Feb. 2002
DIVISION WIDE ACTIVITIES:
The Ebsco invoice payment was finalized in Acorn (these invoices are now "paid" rather than "invoiced"). We are currently working on finalizing the Swets/Blackwell payment (also prepaid this fiscal year). In addition to an automated invoice load via FTP for both of these vendors, the Acorn/PeopleSoft interface is being used to send this information to University Accounting for the first time.
Each team updated goals and objectives and prepared 2002/2003 projects lists. We reviewed our 2001/2002 projects and felt great about the many special projects completed. Staff also worked on their annual performance reviews. Roberta Winjum plans to consolidate the goals and projects and discuss them with Division Library Directors.
As the Technical Services WorkFlow Task Force members (Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Mary Ellen Wilson, Roberta Winjum, and sometimes Peg Earheart) continue to work toward the goal of improving operations, that group is creating more cross-team task forces to address specific needs. We are also starting to see some results from those task forces.
Laurie Power (chair), Yuh-Fen Benda, Bryan Kurowski, and Yan-Xia Zhong continue work on the Series TF. That group has made several recommendations that have been discussed and approved. They are now in the process of writing documentation and training for the new procedures to be implemented. Ann Ercelawn is helping the Series TF with training and documentation aspects.
The Inventory Reduction TF, Rich Murray (chair), Susan Bell, Don Jones, Pete Wilson, Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Peg Earheart, and Roberta Winjum (guest) met during the month to finalize preparations for sending our file of records for items in the inventory to OCLC for matching against their database. The group planned, and Nancy prepared and sent a test file of 100 records for inventory books to OCLC so they can begin to set up the specifications for the project.
The newly formed Materials Routing TF, Chris Waldrop (chair), Susan Bell, Suzanne Bell, Karen Pillow, and Dennis Sauls, met with the TSWFTF to discuss their charge. That group has met several times and has already implemented a couple of improvements in the Baker Mailroom.
A new TS Web Page TF was formed with Ann Ercelawn, chair, Angel Bruner, and Charlotte Lew. This group will tackle the task of making the RS Documentation page more user-friendly and effective.
2,384 additional netLibrary records for the second Solinet shared collection were loaded into Acorn, and sent to Marcive for authority matching and TOC’s.
PERSONNEL:
Many attended the Feb. 20th Technology Update.
Sue Davis spent much of February interviewing candidates for the Binding/Marking vacancy. Patti Skipper accepted the position and begins March 4. The Preservation Team is looking forward to her arrival.
LIBRARY ANNEX:
Patron Specified Library Requests:
On Feb. 7th we began the new service of Library Annex Patron Specified Library (PSL) delivery requests. Patrons can now request to have Annex materials delivered to the Campus Circulation desk of their choice, not just the owning library. The 2nd component of Annex PSL service was the lending of Annex Periodicals across the VU campus. These are restricted to in-house use at the non-owning libraries. This new feature went live on February 27th. The 3rd component of the Annex PSL service is the faxing of journal articles of 30 pages or less. Fax copies are sent to the patron's departmental or home fax machine. This service also went live on 2/27. Clint accomplished a most excellent job of serving on the CAG sub-committee, and in representing all Annex interests in this development. Peg prepared instructional documentation and examples for Annex staff on all PSL delivery policies.
Feb. 2002 PSL statistics:
Week % of requests sent to non-owning libraries
1 17%
2 21%
3 15%
Education and Management Annex volumes received significantly higher Annex circulation during Feb. 2002, and we feel this is because of the PSL service.
Storage:
Mary Beth Blalock, Janet Thomason, Jo Bilyeu, and Peg Earheart met February 21st to complete plans for the 113,000 volume Central Transfer Project. Bibliographers had selected the first 4,745 volumes in the A, B, C, F, H, J, P, R classification schemes for Annex transfer. The first carts of weekly transfers were received at the Annex on Feb. 25. Although there was "shelve by classification" space for most of the A's to be shelved, the other volumes will be shelved in the new "Central Overflow stacks", arranged by "next volume in" and not by continuous call number arrangement. It is by the use of Acorn that we track range number, vertical tier number, and shelf number in order to find and retrieve the item for circulation. Peg plans a 2-year circulation analysis of Central overflow.
On Feb. 11th the VU movers brought the Special Collections vault cantilever shelving components to the Annex basement for storage. The Annex basement is full again of used furniture from Central, Divinity, Baudelaire Center, Music, Office of the University Librarian, Science, and Special Collections. A year ago it was nearly empty. In roughly a year's time, we have exhausted further empty square footage space. We can't accept any further campus library furniture, desks, or pieces of shelving.
127 linear feet of new transfers were received from Central, Law, Mngt., PColl, RS Inventory, VColl, and Science. We anticipate this figure to grow significantly in March.
