Technical Services Monthly Report
Sept. 2003
DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:
In addition to two regular meetings, TechForce also met with Nancy
Korekach to review ongoing concerns with the spine label generation program and
gain better understanding of the underlying issues. Becky Atack continues to
review materials that fail to generate a label and works with Nancy
Boggess-Korekach to resolve the remaining problems. Thanks to Nancy for being
so helpful and responsive in creating new holdings codes when needed and
modifying existing ones so that the labels could be generated
The Rush Processing Task Force (Mary Ellen Wilson, Susan Bell,
Rita Breen and Sheranda Lee) continued to study our existing rush processes,
already resulting in some improvements in the way and speed with which TS
handles Patron Requests. For example,
patron request items are now always labeled as RUSH. A brief experiment early in September showed that most patron
request items were processed as RUSH anyway, so including all of them as RUSH
was not a big change and would provide much better customer service.
The Electronic Resources Task Force received a demo of Innovative
Interface's electronic resource management product, ERM, with a follow up
meeting to discuss our needs here.
Phase 3 of the Reduction in Inventory project began. For this phase, we asked Nancy
Boggess-Koreckach to run reports of all inventory items with call numbers. After editing these reports to exclude
inadequate call numbers, we will be processing the rest through our inventory
dispersal routine and sending them to the stacks. The Annex has started sending over 30 volumes per week. Catalogers have a week to select any of
these for full cataloging and then Bryan Kurowski and Jeff Taylor process the
remainder as INVD. Bryan reports that a
check against OCLC for updated copy has revealed that many of these materials
have LC or PCC copy that was not found by the OCLC Retrocon Batch service.
The Preservation Team joined LITS in a demonstration of LincPlus,
a binding software developed by SF Systems and newly marketed through SIRSI.
The software provides many features the current LARS doesn't have. LincPlus has the potential to drastically
cut binding preparation time with the added bonus of increasing accuracy.
Interesting tidbit of the month: Charlotte Lew reports making a
clamshell box to contain the smallest item she ever handled. A teeny, tiny miniature book of the Lord's
Prayer measuring about 1/8" x 3/16" needed better housing than an old
envelope. Preservation returned the
item to Special Collections with great relief, as they were concerned they
might sneeze and lose it!
PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:
Many Technical Services staff was able to attend various events
connected to the Employee Celebration Month.
Sherry Huffer (35 years), Alice Cunningham (30 years), and Sue Davis (25
years) were honored at the University’s Service Awards Ceremony.
Some staff attended the Community Giving Campaign breakfast.
Zora Breeding and Roberta Winjum attended a meeting with the new
Solinet and OCLC representatives for the region.
Monica Sanchez, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum took a trip
to the I-24 Expo Center in Smyrna to attend Ingram's Publisher Showcase. Later in the month, OS received a visit from
Kathy Brannon from Swets.
We welcomed Daphne Walker back from her summer break.
CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:
The team was grateful for a “routine” month. The feeling of being overwhelmed subsided
somewhat and production statistics went up.
New materials and the usual projects were worked on with unusual
zeal. Thanks to everyone for working
hard and doing a great job!
Mary Charles Lasater is pleased to announce that Yuh-Fen Benda is
now an independent contributor of NACO personal names.
Ann Ercelawn continues to make national level enhancements to
serial records in order to improve the quality of records received through
Serials Solutions (not reflected in statistics). She also works on resolving other problems with Serials Solutions
records. In response to her efforts,
Peter McCracken of SS is corresponding with the Cataloging Distribution Service
in an attempt to resolve why corrections are not being redistributed.
Susan Bell continues her weekly trips to Peabody to pre-process TN
textbooks. She also attended some
library BI sessions as a way to improve her “service quality.”
Pete Wilson attended the first meeting of the "tabs"
subgroup of the Acorn and Virtual Catalog Task Force, whose purpose is to study
the possibilities of the "tabs" setup of the Webcat record display
and determine how we might make use of it in future changes to Acorn.
Statistics:
2196 new titles cataloged
339 were original
contributions or national level enhancements to the OCLC database
1399 were modified locally
139 titles recataloged
Linda Davis edited 180 holdings and 695 call records for materials
returned from the bindery. Yuh-Fen
Benda, Becky Atack and Ann Barnette brought in many new series authority
records and many hundreds of changes were made to headings.
ORDER
SERVICES:
Order Services is currently receiving relatively few purchase
requests to order. This month, we
placed 847 new orders, compared to an average of approximately 1600 per month,
and last September's 1319 orders.
Correspondingly, firm order receiving has slowed a bit, and so
firm orders are being received, paid, and speed cataloged or routed within just
a few days of receipt in the mailroom.
Non-domestic approvals are being processed within the requisite time
frames; the oldest volumes awaiting processing were received in
mid-September. Domestic approvals are
being processed upon receipt. Serials are being processed within 1-2 days of
their receipt.
With few requests coming in, verifiers have been focusing their
attention on approvals and gifts.
We have been testing Sirsi's 9XX loader, which is Sirsi's software
that allows us to place our orders on Collection Manager and GOBI (as opposed
to using local scripts to accomplish this).
We hope to have this in production soon.
Statistics:
Received and processed:
Serials/Periodicals: 3493
Approvals: 931
Monographs and
Continuations: 1460
Added to Acorn:
SSO's: 166
Gifts: 528
Speed cataloged: 890 titles
PRESERVATION:
The Preservation Team continued to push through summer binding
backlogs during September with the help of Debbie Williams and Linda Davis. We
are very grateful to both Debbie and Linda for their continuing support. Though
the binding backlog is slowly shrinking, the marking shelves have filled to
overflowing. Even though there was a significant drop in the number of items
coming from Order Services, the Cataloging Team more than made up the
difference. The much-hoped-for seasonal
slow down has not yet happened except in periodicals binding. There is plenty of incoming work in the
repair lab as well.
Charlotte Lew responded to an emergency call from Divinity. A vandalized commode in the men's room had
overflowed and leaked downstairs into the Divinity Library oversize
section. She rescued and dried the wet
books. Some books will need further
remedial work.
Sue Davis worked with Gretchen Dodge in Government Information to
design a physical condition preservation survey for the SuDocs collection that
will be carried out by students. Sue and
Charlotte will provide training and collection maintenance follow up as further
plans become finalized.
BINDING:
1,149 monographs
24 rebinds
296 periodicals and
110 serials were sent to Heckman Bindery during September.
1,454 new Central paperbacks sorted (a 2-year high) and 658
selected for immediate binding.
180 monographs rebarcoded
in preparation for binding
With Linda Davis's help in serial holdings, the team updated 725
Acorn records as a result of binding.
MARKING:
3,477 volumes
147 unbound serials
236 RUSH items
The oldest materials on the marking shelves have been waiting
about two weeks.
REPAIR:
349 volumes were repaired with 413 treatments
A significant portion of the month was spent measuring and then
processing a very large wrapper order, mostly for Special Collections. We also treated Central, Divinity, Peabody,
Law, and Science materials in September.