July 2004
DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:
Jody Combs, Catherine Gick, and Roberta Winjum, as the
Institutional Repository Implementation Team, met with Zora Breeding and
Michael Scott to begin a discussion about metadata issues for the libraries in
general.
Mary Charles Lasater met with Monica Sanchez to discuss how Order
Services may be able to help put preliminary records onto Acorn for the 4000+
masters theses using the shelf list cards.
Full cataloging with the item in hand would follow as time and resources
allow.
PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:
As a component of our evaluation of
binderies, Heckman Bindery invited Machelle Keen and Sue Davis for a visit.
While there, they toured the plant and met with various Heckman staff
The Sirsi patch was tested and installed to fix the problem in
Acorn of references not being generated for names with an open date. Mary Charles Lasater helped LITS to test the
patch.
Zora Breeding showed David Anderson and Peter Brush how to use
Smartport to import OCLC records into Acorn for videos.
Ann Ercelawn helped to prepare for the VUFinder demonstration,
which several TS staff attended.
Ann Ercelawn, Jean Wright, and Roberta Winjum assisted with the
Retirement Learning classes.
Ann Ercelawn read about 300 conference evaluations for NASIG's
annual conference and wrote a report for the Executive Board.
CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:
New and gift material continued to arrive at a steady pace. Don Jones and Jeff Taylor worked on the
Wachs collection (total titles cataloged to date is 562, up from 477 last
month). The Wachs gifts that are going
to the regular stacks have also begun to arrive and are being cataloged. Susan Bell cataloged more of the Sights
collection. Michael Scott finished
cataloging the Cuban materials that Paula Covington purchased in May. Pete
Wilson finished cataloging a large batch of miscellaneous periodical issues
from the Helguera collection. Mary
Charles Lasater, Yuh-Fen Benda and Jeff Taylor continued work on the Peabody
Ed.D. theses. Jeff processed a small
batch of new Peabody theses and some new electronic theses titles. Mary Charles
Lasater and Denise Chavez completed the name authority de-duping project. Ann Ercelawn and Linda Davis worked with
Nancy Boggess-Korekach on a project to clean up records with Available Online
call numbers.
Statistics:
TS totals: 3015 new titles cataloged.
CAT totals: 1721 new titles cataloged, 296 of which were original
contributions or national level enhancements to the OCLC database and 926
modified locally.
293 titles recataloged
58 titles reconned 58 titles.
43 titles and an additional 227 item records withdrawn
Marcive delivered around 5225 new or modified authority records.
910 name, 362 subject and 73 series headings changed on Acorn
bibliographic records (not part of new cataloging activity)
356 series authority records brought into Acorn
1274 authority records deleted.
We are still waiting for LITS to extract our series authority
records so that we can send this history file to Marcive in order to be able to
begin getting series authority records as part of our Marcive service.
COPY CATALOGING:
The green "Start here" flag sits near materials received
on 7/1.
ORDER
SERVICES:
Since this month saw a lot of vacations, and the cancellations hadn't started up yet, it was pretty much business as usual.
Invoices: This year, as
last, we did not pre-pay subscription renewal vendors. The interest rate was fairly low, and we
knew we were expecting a number of cancellations of those very same titles.
Receiving: After a brief
pause at fiscal year end for rolling over all orders, etc, all ordering and
receiving resumed.
Statistics:
Received and processed:
Serials/Periodicals: 3517
Approvals: 791
Added to Acorn:
SSO's: 98
Gifts: 213
OS placed 1067 new orders, and Speed Cataloged 1288 titles.
PRESERVATION:
The heavier workflow of summer coupled
with our reduced staffing has produced backlogs in all three areas. Debbie Williams was able to assist us a few
hours in July, as well as Linda Davis.
Their assistance was vital to our keeping the material flowing.
Preservation received back the volumes
from the ICI/MAB test shipment. Small
stickers in the back of each volume identify items from each bindery. Heckman places its logo inside the new back
cover. MAB puts its sticker a page or
two further in.
The team evaluated the test shipment and met with the
representative from Mid-Atlantic Bindery.
The results of the test were generally positive with only a few
glitches. The glitches were not
surprising since establishing a complete profile for our complicated
organization doesn't happen over night.
We learned that MAB has some different services and options from
Heckman.
The next step is for the Preservation Team and Roberta to fully
analyze all the facts now before us. We
have product samples from both binderies, and we have worked with customer
services and technology support services from both binderies. We plan to meet in mid-August to come up
with a recommendation for which bindery we feel provides the best product and
service at the best price.
LINCPlus, the binding processing software purchased from SIRSI, is
now installed on Machelle's and Karen's workstation. Once the database of periodical/serial patterns is converted from
LARS to LINCPlus, we can start real-life testing. Dale Poulter is coordinating the installation between SIRSI,
Heckman, and SF-Systems, who developed the software. Vanderbilt will be the first SIRSI/Heckman combination site to
use the software.
Beginning with July '04 most marking statistics are generated
automatically from Acorn, thanks to Anne Martin's ingenuity. The numbers will reflect monthly totals by
library. The only statistics the team is now keeping manually are RUSH items
(the only way to track how many RUSH requests come through TS) and
miscellaneous items that don't have barcodes.
Sue responded to two calls for help after water leaks in
July. One involved Special Collections
materials at the Annex and the other a few periodicals in Peabody.
It turns out the PEM field trial wasn't
quite over. The Rochester Institute of
Technology's Image Permanence Institute requested one last file of collected
temperature/relative humidity data.
Just prior to this request Sue discovered that the three years of
collected data had disappeared. The
good news is that LITS was able to eventually restore the data. As a reward for participating in the
environmental monitoring field trial, Vanderbilt received a copy of the
now-released Climate Notebook software, a $500 value. We also get to keep the
two dataloggers, but they will soon need to be recalibrated.
Binding:
728
monographs
578
periodicals
45
serials
1,351
volumes total
1,327 new Central paperbacks sorted and 544 selected for
immediate binding (41%).
529 Acorn records updated
Marking:
3,874 items labeled, including 222 RUSH.
118 miscellaneous items labeled in addition to the automated
count.
Currently we have about a one week turnaround in marking.
Repair:
283 volumes repaired with 350 treatments
Most of the work focused on protective enclosures, including
wrapper boxes, 3-flap portfolios, and pocket portfolios. Materials came from all libraries except
Biomedical.
As mentioned earlier there is a large backlog in book repair. At last count there are 919 items waiting
for treatment, either repair or enclosure.
This number includes the Wachs Special Collection Boxing Project and the
Peabody Sights Collection Boxing Project. The oldest items in the lab date from
February.