Technical Services Monthly Report

October 2003

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

Highlights of the month were the TS Baker Open House on Oct. 8th, and the TS/GLB Open House on the 16th. Teams enjoyed planning the event, discussing topics for workshops, and hosting the event. The CAT team especially enjoyed displaying their collections of “cataloging humor” on the wall next to the work tool area. We were pleased by all of the responses we received for future sessions on processing procedures. If anyone has workshop sign up sheets that they have not yet returned, please send them to team leaders. Workshop offerings will be posted to allow others a chance to sign up.

Anne Martin was a guest at a Rush Task Force meeting to demonstrate the use of HOLDS. The Task Force submitted an interim report instead of a final report on Oct. 15; this task force's charge has proved to be more time-consuming that originally thought. The final report is expected at the end of November.

Yan-Xia Zhong, Angel Bruner, and Keith Curd have recently begun working on a project in Special Collections to assist with their digitization project - they will be helping to input the metadata for some of their photo archives. We appreciate their willingness to help.

Susan Bell and Suzanne Bell continue to work at Peabody each week adding records for Tennessee Textbooks.

Debbie Williams, Ibtisam Latif, Kathy Ma, and Linda Davis have all spent some time assisting in Preservation. In addition to their continued (and very welcome) assistance, the Preservation Team gained a volunteer, Jing Liu, in October. Jing has already made a positive impact on the marking flow.

Zora Breeding and Pete Wilson met with Juanita Murray, Kathy Smith and Teresa Gray to formulate a plan to create OCLC and Acorn records for Special Collections manuscript collections. Pete will begin cataloging about five per week in November.

Sue Davis met with Norman Nash and Susan Smith to review progress on mounting the library disaster response plan on the web. Sue also met with John Haar and Kathy Smith to begin planning a fragile book policy for the library system. She met with Yvonne Boyer, Mary Beth Blalock, and Norman Nash about some seriously vandalized Arts folio volumes. There is concern that many of these large format volumes contain plates attractive to thieves.

With help from many, Roberta Winjum completed and submitted to Flo Wilson the Collection Growth statistics for the libraries for 2002/03, as well as statistics used for Technical Services Allocation.

Interesting tidbit of the month: Sue Davis shares this excellent source of information about the care and handling of CDs:

http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/carefordisc/

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

Many staff attended the library service awards on Oct. 2. From within Technical Services we honored Sherry Huffer, 35 years; Alice Cunningham, 30 years; Sue Davis, 25 years; Linda Hand and Denise Chavez, 15 years; Chris Waldrop, 10 years; and Regina Berry and Jeff Taylor, 5 years. Roberta Winjum was also recognized as this year’s recipient of the Innovation and Creativity Award.

Many attended the Oct. 21 Information Alliance panel discussion on institutional repositories, moderated by Roberta Winjum. Some also met with counterparts from UK and UTK.

Mary Charles Lasater helped to prepare the report of the PCC Task Group on SACO Program Development.

Ann Ercelawn traveled to Atlanta to teach a Solinet workshop.

Zora Breeding was one of the Vanderbilt library attendees at a meeting with TSU library staff to share our experiences with Sirsi.

Sue Davis consulted with staff of the newly formed Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy about their budding resource collection. She also consulted with Second Presbyterian Church about the condition of a pastoral book collection that survived the fire.

Several staff attended both metasearching/reference linking software demonstrations.

Many staff also attended these meetings and events: Benefits Fair and Benefits Brown Bag, SAFE Day presentations, and the Halloween Party.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

A large percentage of the “new” materials arriving from Order Services this month were gifts, and a large percentage of the gift material was in Latin American Studies and Spanish Literature. Approval books are still coming in the usual numbers and the various projects and accumulated materials are keeping us all busy. Mary Charles Lasater and Jeff Taylor continue work on the Peabody thesis project. Bryan Kurowski and Jeff Taylor continue work on the Inventory Reduction effort with help from Zora Breeding, Becky Atack and others. Pete Wilson reports that Special Collections new materials are still abundant. Zora and Don Jones cataloged a number of French rush videos that had no copy on OCLC. Ann Ercelawn cataloged more Pia titles and UN documents. Bryan dealt with a large number of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Michael Scott worked through some of the Mayan books. Ann E. worked on continuing issues with Serials Solutions. She reports that the latest Serials record load was Oct. 28.