The Science LC Periodical transfer project is on schedule for phase completion in early June. This involves 300.9 linear feet of QA's and QD's still to ship. A minimum of 2 weekly carts of transfers will permit Science to reach their target date. The total project involved 802.5 linear feet of transfers. We had managed to put 491.6 in our "call number order" stacks. This was in addition to creating space for the Astronomy materials in QB to transfer here from the Observatory Library.
Music Library staff completed another round of Robinson review materials, and returned 5 boxes to the Annex to offer to Central. Dale Manning and Julie Loder selected Divinity titles from the Robinson Collection to send to Ann Womack for review. Annex staff packed Robinson books from Staging Area I, to become boxed materials in the Stockade. This material will be held for Central Bibliographer review at a later time.
The 2nd floor storage room was completely vacated by Institutional Planning and Development on Wed., Feb. 27th. Peg's recommendation is to turn this 388 square foot room into a specialized area for University Archives.
Circulation:
724 items circulated to Central, Divinity, Education, Government Information, Inter-Library Loan, Law, Management, Music, Baudelaire Center, RS Cataloging, Science, and Special Collections.
20 more volumes were requested by VU patrons for materials not in the Annex.
341 patrons requested their Annex retrievals via the Web.
71 ILL patrons requested articles to be photocopied, for which we reproduced 645 pages.
37 books could not be loaned due to the fragility of the materials or incorrect citations.
Buildings and Equipment:
We await word from Central Business Group on a revised installation schedule for our newest SpaceSaver shelving. The latest news was that the manufacturer was scheduled to ship our newly produced shelving on March 6th. We've all been busy clearing away space for the project to begin on the first floor shortly.
The Wasco Company replaced our front entrance steps.
RS Maintenance:
Linda Davis continues to assist with the editing of holdings for titles sent to the bindery. She also aided in the processing of superseded titles being transferred out of Divinity into Music and Management.
No. 1-79 of the 370 P33 (former Peabody vault) Special Collections Dewey project have now been sent from the Annex to the Cataloging team for recon.
Leonor Van Cotthem worked on the microfiche stamping for technical services.
2 titles reconned.
2 more unique Pascal Pia titles found within the Pia duplicate re-verification project.
217 withdrawals processed
1 Central volume re-instated.
9 intra-library transfers processed for the campus libraries.
1904 Acorn records edited
Visitors/Meetings
34 visitors and tenants were on site. These included representatives of Central Collection Development, Information Technology Services, Institutional Planning and Development, O.U.L., Owen School, retired faculty members, Resource Services, Science faculty, Special Collections, Student Accounts, and the VU Theatre Department.
Peg and Kathy Smith provided a tour of the Library Annex including Special Collections and University Archives Annex physical holdings for Teresa Gray on February 20th.
Peg meet with Jim Toplon on Feb. 11th to view technological applications with potential future Annex developments. Peg also met with Sherre Harrington and Deb Stephens to develop creative applications for the current Science transfer project. Peg attended the Feb. 12th Bell South Expansion Proposal meeting with the Metro Neighborhood Association and Council representative Ginger Hausser.
CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:
The flow of new materials to cataloging was unusually heavy for February. Becky Atack reports heavy receipts of Russian materials and Don Jones and others report that French titles are pouring in. The German titles, on the other hand, have finally slowed down, allowing Zora Breeding to catch up with current receipts for the first time in months.
Pete Wilson, Don Jones, Susan Bell, and Rich Murray are all feeling the effects of the increased workload due to Norma Riddick’s retirement. Although Norma continued to work her old schedule through the end of the month, she is no longer working on current receipts. Norma worked on cataloging "previously undiscovered treasures" which Special Collections has turned up, and is working on Robinson material that has been selected for Sevier.
Susan Bell continues to handle the Tennessee textbooks from Education and has recently learned that these are expected to continue to be donated into the foreseeable future. Rich Murray has received quite a number of new titles for the Baudelaire collection. Ann Barnette cataloged another 94 IMF working papers, which completes cataloging of the years 1992-1996 and leaves only 1991 to catalog (the year, not the amount).
Ann Ercelawn cataloged a number of Pia and Baudelaire titles, and has tried to keep up with the mass of e-journal title maintenance that has become a routine part of her workload as we add and subtract vendors and existing vendors pick up and drop titles they provide access to. She also consulted with Nancy Boggess-Korekach and Dale Poulter about the possibility of adding URLs and notes to a large number of Acorn records.
