Mar. 2002
DIVISION WIDE ACTIVITIES:
The TS WorkFlow Task Force held a follow-up meeting with the Series Task Force to discuss final changes and implementation strategy. The Series TF is now in the process of preparing documentation (Ann Ercelawn and Zora Breeding are helping TF members with this effort) and planning for training.
The TSWFTF also met with the TS Web Pages Task Force (Ann Ercelawn, Angel Bruner, and Charlotte Lew) to review their suggestions for structuring the TS documentation pages.
The Materials Routing Task Force (Chris Waldrop, Susan Bell, Suzanne Bell, Karen Pillow and Dennis Sauls) continue their efforts.
The Building Access Task Force (Mary Charles Lasater, chair, Ann Barnette, Pat Johnson, and Debbie Williams) met several times and presented a survey to GLB and Baker staff.
Everyone completed the 2002 Annual Review process and participated in another week of Cost Study, March 20-26th.
Team members attended the TS-wide meeting on March 25.
PERSONNEL:
Patti Skipper was hired to fill the vacancy in Preservation.
Linda Davis and Rich Murray accepted the invitation to serve on this year's Library Special Merit Award Committee.
Rich Murray had a book review published in the March 2002 issue of The One- Person Library. He reviewed Priscilla Shontz's Jump Start Your Career in Library and Information Science.
Mary Charles Lasater is a member of the Music Cataloger search committee.
Roberta Winjum agreed to chair this year’s Staff Forum committee.
Sue Davis attended an excellent ARL/University of Michigan preservation conference March 6-8.
>Mary Charles Lasater attended a Solinet training session for CATME software at Nashville Tech.
Denise Chavez attended the Nashville Library Club meeting at the Country Music Hall of Fame Library.
Several staff attended TLA, with some especially enjoying the informational session on the MS program in Library Science at the University of Tennessee. These include: Ibtisam Latif, Debbie Williams, Yan-Xia Zhong, Bryan Kurowski, JoNell Owens, Angel Bruner, Charlotte Lew, Patti Skipper and Roberta Winjum. Angel also attended a pre-conference on Website Usability Testing. Monica Sanchez and Rita Breen attended the exhibits and met with a number of vendors represented there.
Various staff attended one more Dreamweaver class on Mar. 7 and a Management Library candidate presentation.
On March 14, architect Geoff Freeman accompanied Paul Gherman, Flo Wilson, and Edward Belbusti (VU campus architect) to the Library Annex for a site visit. March 28th, Flo Wilson and Peg Earheart met with Edward Belbusti and Dan Borsos, EMC Structural Engineer to investigate our Building's storage capacities for our future.
On March 18, Miles Moving Company delivered the first stage of our new Spacesaver compact storage components. The construction began in March and will continue through the first two weeks of April.
Joe Collins and Linda Davis spent time on the Second floor experimenting with the new 100% occupancy "Next book in" shelving plan, which Joe thinks will serve us well. New transfers to the Annex are arranged by range, tier, and shelf order and found accordingly, by information recorded in the Comments field of the item records.
Clint Grantham worked on transfers, mainly from Science and Management. He also worked on the Education Annex brief record and began working on Education withdrawals.
Leonor Van Cotthem remains on restricted work assignments due to an arm injury. During March, she received the Inter-Library loan requests and aided with retrieval for Web patron requests, including processing her first PSL requests for non-owning libraries. She rounded out the month working on stacks identification projects.
Linda Davis withdrew volumes and titles for Management, Science, and Education, and edited records for periodical and serial titles for Science and Central that were sent to the bindery. She assisted with patron's requests and collected information from the Vanderbilt Pest Control workers’ service visit. This visit pertained to a spider problem in the detached 'Theatre Building' of the Annex.
Circulation:
532 items circulated to Central, Divinity, Education, Government Information, Law, Management, Music, Pascal Pia, RS Cataloging, Science, and Special Collections.
40 of these requested items were Patron Specified Library deliveries - directed to other than the owning library. The PSL's are actually quite interesting. For example: Central Annex volumes were sent to Biomedical, Divinity, Education, Law, Music, and Science. Education Annex volumes went to Central and Music. Management Annex volumes were delivered to Central and Education. Science Annex volumes went to Biomedical, Central, and Education.
An additional 14 patrons used the new Annex fax service. We photocopied 133 pages and faxed to articles to their offices during March.
Another 44 Inter-Library Loan patrons requested articles to be photocopied. Annex staff photocopied 421 pages for these 44 individuals. Still another, 31 separate ILL requests were rejected for lending, due to the condition of the material or an incorrect citation.
289 of our patrons requested their Annex retrievals via the Web.
Storage:
434.5 linear feet of new transfers were received from our campus libraries' stacks. Central, Science, and Management had a number of new transfers this month. The pace of the transfers got ahead of the number of physical book carts available to use, and more carts had to be ordered.
RS Maintenance:
2,166 Acorn records edited
2 Central titles re-instated.
362 withdrawals
3 intra-library transfers
3 titles circulated to ILL patrons during March from RS Inventory. 2 were in French, and 1 in German.
Visitors:
71 visitors were on site.
CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES TEAM:
In addition to the regular flow of new materials, CAT members worked on several projects and collections. The Education not-on-Acorn theses project got well underway and Mary Charles Lasater reports that she, Denise, Yuh-Fen and Jeff have completed the first 100 Ed.S. titles. Ann Ercelawn and Don Jones cataloged more Pia titles. Susan Bell worked on newly arrived TN textbooks. Norma Riddick worked on more Special Collections rediscovered treasures and more boxes of Robinson gifts. Zora Breeding cataloged more Waldinger gifts. Ann Ercelawn worked on e-journal titles from Wiley, Muse, and ProQuest's American Periodicals series. Pete Wilson added URL's for online versions to a number of records for print publications published by Federal Reserve Banks, at Melinda Brown's request. Rich Murray has been inundated with materials from Paula Covington’s buying trip to Guatemala, including another large set of maps and some material in and about Mayan dialects. Rich also worked on several new Baudelaire titles. Don Jones, with help from Laurie Power, tackled the massive influx of French materials. Denise Chavez and Sue Richardson made progress on the backlogs of withdrawals and old unauthorized headings lists. Several team members (Susan Bell and Rich Murray in particular) report many problems coming to them as a result of the bibliographers’ efforts with the Central transfer project.
Rich worked on the subject guides section of the library's public web page due to the fact that Education and Management changed their URL’s and/or added new subject guides recently.
Mary Charles finished preparations for telecommuting and had her first day of working from home. She reports that it was a success.
Pete Wilson made a list of proposed fields to add to the "full" display in Webcat for the various record formats. This came about because we are eliminating the "all" display due to privacy concerns.
Statistics:
2839 new titles cataloged on Acorn
2026 done by the CAT team (up from 1839 last month)
70 titles input or upgraded to PCC level (equal to LC, in library lingo).
We created original records or modified vendor inputs for 276 titles
We enhanced another 78 records on the national database.
Of the 2,839 total new titles processed, 1,309 (46%) were accepted without further modifications - - this includes all the speed cataloged titles (around 800), some LC titles and those that were found to have significantly upgraded copy when searched in by CAT members.
Authorities Statistics:
6038 new authority records were added to Acorn in March.
1266 manual changes were made to access fields on bibliographic records as the result of regular authority work.
Global edits account for many times more changes to bibliographic records.
ORDER SERVICES:
During the month of March, OS added:
867 approvals,
85 gift titles,
4081 serials and periodicals
2058 new orders created (up from 1,924 last month)
Over 1400 firm orders were received
799 titles were speed cataloged in OS (identical to last month)
At this writing, serials and periodicals are being received within 24 hours of their arrival in Baker. Firm order shipments are being processed within 2 weeks of their receipt in the mailroom.
Verifiers are keeping current with new order requests and incoming approval shipments. They have been in contact with their respective bibliographers to discuss year end orders - some of the funds have already been fully encumbered (not many, but a few) - others have money remaining, but no requests waiting to be placed. The entire shipment of Paula's Guatemalan purchases has been processed through OS. Mary Ellen Wilson sent a message to bibliographers reminding them that all regular orders should be received in Order Services by Monday, May 20th, 2002
The Swets/Blackwell renewal invoice is in the final process of payment - we expect that the transactions will be completed no later than April 12.
Our new Ebsco sales rep, Jim Tucker, and Margaret Willingham, Account Services Manager, visited on Mar. 28 and updated us on the latest Ebsco services.
PRESERVATION:
March was a good month in at least two ways. First, we filled our position vacancy. Patti Skipper began work with us on March 4 and already has made a big difference. Second, we reduced our backlogs to the lowest levels in many months. It almost feels like the good ol' days again.
Binding:
1,822 items sent (slightly down from 2,234 last month) including:
979 monographs
618 periodicals
223 serials
2 rebinds
Machelle Keen sorted 1096 new Central paperback monographs and selected 428 (39%) for immediate binding.
Currently we are receiving monographs, periodicals, and serials from the binding shipment returned on March 21. The next shipment arrives Thursday, April 4. We are preparing a shipment to go out on Thursday as well. To see the Heckman Bindery pickup and delivery schedule, go to:
http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/rs/heckman%20bindery%
20pickup%2 0and%20delivery%20schedule%202002.htm
There is a small backlog of monographs waiting to go to the bindery, the oldest having been in unit since approximately mid-March. This includes the Central monographs that require rebarcoding before being added to the binding stream. Machelle reports that she rebarcoded 182 items in March. We are making a concerted effort to reduce the monograph backlog before the end-of-the-semester-and-summer-binding- crunch hits in May.
We continue to deal with Heckman Bindery quality control issues. This month's efforts include correcting our box address labels, invoice problems, and items not bound according to instructions.
Sheranda Lee updated 438 Acorn records as a result of binding. Linda Davis continues to assist the Preservation team with Acorn editing.
The team labeled
4,492 books (up from 3,911 last month)
193 RUSH books
243 unbound serials
73 microfilm reels
The oldest items waiting for labels have only been in the unit for one week. With student help and Heckman Bindery attaching the security strips, we can keep up with the flow much better.
However, Machelle Keen noted an increase in books with labeling problems recently. In the past week she saw approximately 25 recently cataloged books missing the location code in the COMMENTS fields.
Repair:
172 volumes received 259 treatments.
This total includes a small shipment of wrapper boxes. The bulk of the work was for Central, but we also repaired items for Divinity, Law, Music, Science, and Special Collections. Charlotte Lew created a giant folder for several large political posters. Sue Davis and Charlotte also helped Paula Covington and Kathy Smith sort through 100+ (we don't know how many) art and political posters from the Biderman collection. Since the goal is to flatten all these rolled up posters, the work will take many months in the limited available space.
Other:
Sue Davis and Juanita Murray visited the Fine Arts Dept. to look at the slide digitization project currently underway there.