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Technical Services Monthly Report

January 2004

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

Peabody Library’s Sights/Roller collection was unexpectedly delivered to the Repair Lab in mid January. TechForce worked with Susan Bell, Suzanne Bell and Sharon Wiener to rework the procedures for handling the project. Suzanne will work with the gifts at Susan’s workstation in the GLB during Susan’s upcoming absence in February, instead of working from Peabody, as had been the previous plan. The books will not receive preservation treatment until cataloging is completed and should be back in Peabody in several months. We thank all those involved for their flexibility in dealing with the situation.

Throughout the month, Mary Ellen Wilson and Rita Breen met with Monica Sanchez and others in Order Services to review the proposals from the Rush Task Force. The task force is currently working on documentation. Discussion in this area has also pointed out the need for the revision of our existing purchase request form, preferably to a web-based form. Mary Ellen will work with LITS to initiate this process.

Yan-Xia Zhong, Angel Bruner and Keith Curd continue to work on the metadata project in Special Collections.

Some team members in CAT and Preservation had their Mulberry Group Mailbox training and are starting to use the new mailboxes.

Some of us spent time on last minute cleaning of Pegasus accounts before the end of the month.

Additional challenges this month included many virus updates to protect against all the computer attacks.

Of special note: Orders Services staff is processing gift materials as the libraries send them. For the first time in recent memory there is no backlog in OS of gifts waiting to be processed.

We encourage bibliographers to send us anything that they have ready to order!

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

On Jan. 10, Michael Scott was hit by a minivan while crossing 21st Ave. We are relieved that he appears to have fully recovered, except for some continued aches and a pronounced wariness of traffic.

Linda Davis held her workshop entitled “How to Withdraw a Book.” She did a great job!

Charlotte Lew held two sessions of the Minor Repair Workshop. Because of the hands-on activity, she had to limit the number of attendees. Feedback has been very positive. Other Preservation staff are planning other workshops.

Ann Ercelawn attended the first meeting of the SFX Implementation Team as the Technical Services representative.

Roberta Winjum attended a meeting of the Institutional Repository Advisory Board. The board OK’d a plan to investigate loading of Economics Department Working Papers into DSpace as a prototype. Roberta, Jody Combs, and Catherine Gick met with John Conley of the Economics Dept. to discuss the details.

Mary Charles Lasater is testing the authorities component of a new beta version of Sirsi. She was a bit unnerved to discover that she is the ONLY tester for authorities functionality for the new release on the Solaris platform (anywhere).

Ann Ercelawn reports the exciting news that our CONSER status will be upgraded from Enhance to Associate, which will allow us to authenticate records for inclusion in the CONSER database. This is another validation that Ann’s excellent work is recognized at the national level.

Patti Skipper has resigned her position in Preservation, effective Feb. 20.

The Preservation Team continues to benefit from volunteer Jing Liu. She assists in Marking 12 hours a week and makes a big difference.

Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater, and Roberta Winjum attended the ALA midwinter conference in San Diego.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

Don Jones worked with Yvonne Boyer and Zora Breeding to finalize preparations for cataloging the Wachs Collection. The first few boxes of Wachs books were delivered to the workroom on January 20th. Don, Ann Ercelawn, Jeff Taylor, Ann Barnette and Becky Atack finished the first truckload of materials by the end of the month, so the project is well underway.

Ann Ercelawn and Linda Davis met with Carlin Sappenfield to develop a strategy to change holdings on Observatory records. Anne Martin provided a list to work from and Linda has begun this new project to change or combine the Observatory holdings into their current locations.

Chris Benda continues to work on Peabody masters theses and send them to Mary Charles Lasater for review. Mary Charles and Jeff Taylor are nearing the last of the Peabody Ed.S. theses.

Mary Charles Lasater and Denise Chavez continue to make progress on the Library of Congress subject heading unauthorized list, eliminating long-standing errors of many types.

Ann Ercelawn and Zora Breeding worked with Dale Poulter to report and investigate a problem with some serial records missing their title fields. Dale was able to run a report of records in Acorn missing the 245 title field. Zora found that the majority of the records on the report were corrupted records missing ALL their descriptive fields, some since conversion from Notis and some due to corrupt Promptcat loads. Dale was able to fix the ‘serial records with no title’ problem and Zora began working with the remaining records to resolve the other problems.