Mary Charles Lasater and Denise Chavez focused Authorities work on making corrections to subject headings identified in the latest unauthorized heading list for the 650 tag. Additionally, Mary Charles is working on changing headings for Zoology and Botany that are now being cataloged under more specific headings. Mary Charles continues to work on headings problems from the IEEE load. She reports that Marcive processing of the latest NetLibrary load (5990 records loaded on the 24th) resulted in a significant reduction in the number of incorrect headings that she will have to correct manually. She continues to be very pleased with the benefits of the Marcive service. Mary Charles reports that, thanks to Dale Poulter implementing a fix from the University of Virginia, the global edit report is working again. It had been a casualty of the last upgrade.

Statistics:

1833 new titles cataloged

288 original contributions or national level enhancements to the OCLC database

1065 modified locally.

178 titles recataloged

331 call records edited for 179 serial titles for materials returned from the bindery.

Marcive delivered 7525 new or modified authority records.

722 name, 1150 subject and 58 series headings on Acorn bibliographic records changed (not part of new cataloging activity)

305 series authority records brought into Acorn manually

110 authority records deleted

The copy cataloging "Start here" flag sits close to materials we received on 9/29, which is just a tad off of our goal, which is to process materials received within a month's time.

ORDER SERVICES:

On Oct 15, John Laraway and Maggie McNair visited from Blackwells to demonstrate Collection Manager to bibliographers. The demonstration focused on how bibliographers could use CM to initiate orders that would then be completed by OS staff.

Oct 21, OS staff, along with all Baker tenants, participated in a scheduled fire drill. Owing to the fact that approximately 100 persons evacuated the building prior to the fire drill to avoid the rush, the Fire Marshall decided that future fire drills would be unannounced.

We have just received the Swets periodical renewal invoice, and it has been auto-loaded into Acorn. Chris Waldrop is currently working on those items from that invoice that did not load properly. We are also in the process of loading the Harrassowitz invoice (the first file contained errors). We have not yet received the Ebsco renewal invoice, but we expect it very soon.

Other individual renewals have been fairly heavy.

Mary Ellen Wilson worked with Blackwells to remap Collection Manager orders in preparation for using Sirsi's "9XX" loader, which will replace our local scripts for the loading of these orders into Acorn.

Statistics:

Received and processed:

Serials/Periodicals: 3811

Approvals: 1026

Added to Acorn:

SSO's: 148

Gifts: 792

OS placed 731 new orders, and Speed Cataloged 845 titles.

As these numbers demonstrate, verifiers have been focusing primarily on gifts and approvals. Incoming order requests remain light.

PRESERVATION:

With the outside assistance from OS and the volunteer, Jing Liu, the team is finally making headway and backlogs are shrinking. However, as the semester winds down the workload is expected to pick up again.

BINDING:

There were three bindery shipments during October:

1,256 monographs

815 periodicals

212 serials

2,283 volumes total

Machelle Keen happily reports that there are (drum roll, please) ZERO books waiting for rebarcoding. 406 items were rebarcoded during the month.

1,275 new Central paperbacks sorted; 643 selected for immediate binding. The binding count is higher than usual because many of the "new" titles were gift items in poor condition.

Charlotte Lew spent several hours training for and then sorting incoming paperback books in Binding/Marking while Machelle Keen was on vacation.

781 Acorn records were updated as the result of binding.

Reminder: The bindery closes during both Thanksgiving week and Christmas week. There is a single November bindery shipment scheduled for November 13. The last two 2003 shipments are set for December 4 and 18. The first shipment of 2004 is due to go out on January 8. Please note these dates when you plan your end-of-semester binding. And, remember that we need the items at least a week ahead of the above dates to prepare them in time for the outgoing shipment. We also appreciate any advance notice if you plan to ship larger than usual amounts to us for binding.

MARKING:

4,326volumes

231unbound serials

215 RUSH items

46 reels of microfilm labeled

We also generated labels for 557 microfiche envelopes. As of November 3, the oldest books on the marking shelves waiting for labels date from October 15.

REPAIR:

155 volumes repaired with 231 treatments during October. Most of the items were spine repairs for Central, but we also treated a variety of items from the Baudelaire Center, Divinity, Peabody, Science, and Special Collections.