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Technical Services Monthly Report

Feb. 2004

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

OS staff deserves special recognition this month as they continue to work on various projects, in addition to their routine receiving and verification tasks.

1. All routine gifts have been processed.

2. They have begun to process some of the less challenging materials within the Wachs collection. They are holding the materials that Ibtisam Latif has processed so far, awaiting bookplates for this collection.

3. Suzanne Bell continues to work on the Roller collection at the GLB, and has done some mystery solving related to the collection.

4. Yan-Xia Zhong, Keith Curd, and Angel Bruner continue to work in Special Collections adding metadata for the photo archives.

5. In addition to their regular duties, Debbie Williams and Sherry Huffer have begun assisting in Binding and Marking on a temporary basis, due to a recent resignation on that team. Dennis Sauls is also waiting in the wings to assist there as needed.

6. Alice Cunningham and Gina Berry are being trained by Becky Atack to catalog selected material (CIP) from the new receipts at Baker.

7. Kathy Ma worked on a project of adding records to Acorn for some materials that are on loan to the Chancellor's residence. Just on the off chance that anyone might be looking for them...

A big thanks to the OS staff for their willingness to help out.

At the request of the TechForce, Sue Davis and Zora Breeding met to discuss possible “black holes” in TSGLB processing where material might be out of our control. While they found no such holes, other than an occasional piece that was misplaced due to NOT following established procedure, they did write up a document to identify where material might be within TSGLB work areas, and how it is routed to and from these areas. This document will be under review by TechForce.

Roberta Winjum is meeting weekly with Jody Combs and Catherine Gick to pursue implementation of the DSpace institutional repository at Vanderbilt. We continue to work with Dr. John Conley, Economics, on adding Economics Dept. working papers as our prototype for the repository. We are currently working out the metadata and document ingestion details.

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

Most team members were able to attend the Strategic Planning meeting. Mary Ellen Wilson and Zora Breeding are members of the Intellectual Property Support group, which Roberta Winjum chairs. Sue Davis is a member of the Organization Planning group. Ann Ercelawn is a member of the Services for Faculty group. Chris Waldrop is a member of the Services to Undergraduates group.

Ann Ercelawn is serving in the SFX implementation team. Ann and Roberta Winjum attended the intensive two-day SFX training sessions. Several staff attended the SFX training opening session.

Two CAT team members took extended medical leave this month. Linda Davis was out for two weeks and Susan Bell will be out for four weeks (Feb. 11-Mar. 15). Yuh-Fen Benda acted as backup for Linda. Zora Breeding, Pete Wilson, Ann Barnette and Mary Charles Lasater have been cataloging Susan’s materials. Thanks to all for pitching in, and we’ll be glad to see Linda and Susan’s lives back to normal.

Denise Chavez attended an Excel 2 class at New Horizons Nashville.

Several staff attended the Staff Web Open House and the Short Term Disability benefit brown bag.

Staff worked on their yearly self-evaluations.

We began a week of the cost study.

Patti Skipper resigned her position in Preservation. We are sorry to see her leave and will miss her.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

The Wachs project was in full swing this month after starting in late January. As of this writing, Don Jones, Jeff Taylor, Ann Barnette, Ann Ercelawn and Becky Atack have cataloged 172 Wachs titles.

Mary Charles Lasater, Yuh-Fen Benda and Jeff Taylor completed cataloging the 900+ Ed.S titles within the Peabody theses “not on Acorn” titles. Mary Charles is planning a celebration! She also plans to start the next phase of the Peabody theses project as soon as the cake is eaten. Work will begin soon on the Ed.D’s, of which there are over 400.

Mary Charles Lasater reports that Sirsi has made progress on the blind reference problem. She has spent some time trying out the new version in test and working with a Sirsi contact by phone. This feature, once installed, will mean we will no longer need to worry about deleting “no hit” authority records for withdrawn items.

Pete Wilson is pleased to report that he has finished cataloging the codebooks that had been bogged down at his workstation. He claims that there is more work to do on the titles already in the stacks, but is glad to have these gone from his sight.