Linda Davis completed the project for Peabody to withdraw a list of newsletter titles. She also worked on withdrawals and editing and updating holdings for the various libraries. She also did bound-with work for Central microfilm and for some titles in Peabody

Pete Wilson cataloged more manuscript collections for Special Collections.

Ann Ercelawn devoted more time than usual to Serials Solutions related work. She de-duped Project Muse records and edited URL’s on about 30 Erlbaum titles, which migrated from Ingenta to Erlbaum right after our latest SS record load. She is looking forward to the change in frequency from every two months to monthly for Serials Solutions record loads. Ann also initiated a conversation with LC and Serials Solutions to address the problem of records missing from the CONSER database and LC has promised to look into the situation.

Jean Wright converted a truckload of documents donated from other libraries. She also brought in records for some previously not on Acorn SuDocs classed material as requested by Peggy Earheart.

Zora Breeding worked with Nancy Boggess-Korekach to investigate ways to get the NetLibrary records de-duped. LITS was able to figure out a way to identify the duplicates. Mary Charles Lasater found that the records loaded last were more likely to have table of contents added, but that all else seemed to be equal. Nancy will be working on deleting the duplicates.

Statistics:

1893 new titles cataloged, including

303 original contributions or national level enhancements to the OCLC database

1165 were modified locally

242 titles recataloged

148 reconned

270 items withdrawn.

Marcive delivered around 4500 new or modified authority records.

698 name, 224 subject and 67 series headings changed on Acorn bibliographic records (not part of new cataloging activity).

327 series authority records brought into Acorn

80 authority records deleted

Copy Cataloging:

The "Start here flag" sits near materials received 12/31 which is VERY close to being within one month of receipt.

ORDER SERVICES:

OS Received and processed:

Serials/Periodicals: 3319

Approvals: 874

Added to Acorn:

SSO's: 204

Gifts: 475

OS placed 969 new orders, and Speed Cataloged 913 titles.

Renewal invoices from major subscription vendors have been received and paid (save for the Elsevier titles recently converted to online). Overall, ordering, receiving and invoice payments are very current. The majority of materials are received and processed the day that they are received. Incoming purchase requests have been light.

All approvals (foreign and domestic) are current. Chris Waldrop, Jonell Owens and Debbie Williams, with Suzanne Bell and Gina Berry's help, updated several hundred serial control records to reflect the migration of Academic Book Center orders to Blackwells Book Services.

Jim Tucker and Margaret Willingham (both from Ebsco) dropped by to visit us in late January (separate visits).

PRESERVATION:

Much of the material in hand is from one or another gift collection. Gift collections typically require more preservation activity, such as repair or binding, as well as the gluing in of hundreds of bookplates.

Sue Davis met with a representative from a competitor bindery. He has offered to bind a few items for free to give us samples of the bindery's workmanship. We will likely take him up on the offer.

BINDING:

Binding statistics show a smaller than average number of volumes sent to Heckman Bindery.

630 monographs

19 rebinds

545 periodicals

182 serials

The team dealt with several quality control issues in recent shipments and returned about two-dozen items for rebinding. Heckman Bindery continues its major reorganization (last year the plant; this year the accounting, sales, and customer services depts.). The new customer representative assigned the previous month is beginning to learn our accounts and is responding more quickly.

1,112 new Central paperbacks sorted; 547 selected for immediate binding.

Once again the high binding ratio can be attributed to the large percentage of gift items in the workflow.

94 items rebarcoded before sending to the bindery

524 Acorn holdings records updated as a result of periodical and serial binding

MARKING:

3,508 volumes

194 unbound serials

229 Rush items

49 reels of microfilm

The marking backlog is staying under control, although the incoming rate seems to be sneaking up again. As of today (Feb. 5), we are labeling items from Jan. 26.

REPAIR:

162 volumes treated with 227 treatments.

The month's activities included routine repairs, enclosure construction, and poster encapsulations. Materials from Central, Divinity, Peabody, and Special Collections were treated. There was a run of rush repair jobs that came from a variety of sources, but the staff rose to the challenge.