Technical Services Monthly Report

Sept. 2004

INTERDEPARTMENTAL ACTIVITIES:

At the beginning of the month TS began following the new Priority Levels procedures. Level 1 and Level 2 replace the old Rush categories. Level 1 includes all materials ordered Rush, all Patron Requested material, the Super Rush category and material needed for Reserve. Our goal is to get these materials to the library's circulation desk within 24 hours. Level 2 materials include Reference, Leisure Reading, ILL purchases and other Priority materials and our goal is to have these materials ready within 5-7 days (except, of course, those going to the Bindery). Level 3 materials include everything else and are processed normally.

As part of the new Priority Levels procedure, Ann Mallette has begun labeling Reference and other Level 2 items daily. Ann is temporarily keeping statistics to see how many of these items come to Marking. Early in September there seemed to be a real boom in Reference volumes, which are now Level 2.

TechForce met with the Binding and Marking Task Force to review that group's recommendations. Sue Davis has asked CAG for feedback on a couple of the issues raised and the Binding TF has met with select Central staff to discuss some of the recommendations.

Pete Wilson reconvened the Cataloging Task Force (Pete, chair, Becky Atack, Bryan Kurowski, Monica Sanchez and Alice Cunningham), which has been on hiatus this past year. We anticipate their final report on or before Dec. 1.

Mary Charles Lasater worked with Monica Sanchez, Angel Bruner, and Yan-Xia Zhong to answer questions about the 'T' Masters thesis project. Angel and Yan-Xia are creating preliminary Acorn records for these Peabody masters theses.

Roberta Winjum worked with Suellen Stringer-Hye to give the new “VU e-Archive” institutional repository a Vanderbilt look and feel. The new pages are available at http://e-archive.vanderbilt.edu/

Sue Davis, Machelle Keen, and Roberta Winjum met with Law Library staff about remaining with Heckman Bindery or switching to Mid-Atlantic along with Technical Services. That decision is still pending.

Zora Breeding, Jean Wright and Roberta Winjum attended a meeting with Larry Romans, Amy Stewart-Mailhiot, Linda Tesar and Nancy Boggess to discuss GPO records. Linda was anxious that someone at Central begin reviewing Marcive GPO new record loads because of the number of problems she is finding. Amy, with approval from Larry, agreed to take on this task following some training.

Jean Wright and Zora Breeding held a few informal training sessions with Amy Stewart-Mailhiot.

Mary Charles Lasater prepared for NACO funnel training that she will be conducting here on Oct. 13-14 for librarians from MTSU, TN Tech and TN State Library and Archives.

Mary Charles Lasater gave Suzanne Giffen of Biomedical some training in authorities.

Dennis Sauls assisted the Preservation team by unboxing binding shipments. Thanks, Dennis!

Mary Ellen Wilson, Roberta Winjum, and Jody Combs met with representatives from two security system companies to get estimates for a new security system for Baker. The old one has worn out.

Mary Ellen Wilson and Roberta Winjum met with Flo Wilson, Jody Combs, Marshall Breeding to discuss plans for new carpeting and other possible renovation of the Baker suites.

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

On September 9th, Monica Sanchez, Suzanne Bell, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum attended Ingram's Fall Publishers' Showcase. While we were there, our former colleague William Taylor donated a number of review books from Ingram for us to add to the library's collections.

We are very happy to report that Daphne Walker returned from her summer recess.

Sue Davis began interviewing candidates for a temporary (3 months) position in Preservation

Most of us attended some events in connection with the Employee Celebration Month.

Several staff attended the Vanderbilt Community Giving Campaign Breakfast and some attended the Community Giving Campaign Coffee in Peabody's Fireside Reading room. Many attended the Benefits Brown Bag.

The TS/GLB group held a long overdue potluck lunch.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

Mostly, the team worked on regular assignments and cataloged new material and the gift collections that are coming through. Jeff Taylor processed a large batch of new VU theses. We have started to see more videos arriving from OS on the new Film fund. David Anderson completed cataloging the LRC-ordered backlog and TS has thus begun full processing of this material, including ordering, cataloging, assigning numbers and labeling.

Projects:

Don Jones, Zora Breeding and Jeff Taylor met with Yvonne Boyer to discuss the next phase of the Wachs collection project. These 12 boxes of materials may contain items to be selected for the special Wachs collection. Don, Jeff and Ann Barnette began searching these and sorting them for final collection decisions by Yvonne.

Pete Wilson finished cataloging a few problematic Sights/Roller titles and that project is now fully cataloged and moved on to the Preservation Repair Lab for treatment.

