Technical Services Monthly Report

Aug. 2005

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

Tech Services teams finalized the details for the new Rush In-Process Request procedure, which went into effect on August 29th. The procedure involves TS staff receiving e-mail rush requests for in-process items directly from patrons, processing them quickly, and then responding to the patron indicating when the item will be available at their library’s’ circulation desk. In further support of this effort, we have identified Delivery Liaisons in CAT and OS who have volunteered to walk requested items to the libraries. We feel confident that the new procedure is working fairly well, with a minimal number of kinks still needing to be ironed out. The most important feature of this new process is that we are able to make items available to the patron days faster than before.

In Order Services, the Online Purchase Request form was modified to include a new category for those items that bibliographers designate as "Low Use" (these items will not be ordered by OS if they duplicate either UT or UK). A new procedure for handling these materials was also set up, along with the creation of two new Item Category 2's that aid in identifying and gathering statistics on these materials. The records for these materials will also be identified by the designation "LOW USE" in the 952 of the bib record. The entire (albeit brief) procedure may be found at:

http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/rs/techserv/OrderServices/LowUseIA.htm

The amount of new material processed from Order Services continued to increase. CAT cataloged the highest number of new titles since Sept. 2003!

After Hurricane Katrina blew through Nashville, there were multiple leaks in the GLB. Along with other building staff, Sue Davis helped look for leaks and assess damage. Collection damage amounted to one book. A significant leak in the book repair lab area resulted in some damage to supplies. Overall the leaks were contained and cleaned up within the day. Housekeeping staff in the GLB deserve special thanks for their extra effort that day. At the request of OUL, Bill Hook and Sue Davis teamed together to revisit the library's disaster response planning. Ironically, the first meeting happened on the day after the hurricane. It is obvious that there is much work to be done.

The Cataloging Documentation and Training Task Force (Don Jones, Becky Atack, Pete Wilson, Denise Chavez and Alice Cunningham, with help from Ann Barnette) continued working on reviewing and creating needed documentation. Becky and Ann B. are discussing training for copy catalogers and soliciting input from other cataloging units.

Zora Breeding convened the final meeting of the Cataloging and Authorities Advisory Group (CAAG), members: Mary Charles Lasater, Ann Ercelawn, Eileen Crawford, Catherine Gick, Nancy Bogess-Korekach, Amy Stewart-Mailhiot, Susan Widmer, and Roberta Winjum. It would be difficult to say that their work is finished, but along with the rest of the library-wide committees, they are waiting to hear what will take their place.

Computer ghosting was completed with a few problems, but the process went smoothly overall.

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

The big personnel news for August was that Molly Dahl accepted our offer of the Spanish cataloger position. She will begin work on September 6th. We are looking forward to working with her.

The second big news was the approval to make the temporary position in Preservation permanent. Jing Liu, who had held the temporary position, will fill it permanently.

We bade a fond Auf Wiedersehen to Heike Schniedermeyer, who returned to Frankfurt, Germany on Aug. 13.

Both Becky Atack and Sue Davis were able to attend a reception for USAC members at the Chancellor's residence.

Various staff attended the Donuts and Coffee meeting with Paul, the Brown Bag on LOCKSS, the brown bag on Morocco, and the VUprint open house. Ann Ercelawn attended a training session on the U.S. serial set.

Sue Davis joined OUL for a meeting about applying for an NEH preservation grant.

Ann Ercelawn taught the Advanced Serials cataloging workshop for the Alabama Library Association. She also wrote a short "Best Practices for Ejournals" web document.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

Don Jones prepared a document on training strategy for new catalogers to facilitate with Molly Dahl's training. Don will once again take the role of Principal Trainer and Master Cataloger. We appreciate his willingness to do this for the third time in six years! Zora Breeding prepared a schedule for Molly's first week and started the process of preparing for a new cataloger.

Jeff Taylor processed a small shipment of Peabody theses. Ann Barnette did the subject analysis for last month's shipment, including many in electronic format.

Yuh-Fen Benda cataloged the huge set of Chinese CD-ROMs called Siku Quanshu for the Asian history department. Because the whole set and all instructions were in Chinese, she was also enlisted to load its 182 CD-ROMs on the Reference Standalone computer and demonstrate it to the faculty who requested it. We appreciate Yuh-Fen’s enthusiastic willingness to help.

