataloger.

 

Most staff had their computers ghosted and software upgraded to Windows 2000. As a result, some discovered a need for more memory to keep their computers operating as efficiently as before. A few application and memory problems remain from the upgrade, but LITS is working through them. Thanks to LITS for working to keep us going.   

 

PERSONNEL:

 

May was a month of departure for the Cataloging and Authorities Team.  We had a going away party for Rich Murray, whose last day was May 17th and the next week we “celebrated” Norma Riddick’s retirement after 26 years.  The empty cubicles where Laurie Power, Norma and Rich so recently sat feel empty and forlorn.

 

Norma’s retirement party was a very pleasant success, thanks to the efforts of Becky Atack, Pat Johnson, Zora Breeding, Denise Chavez and Suzanne Bell.  Ann Ercelawn conspired with Norma’s sister and nephew to surprise Norma with their attendance. The heartfelt comments of several attendees made a terrific party and a lovely remembrance of Norma.

 

Becky Atack was hired into the vacant LA4 position but continues to try to do two jobs while waiting for the now vacant LA3 position to be filled. 

 

The Cataloging and Authorities Team hired a student, Joel Norton, to work through the end of July.

 

In Preservation, Daphne Walker has taken personal leave for the summer months of June, July, and August.  We welcomed back Lesley Grantham as a summer Binding/Marking assistant.  We hired two assistants in repair, Myra Foxworth, a Divinity graduate student, and Carrie Sprouse, a part time library assistant in Central Periodicals.

 

Summer temporary assistants from local colleges and high schools were hired by the Annex. Greg Hall and Matt Williams joined us in late May.  Melinda Higgins and Will Stringfellow started June 2nd. All will be helping us with 2nd floor Annex stacks shifting projects. University Archives hired additional students for summer projects, and they too are in the Annex for work with David Stringfellow. The Annex said a sad summer good-bye to Professor Helguera’s graduate student, Eugene Berger.

 

Mary Ellen Wilson and Roberta Winjum attended the annual UUGI conference at the beginning of the month. Roberta and Dale Poulter gave a presentation on Vanderbilt’s Acorn/PeopleSoft interface for invoice and payment processing.

 

Roberta Winjum attended a meeting of the OCLC Digital and Preservation Cooperative in Dublin, Ohio, on May 8-10.

 

As a member of this year’s Merit Awards Committee, Linda Davis spent time during May studying the nominations submitted for Merit Awards.

 

Several staff attended the open interview sessions with the final Education Library Director candidate and the Special Collections open house. Some also attended the scanning session taught by Rick Stringer-Hye.

 

Several GLB staff participated in Janet Thomason's Central Library evacuation plan update meeting.  Two additional training needs surfaced during the discussion at that meeting—CPR training and fire extinguisher training.  Sue Davis submitted both training needs to the Staff Development Coordinating Committee; Lisa Shipman responded that the SDCC would sponsor these events soon.

 

Don Jones attended the breakfast and reporting session of the 2002 Faculty-Staff Campaign.

 

Congratulations to Peg Earheart on the birth of her first grandchild, Serenity Jade Earheart.

 

LIBRARY ANNEX:

 

May 10th, 439.83 linear feet of Dyer Observatory materials were transferred to the Library Annex via Ozburn-Hessey movers.  These were placed in a staging area on our 1st Floor. The Acorn HOME location for these staging area items is ASTRONOMY.  As Annex staff verify and edit Acorn record correlation and shelve the material on our 2nd floor stacks, the HOME locations will be changed to ANNEX.  As duplicates are found in the collection, they will be withdrawn from VUL, and sent to staff at the Science Library to be returned to Dyer.  Annex staff will also identify titles that are Not on Acorn, and recon the DLC cataloging types.  This part of the project may take up to two years to complete.

 

As is normal for the month of May, we continued to have an increase in reshelving of recently discharged volumes.

 

Our assistance to Central Collections Development with the crated Chinese dynastic histories was completed on May 2nd.

 

Clint Grantham finished processing and shelving the last of the Science spring semester transfers.  Toward the end of the month, he began receiving and processing the first of the massive Central transfer project.  He also spent time with Jean Wright on the Not On Acorn items.

 

Linda Davis reports that May 1, Binding and Marking staff notified her that they would resume 100% of the Acorn editing for bindery pattern work.

 

May 6th, Leonor Van Cotthem provided an Annex orientation and tour to Prof. Ruiz-Ramon. 

 

Joe reports that May 2002 was quite a busy month for stacks maintenance.  He worked on returns, VColl shifting, and storage shelving transfers.

 

Retrieval:

229 patrons requested Annex materials via the Web.

  19 patrons requested PSL deliveries

    9 patrons used our new fax service to request 99 pages

401 items were circulated to the campus libraries.

 39 Inter-Library Loan patrons requested 350 pages of photocopies

 

Storage:

545 linear feet of new Annex transfers were received from Central, Dyer Observatory, Government Information, Law, Management, and Science. 

9 new volumes were added to the RS Inventory before it was frozen on 5/21.

 

RS Maintenance:

3,487 Acorn records were edited.

     2 Central titles were re-instated.

     5 titles were reconned.

1,616 withdrawals were processed.

 

Visitors:

38 visitors were on site.  These included A & S faculty, and staff from the Baudelaire Center, Campus Planning, Central Business Group, Central Collection Development, Corporate Express, Education, Government Information, Information Technology Services, local authors, LITS, Management Information Systems, Occupational Health, Office of the University Librarian, retired Resource Services staff, Science, Special Collections, Student Accounts, and the VU Theatre Department.  

 

Equipment and Facilities:

 

May 6th, the new industrial-warehouse rolling ladder arrived.  Special Collections, Ozburn-Hessey staff, and Annex staff put this immediately to use! 