Mary Charles Lasater completed loading the MeSH updated authority records and evaluated the records that were not updated. After discussing some issues with Deborah Broadwater, she met with Suzanne Giffen and turned over the follow-up to her.

Ann Ercelawn continued working with Rick Stringer-Hye and Dale Poulter regarding procedures for loading the MARCIt records and other issues involved with our SFX implementation.

Michael Scott reports that he had a Mayan series "epiphany" and wrote up a plan of attack to get these materials cataloged and under authority control.

Mary Charles Lasater and Zora Breeding both pulled material from the Inventory. Zora worked on Russian and History materials and Mary Charles searched and completed both the old Chemistry titles and the Chemical engineering titles. She worked with Kitty Porter to withdraw some old outdated titles.

Pete Wilson and Zora Breeding met with Juanita Murray and Kathy Smith to discuss Special Collections cataloging. Special Collections is ordering fewer new books, and wants Pete to begin work on 21 boxes of Peabody transfers and some old Peabody serials. Norma Riddick will be returning to Special Collections in October to work on the Pete Riley civil war collection and then the Stanley Horn and Donald Davie collections.

LITS has made some progress in extracting our series authority records. The first file did not find all of our series records and must be re-done.

Statistics:

TS totals: 2518 new titles cataloged.

CAT totals: 1722 new titles cataloged, 317 of which were original contributions or national level enhancements to the OCLC database and 909 were modified locally.

We recataloged an additional 237 titles and reconned 15 titles.

Linda Davis withdrew 63 titles and an additional 307 item records.

Marcive delivered around 14,766 new or modified authority records.

733 name, 769 subject and 62 series headings were changed on Acorn bibliographic records (not part of new cataloging activity).

We manually brought in 263 series authority records into Acorn and deleted 112 authority records.

Copy Cataloging: The Start Here flag rests near materials received here on 8/30, which is close but not quite where we prefer it to be.

ORDER SERVICES:

Statistics:

In September, Order Services received and processed:

Serials/Periodicals: 3185

Approvals: 616

Added to Acorn:

SSO's: 120

Gifts: 645

OS placed 1041 new orders and Speed Cataloged 585 titles.

Chris Waldrop reports that the serial receivers have continued to receive at a steady pace. The serial receivers also paid 1,018 serial and renewal notices during the month of September. The renewal process has also begun with vendors. All active subscriptions and standing orders have been confirmed with Ebsco, Swets, and Harrassowitz, and renewal payments have already been sent to some publishers.

Central, Management, and Peabody also reached agreements to share the cost of journal subscriptions. When one library is continuing a print subscription while the other opts for online-only, the two share the cost of a single print-plus-online subscription. This arrangement saves both libraries money, and avoids unnecessary duplication of subscriptions.

In late August and early September the serial receivers undertook a project to move 146 standing orders to Franklin Book Company. Unfortunately Franklin abruptly closed, so now steps are being taken to transfer the Franklin orders to another vendor to avoid missed volumes.

Shipments from Blackwell have resumed, though the shipments continue to be lighter than normal. In addition to processing new orders, verifier/receivers also continue to add titles from the

Wachs gift collection, as well as other gifts and approvals. Since this is also a busy time of year for the serial receivers, Yan-Xia Zhong, Suzanne Bell, and Gina Berry continue to assist with serials receiving so that these materials may remain up to date.

On September 14th, Chris Waldrop and Roberta Winjum met with representatives from Ebsco.

PRESERVATION:

Binding:

498 monographs

1 rebind

177 periodicals

71 serials

747 volumes total

935 new Central paperbacks sorted and 464 selected for immediate binding (50%).

The binding percentage has risen again since many gift items are coming through the pipeline. Not only do many of these gifts need immediate binding, but others are in even more fragile condition and require boxing before going to the shelf.

Sheranda Lee and Linda Davis (an honorary team member) updated 278 Acorn records as a result of binding.

Machelle Keen provided some binding prep training for a new Peabody staff member, Eli Moody, and met with Science staff about barcoding periodicals prior to binding.

LINCPlus is still not working. Dale Poulter is working to try to resolve the kinks. So far, we have not been able to actually test the binding software in production.

Marking:

4,572 volumes including 186 RUSH items. Additionally we labeled 113 items not caught by our automated report.

As of Oct. 1, we were labeling items that arrived the previous week.

Repair:

122 volumes were repaired with 186 treatments. Most of those were routine repairs.

Charlotte Lew spent considerable time organizing for multiple box orders, including measuring the Roller/Sights volumes as well as training a Central student to help with the Wachs special collection box order. We are using Heckman Bindery for the Roller/Sights boxes because of faster turnaround and improved box design.