Mary Charles Lasater, who recently took over cataloging responsibility for Government Information, has been dealing with several "situations" in connection with this material. As Government Information plans for the merger with the Media Center, they have identified large amounts of UN documents that were never on Acorn. The first range of these awaits processing in Cataloging. Marcive was asked to supply records for the U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Reports.

The team cataloged 47 DVDs and several videotapes for fall classes. Yuh-Fen Benda continued re-cataloging and moving the Japanese anime videos.

Gina Berry processed new SSOs and a few Russian approvals. She also finished receiving the backlog of Russian firm orders.

Jeff Taylor worked on the "broken-links" and "flex-keys-with-o" error reports. He also completed a small project to clean up items with in-process as the home location.

Linda Davis continued editing holdings for items sent to the bindery. She also worked on the never-ending project to add call numbers to holdings (ongoing clean-up effort since conversion from Notis).

Statistics:

TS totals: 3492 new titles cataloged

CAT totals: 1923 new titles cataloged, 312 of which were original contributions or national level enhancements to the OCLC database and 1105 were modified locally

210 titles recataloged; 6 titles reconned

675 items withdrawn

Marcive delivered 9166 new or modified authority records.

ORDER SERVICES:

Statistics:

For the month of August, OS received and processed:

Serials/Periodicals: 3014

Approvals: 916

Added to Acorn:

SSO's: 93 (by Gina Berry, in TS Cataloging)

Gifts: 42

OS received 430 new requests, created 654 new orders, and Speed Cataloged 1527 titles.

Receiving: Serial receiving remains current. Firm order receivers are concentrating primarily on rush materials, firm order receiving, and approvals, particularly Spanish-language approvals. The end of the month also saw preparation for the changes in the rush request procedures.

OS continues to assist in the testing of the Sirsi Java client. Mary Ellen Wilson also participated in a conference call among the Sirsi Forum Moderators with Karen Albright (Sirsi) and others; it was agreed among the moderators that all Enhancement Forums would be on the same review cycle, and all will be reviewed in late November (beginning this November). Sirsi is also looking into new software for the Forums, and plans to eliminate the Discussion Forums for each module in favor of the e-mail lists; in the future only enhancement requests will be handled on the Sirsi Forums.

OS also received visits from Will Fuqua (Ebsco), Julie Deaver and William Taylor (Ingram), and Bob Schatz (Coutts).

PRESERVATION:

The Book Repair Lab received books with all sorts of substances stuck to or soaked into them. It was probably one of the worst months on record. We saw books wet from floods (saved), covered in candle wax (removed after freezing), sprayed with pesticide (withdrew), mold (cleaned), stuck together with "Hold-It" adhesive (sent to bindery), burnt from a home fire (repair still in process), and worst of all, animal feces (removed cover, cleaned, and sent to bindery). Preservation staff skills were surely tested during the past month.

In Sue Davis's absence, Charlotte Lew and Special Collections staff helped to rescue a Sociology Dept. faculty member's office after a flood from an air conditioning leak.

With LINCPlus still out of operation, Machelle Keen and Karen Pillow continued to use LARS for binding input tasks, slowing their productivity somewhat.

Eric Fairfield, a MidAtlantic Bookbindery representative, visited in mid-August. His visit was timely because of a sticky dilemma. Several music scores had become glued into their pamphlet binders pockets during the pamphlet construction process. The bindery found a solution to the problem.

Sue Davis fielded a call from the University of Michigan Library about bindery vendors. Heckman Bindery had given Vanderbilt as a reference for an account who had left Heckman. Sue also met with an independent bookbinder, Britt Stadig, who had recently moved to Nashville. Britt's portfolio showed a high level of skill and sense of design.

Binding:

588 monographs

10 rebinds

560 periodicals

206 serials

1364 volumes total

1211 new paperbacks sorted and 504 selected for immediate binding (42%).

26 monographs rebarcoded in preparation for binding

346 Acorn records updated as a result of binding.

Marking:

4861 volumes including 310 RUSH items, about a third higher number than usual

With Jing Liu on leave, and with an increase in items coming to Marking, the team is struggling to keep our marking turnaround within a week. So far, we are managing to keep close to that goal.

Repair:

232 volumes were repaired with 282 treatments. The month was fairly typical in that the bulk of the treatments were either spine repairs or wrappers/enclosures.