 

Electrical switches in our Mailroom had to be replaced.

 

The Annex elevator required repairs that took 2 reps parts of 2 days to complete.

 

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES TEAM:

 

Becky Atack and Yuh-Fen Benda have taken over the series work that Laurie Power had been doing.  Even with two of them working on this material, they are still overrun by the amount and wonder how Laurie managed.  Pete Wilson reports that he finished cataloging the last of the IMP Working Papers.  Denise Chavez sent another delete file off to Marcive. Yuh-Fen met with Professor Tracy Miller to discuss the 611-volume set of the Chinese classic "Si bu bei yao."  Prof. Miller is anxious to increase access to this set and Yuh-Fen will be starting a project to analyze the set at the rate of a few titles per month.  Jean Wright has started the conversion of the pre-1976 State Department documents as part of our contribution to an Information Alliance cooperative project.  Mary Charles Lasater continued to work through CatME issues as she prepares to demo the software to interested library staff in early June.  

 

Mary Beth Blalock joined Jean Wright for a session of hands on inventory of the "Not on Acorn" material at the Annex. She is familiarizing herself with the follow-up process and has arranged with John Haar to have 10 hours a week of student help assigned to assist with the project this summer. We hope to have all of the work of identifying the material completed during that time.

 

Student Assistant Joel Norton’s excellent work has been a real help in time of need.  Joel had worked in Divinity as cataloging support, so he came to us well trained.  Jeff Taylor and Yuh-Fen Benda have been working with him on LC copy cataloging, series standing orders, e-journal URL maintenance and adding links to National Academy Press titles.  

 

Committee News:  

Ann Ercelawn attended the Web Task Force meeting and participated in testing the SDI feature of iLink.  Pete Wilson continued work with the ISAG Acorn and Virtual Catalog Task Force for which he finished the list of fields to be added to the Webcat "full" view. He also conducted an extensive study on the iLink "categories" function. Zora began to work through the reports of item types that CAAG has recommended be removed from active use.  She found and deleted strange records in Acorn of various divisions’ library hours for 1998/99.  

 

Statistics: 

1868 of 2880 new titles cataloged by RS were done by the Cataloging and Authorities Team.

208 titles recataloged.

644 access points on bibliographic records edited doing manual authority work. 

6600 new or modified authority records supplied by Marcive 

 

ORDER SERVICES:

 

The verifiers continue to process orders, and most funds are now fully encumbered.  Verifiers continue to work on the last of these requests, as well as on approvals and the

processing of firm orders (upon receipt).  Receiving has been quite heavy (the consequence of our actions..) - receivers and verifiers are working to move these materials through as quickly as possible.  Serial receivers continue to process serials and periodicals as they are received.

 

During May, Bob Schatz (Everetts) and John Laraway (Blackwells) visited.  On Memorial Day, several OS staff members braved the lack of air conditioning to continue processing as the air handler was replaced in the Baker Building. 

 

Mary Ellen met with the Training Support Coordinators to learn how to manage the “keys" that allow staff to take the New Horizons tutorials.  Several OS staff have expressed an interest in taking the tutorials, but prefer to wait until after the end of the fiscal year.

 

Statistics:

3279 new orders created (1133 on CM/GOBI)

1012 titles speed cataloged

1170 approvals added to Acorn

22 gift titles added

4436 serials/periodical issues received

1842 firm/continuations received

 

PRESERVATION:

 

The Preservation team could claim title to an OVERacheivers award for the month of May.  Both our binding and marking statistics topped the scales indicating that the summer rush has begun. This is the first spring in recent memory when we are NOT begging, borrowing, or buying more book trucks.   

 

Sue Davis met with Kathy Smith, Special Collections, and Stacy Owens, Education to plan another sorting/cleaning project for a group of medium-rare materials in Education Library's upper vault area.  The project is slated to begin June 28 and last as long as it takes to inspect approximately 1,000 items.  Additional staff will assist with the weekly sessions.  

 

Binding: 

3,223 volumes processed for Heckman Bindery, (Machelle Keen reports that it's the largest monthly total since May 1997) including:

1,389 monographs

     74 rebinds

1,452 periodicals

   308 serials.  

965 new Central paperbacks sorted

414 (43%) selected for immediate binding

370 items rebarcoded. Machelle is currently rebarcoding Central paperbacks received for binding within the last 2 weeks.

 

Both Karen Pillow and Machelle are working on invoices for May's binding shipments.

 

Machelle and Sheranda Lee have updated 984 Acorn records as result of binding.  They both are keeping current with the binding shipments.

 

Staff are currently receiving mongraphs and periodicals from the binding shipment returned May 30.  Karen is wrapping up receiving the last of serials from the May 16th returned shipment.

 

We have received the Heckman Bindery price list for 2002-2003.  There are two changes from last year, both slight increases.  Custom books increase from $5.55 per volume to $5.70.  Mylar paperbacks increase from $4.10 to $4.20 each.  All other prices stay the same.  The current 2001-2002 price list is posted at: 

http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/rs/restricted/Heckprices2001.htm

 

The upcoming 2002-2003 price list is posted at:

http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/rs/restricted/Heckprices2002.htm

 

Marking: 

Volumes labeled include:

5,101 items

163 RUSH

335 unbound serials

62 microfilm reels 

As part of the investigation into alternative microfiche labeling methods, we also labeled 64 microfiche envelopes.  As of this morning, staff are currently labeling volumes received May 30.  The marking backlog has been reduced to a single section of shelving.  May's total is the second highest of 2001-2002.

 

Repair: 

90 volumes repaired with 128 treatments in May.  

Charlotte Lew trained the two new summer assistants and reports that both are doing well.  The bulk of the work was spine repairs for Central materials.