Yuh Fen Benda met with Peter Brush and Ruth Rogaski. Prof. Rogaski was assigned $40,000 for Chinese literature. She is interested in a big set of CDs and some electronic databases; other than that, she is in no hurry to place any orders for monographs.

Some statistics:

1802 new titles cataloged, including 293 original contributions or national level enhancements to the OCLC database and 1115 modified locally

269 titles recataloged

224 titles reconned

86 titles and an additional 365 item records withdrawn

appx. 5400 new or modified authority records delivered from Marcive

657 name, 548 subject and 89 series headings changed on Acorn bibliographic records (not part of new cataloging activity)

221 series authority records brought into Acorn manually

57 authority records deleted

ORDER SERVICES:

OS received and processed:

Serials/Periodicals: 3274

Approvals: 944

Added to Acorn:

SSO's: 141

Gifts: 463

OS placed 1390 new orders, and Speed Cataloged 843 titles.

Invoices: invoices are current and up to date. We have received the Elsevier Science Direct invoice, and it is currently in Acorn as "invoiced", and will be paid within the next few days, as soon as we resolve a few minor glitches.

Receiving: all receiving is current; firm orders are being received in Acorn as soon as received in the mail. Unbound serials and periodicals are also being processed as soon as received; serials with invoices are being received within the week of their receipt. All approvals are current.

Visitors: Mary Ellen Wilson received a very brief visit from Internal Audit - a few of our very large periodical payments having caught their attention, we were able to demonstrate to their satisfaction just how these payments and materials are tracked within Acorn.

Roberta Winjum, Chris Waldrop and Mary Ellen Wilson met with Bob Schatz from Franklin Books. Bob was here to discuss the transfer of some of our standing order titles from our subscription vendor to Franklin. The advantage of this transfer would be that we will receive these materials at a discount instead of with the current added service charge.

PRESERVATION:

With a vacant position, the team has revamped our workflow assignments. For the short term a big part of that revamping involves assistance from Order Services staff. A combined total of 25 hours from Sherry Huffer, Debbie Williams, and Dennis Sauls will go a long way to helping us keep our heads above water. Fortunately, the really busy season is more than a month away, so we have time to train our temporary assistants and catch up on problem-solving before the end-of-academic year rush hits. We are also looking for ways to increase staffing upstairs in the repair lab where the backlog is growing and new projects are on the horizon. Jing Liu continues her valuable volunteer work with the team.

In addition to revamping team workflow, the team brainstormed again looking for ways to reduce processing time or eliminate steps altogether. We are currently testing a couple of new ideas.

Team members are working with Heckman Bindery to correct some quality control issues with the custom line of monograph binding. Several items have been returned for rebinding. Other items were repaired in-house.

Overflowing toilets in both the Divinity and Peabody libraries damaged library volumes. The damage in Divinity was limited to under a dozen oversize volumes, which Sue Davis and Charlotte Lew dried and returned with a few days. The Peabody overflow was larger and nastier with materials being declared a loss.

Sue Davis investigated the possibility of sending a test sample to a competitor bindery, Mid-Atlantic Bindery in Petersburg, VA. A small group of monographs will be sent free of charge at the end of March to test three comparable lines of monograph binding. The results are due back at the end of April.

BINDING:

1,511 volumes including

653 monographs

68 rebinds

612 periodicals

178 serials

994 new Central paperback monographs sorted

427 selected for immediate binding.

514 Acorn holdings records updated as a result of binding.

Many gift items are still coming through.

MARKING:

4,238 items labeled

177 RUSH items

184 unbound serials

41 reels of microfilm

The oldest item on the marking shelves dates from only a week ago, so the backlog is under good control. Our continued volunteer help is one of the reasons we are able to keep so current.

REPAIR:

293 volumes were treated with 440 treatments.

A large wrapper box order contributed to high numbers for the month. Other items received routine spine and super repairs. Two special projects for Special Collections resulted in two special clamshell boxes; one for a rare Latin American volume, and one for a group of Kate Greenaway miniature books that Special Collections wanted kept together. The results of Charlotte Lew's efforts are quite impressive.