Technical Services Monthly Report

June 2004

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

The Rush Task Force (Susan Bell, Sheranda Lee, and Mary Ellen Wilson, chair) turned in their draft recommendations that were discussed by the teams. Some resulting suggestions will be worked into the documentation and presented to LMC and CAG before implementation. Based on some feedback, the Preservation Team has begun a 2-month trial of adding one additional scheduled RUSH labeling to Friday afternoons in the hopes of getting out most RUSH items before the weekend. If the numbers bear out our expectations, we will adjust the labeling times permanently.

The Binding and Marking TF (Linda Davis, Karen Pillow, Machelle Keen, and Michael Scott, chair) continued working toward their own recommendations.

Karen Pillow, Machelle Keen, Sue Davis, and Roberta Winjum met with two Heckman Bindery representatives June 10 to discuss continuing customer service and product concerns. Because of these ongoing quality concerns and the large trial shipment sent elsewhere, Heckman Bindery has invited Machelle and Sue to visit the bindery July 20-21 for a special meeting and tour.

As a result of the Unicorn upgrade, several surprises were discovered. We have lost all cross-references for people who have open-ended dates in their name headings. The Workflows windows grew in size to the point that they did not fit on some screens, although the size of the space that contains information did not increase. Some of the item records at the bottom of a keyword or Home search display of a record in Workflows disappeared (we found them, but they were hiding quite well).

But wait, there’s more: the Unicorn upgrade also threw a small wrench into serial/periodical receiving. Sirsi fortunately provided a fix for the problem and serial receiving is now proceeding unabated. All orders were successfully rolled into the 2005 fiscal year, but it was not until Wednesday, July 7^th, that we received a patch from Sirsi to correct a problem with the report that purges open orders from the previous fiscal year. The unfortunate result of this delay was that users of the OPAC (and some WorkFlows screens) might have noticed double the number of copies On Order for that brief time. All is now corrected and back to normal.

And just so it doesn’t sound like nothing positive came from this “upgrade,” it is a pleasure to report that the blind reference problem has been fixed at last.

We arranged for the switch from Serials Solutions Marc records to ExLibris MARCIt! records. We are working with LITS to prepare the records for loading. Ann Ercelawn continues to be very involved with the SFX implementation, testing our set up and resolving problems before the roll out next month. She created our field-by-field profile for MARC records and collaborated with Nancy Boggess-Korekach on editing a sample batch of records.

Ann Ercelawn, Zora Breeding, Mary Ellen Wilson, Chris Waldrop, and Roberta Winjum worked with their various strategic planning committees to prepare the final reports. The Information Management Group finished the individual members’ reports and Roberta compiled them into the final report. For Sue Davis, the heavy-duty committee work on the Organization Group will begin later this summer after all the final reports have been reviewed by the strategic planning steering committee and LMC.

Zora Breeding and Ann Ercelawn attended the ExLibris Electronic Resource Management System demo given by Dave Stout. Roberta Winjum and Chris Waldrop also met with Dave to discuss ExLibris’ new ERMS, called Verde.

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

Michael Scott attended a Solinet map-cataloging seminar held at the City Archives in Green Hills.

Ann Ercelawn attended the NASIG annual conference in Milwaukee.

Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater, Michael Scott, and Roberta Winjum attended the ALA annual conference in Orlando. Michael attended a preconference on digitization projects. Mary Charles attended a preconference on FRBR.

Becky Atack was reelected to another term as Staff Council representative.

Don Jones completed his duties as a library representative for the 2004 Faculty-Staff Campaign.

Tech Services had an ice cream sundae celebration for both the end of a difficult fiscal year and the return of the test bindery shipment from Mid-Atlantic Bindery.

We participated in another week of time cost study.

Several TS staff members were able to attend the web cast on institutional repositories sponsored by the Staff Development Committee. Roberta Winjum gave attendees an impromptu update on the status of Vanderbilt’s institutional repository.

Many attended the presentations of the Government Information candidates. CAT team members enjoyed the opportunity to attend meetings between the candidates and the catalogers. Pete Wilson served on the search committee for this position.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

The books from Paula Covington’s buying trip to Cuba are being cataloged. Michael Scott, Pete Wilson and Ann Barnette are working on this material. Don Jones, Jeff Taylor and Ann Barnette continue work on the Wachs books. They are considerably ahead of schedule on this project, having completed 477 titles to date. The original estimate of the total number of the Wachs Collection titles was 581. Becky Atack, Ann Ercelawn, Ann Barnette, Yuh-Fen Benda and Bryan Kurowski continued to work on de-duping the series authority file in preparation for Marcive. Mary Charles Lasater and Denise Chavez continued working on the name authority de-duping project. Mary Charles completed the corporate names and helped with the personal names. Denise deleted 562 duplicate name authority records. Linda Davis continued work on the holdings clean-up project. Jeff added URL’s to records for AIP conference proceedings. Yuh-Fen and Jeff worked on cataloging more old Peabody theses. Jeff cataloged some new electronic dissertations. Jean Wright worked on material that Gretchen Dodge is clearing out of her various project areas as she prepares for her retirement. Zora Breeding is investigating whether it would be possible for David Anderson to use SmartPort to bring in full bib records from OCLC for videos.