Mary Charles Lasater, Yuh-Fen Benda, Denise Chavez and Jeff Taylor worked on the Education theses recon project. Mary Charles and Denise began experimenting with the CatME software, in preparation for using it to work on the Education theses project. If that experiment goes well, there may be additional ways to use this software to our benefit. Pete Wilson, with Ann Ercelawn’s help, made a list of MARC fields for books and serials formats, that should be added to the public "full" view if we discontinue the "all" view for privacy purposes. Pete Wilson reports that the ISAG Acorn and Virtual Catalog Subcommittee has began discussions of whether to buy Sirsi's iLink public interface product and, if so (it will likely be so), how to implement it.
Jean Wright finished the cursory follow-up of the newly discovered “not on Acorn” Dewey material from the inventory work at the Annex. She began a new database to help with offering material that is out of scope for our collection to other libraries. She has also begun work on her new project: full conversion of the pre-1976 Department of State series, in accordance with our commitment to the Information Alliance project. Don Jones has given Jean a crash course on OCLC Enhance procedures so that she can eventually upgrade the associated State Dept. records on OCLC.
Mary Charles Lasater has been checking the reports of the new Marcive service called NewMatch and finds that it is going well. We are waiting until she has had a chance to evaluate the service further before making any changes in our workflow. She, Denise Chavez and Sue Richardson are making progress checking the unauthorized headings lists and catching up on the backlog of withdrawn titles -- they delete authority records for headings which no longer have associated bibliographic records in Acorn, thus reducing the number of blind references.
Rich Murray was asked to be one of four panelists at a program on recruitment and retention of new academic librarians at next year's ACRL conference.
Mary Charles Lasater’s proposal for telecommuting has been approved and she hopes to be able to start in mid-March, as soon as she gets all of her home computing and equipment needs taken care of. She will continue to have a schedule similar to her current one, but with fewer hours on campus. We will post a detailed schedule once she begins telecommuting.
The team cataloged 1839 new titles.
ORDER SERVICES:
Incoming purchase requests are moderate. The oldest purchase requests awaiting processing at this time are less than two weeks old. Firm orders in the mailroom are approximately two weeks old. All approvals are current, including all non-domestic approvals. Serials and periodicals are being received within 24 hours of their receipt in Order Services.
Statistics:
905 approvals added
117 gift titles added
1924 new orders created
3942 serials/periodicals received
799 titles speed cataloged upon receipt.
In support of the TS Web Page Task Force, Order Services has established its own team task force to look specifically at OS documentation on the web. Angel Bruner chairs the group that also includes Gina Berry, Alice Cunningham, and Chris Waldrop.
Early in the month, OS received a visit from Stuart Grinnell of Ambassador Books and Dena Schoen of Harrassowitz. Later in the month, Kathy Brannon of Blackwell's paid us a visit.
Last week, Chris Waldrop held an instructional session for representatives from Management and Divinity who were interested in learning how to claim serial issues electronically, and find information using some of the online databases provided by our subscription vendors. Representatives from Central and Education also attended the session. If anyone is interested in learning more about this session, they may contact Chris.
PRESERVATION:
The short month of February flew past as the team continued to whittle down the backlog. Credit for a job well done also extends to the two student assistants who faithfully showed up and worked hard--Grace Choi and Rael Ellis. Rael had previously worked in the repair lab and asked to return there. She agreed to split her time between upstairs and down to help with the marking load.
Sue Davis uploaded the PEM data from the Annex, generated reports for Peggy Earheart, and emailed the data to Rochester, NY.
Sue Davis met with Stacy Owens to plan another Education Library sorting/cleaning project from an area of the collection known as the "upper vault". With Stacy's help Sue developed a sorting form. A starting date for the project has yet to be set, but it will be soon.
Sue Davis and Janet Thomason resolved some thorny procedural problems relating to Central monographs selected for repair and transfer to the Annex.
Binding:
Another banner month for binding:
2,234 volumes sent to the bindery, including
1,311 new monographs,
84 rebind monographs,
782 periodicals,
57 serials.
While the bulk of monographs were Central items, the majority of the periodicals came from Science.
Machelle Keen sorted 1,127 new Central paperback monographs. She selected 539 (48%) for immediate binding. There was a higher than usual percentage of fragile gift materials and a large number of IMF papers in that mix.
As a result of binding Sheranda updated 480 Acorn records. Linda Davis, RS Maintenance, continues to update Acorn records for Central periodicals and serials for multiple libraries.
Marking:
3,911 volumes labeled, plus
145 RUSH books,
268 unbound serials, and
145 microfilm reels.
The new printer seems to be holding up well under pressure. Another happy consequence is that its labels appear sharper and darker than those generated by the older model printers.
Repair:
128 volumes were repaired with 210 treatments.
The emphasis continues to be on Central and Special Collections items. Charlotte Lew reports that she has completed constructing enclosures the current crop of items from Special Collections. Daphne Walker, along with Rael Ellis, focussed on spine repairs.