Statistics:

1356 new titles cataloged, 233 of which were original contributions or national level enhancements to the OCLC database and 778 were modified locally.

313 titles recataloged

55 titles reconned

18 titles and an additional 213 item records withdrawn

Copy cataloging: The green "Start here" flag sits near materials received on 5/24.

Fiscal year end totals: CAT cataloged 20,488 titles this year from the 34,296 total cataloged by TS and Music. We recataloged an additional 2814 titles.

ORDER SERVICES:

... And another fiscal year comes to a successful close. Order Services spent the last month of the 2003/2004 fiscal year processing orders, invoices, serials and periodicals right up to the end, to be sure that all materials that were to be processed in the 2003/2004 fiscal year were processed, and all invoices were paid.

Chris Waldrop reports that both Sage Publications and Cambridge University Press now offer online-only subscriptions. The libraries have been given lists of their active subscriptions with these publishers in order to help decide whether they would like to keep their print subscriptions or convert to online-only. Beginning with 2005 the Science Library has decided to convert all their subscriptions to Cambridge University Press titles to online-only. The serials team is currently working to get these records updated and the vendors notified.

The end of the month saw a number of small Acorn cleanup projects in preparation for fiscal year rollovers. For the new fiscal year, we were ready to "roll" by the end of the day on the 30th, however nothing was done to affect the funds on July 1st, to allow libraries the time to run any individual reports that might have been necessary. Following the Sirsi patch for open orders, things were back to normal early in July.

Visitors in June included Dena Schoen from Harrassowitz, and Mary Ellen attended a demonstration of YBP's GOBI product by Suzanne Kapusta and Bob Nardini.

Statistics:

3658 serials and periodicals received

1034 approvals received

97 sso's added

52 gifts added

1263 titles speed cataloged

Total number of orders placed for the 2003/2004 fiscal year is 15,832, compared to:

2002/2003: 18,887

2001/2002: 20,321

PRESERVATION:

The month of June usually involves some increased juggling to the team's workflow. Some libraries have used up their last binding dollar while others want to squeeze in one more truck of binding or repair items before the end of the fiscal year. And, of course, Karen Pillow and Machelle Keen push to encumber as many funds and to pay as many invoices as they can before the year-end deadline. This year we had one additional ball to juggle in June--a major test shipment to a competitor bindery. Fortunately, marking slowed down enough so the staff, with the valuable help of Debbie Willliams and Linda Davis, was able to juggle all the balls successfully. For the most part Ann Mallette was able to keep the labeling shelves to only a few days' backlog. Good job, Ann.

The shipping schedule was different between the two binderies, so keeping track of the coming and going of materials got a bit tricky. The messengers were really helpful in keeping all our boxes sorted and headed in the right direction. The large test shipment was picked up on June 15 and returned June 29. We'll report next month on the results.

Charlotte Lew returned June 10 from her vacation and plunged right back into book repair. Because of the large backlog, she focused on spine and hinge repairs. Near the end of the month Charlotte trained a Central student to help measures boxes for the Wachs collection.

Sue Davis received her new computer and in the process discovered that 3 years of PEM data had disappeared. George Anglin found the Annex data on a back up tape, and Sue is hoping that he can magically resurrect the Special Collections data as well.

HIGH CLASS BOOK DAMAGE: Sue semi-successfully cleaned some crème brulee stains from an ILL book. It was a pleasant change from the ordinary run-of-the-mill coffee or Coke stain.

Binding:

519 monographs

57 rebinds

596 periodicals

86 serials

1,258 volumes total to two different binderies with one shipment going to ICI Mid-Atlantic Bindery as a test

906 new Central paperbacks sorted and 375 (41%) selected for immediate binding

544 Acorn holdings records updated as a result of binding

For 2003-2004, Preservation sent 19,374 items to the bindery, an increase over the previous fiscal year of 1,645 volumes. Other statistics are readily available upon request.

Marking:

2,682 volumes

143 unbound serials

266 RUSH items

Repair:

114 volumes were repaired with 160 treatments