Technical Services Monthly Report

June 2005

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

The Cataloging Documentation and Training Task Force (Don Jones and Becky Atack, co-chairs, Pete Wilson, Denise Chavez, and Alice Cunningham) met and continued reviewing existing documentation.

participants regarding plans for the future of the program. Roberta also conducted a conference

Roberta Winjum participated in a conference call of LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) call with several staff at the University of Mississippi Medical Center Library to answer their questions regarding institutional repositories.

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

Kathy Ma retired on June 2nd. We were pleased to honor Kathy with a retirement party in the Peabody Fireside Room. Appreciation goes to Angel Bruner, Debbie Williams, and Yan-Xia Zhong for their help in planning and staging this event. Kathy has worked for the library since 1969, and expressed her appreciation to all those who helped her throughout her library career. Kathy is a part of our library family, and we will greatly miss having her here every day. We all wish her all the very best in her retirement.

The search committee for the Spanish Cataloger position began deliberations in June. The group (Zora Breeding, chair, Pete Wilson, Paula Covington, Angel Bruner and Lisa Shipman) reviewed applications, ranked the candidates and made numerous reference calls. They hope to have interviews scheduled in July.

Roberta Winjum finalized plans for the visit of Heike Schniedermeyer, librarian from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitaet in Frankfurt, who was expected on June 30. She will be helping with the VU e-Archive during her 6-week visit to Vanderbilt.

Yuh-Fen Benda, Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Don Jones, Mary Charles Lasater, Pete Wilson, and Roberta Winjum attended the American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago.

Several attended the webcast on Google's library digitization project and the "Blogging in Academic Research Libraries" brown bag.

Most attended Paul Gherman's library-wide presentation on implementing the strategic plan. Some also attended the informal coffee and doughnuts chat with Paul Gherman and hope that becomes a more regular event.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

The CAT team made the final switch from Passport to Connexion and lived to tell the tale. Except for the frequent periods of down time and some problems with reliability, the transition is going well. During the first week of the transition, Z39.50 connections to OCLC were down and Zora Breeding helped Angel Bruner and Yan-Zia Zhong learn some searching and exporting functions in Connexion. Luckily, OCLC resolved that problem quickly. We hope OCLC works out the remaining stability issues soon.

Becky Atack and Zora Breeding showed Gina Berry how to search the Russian inventory list and Gina has been pulling books from that list during the lulls in new material. Gina continues to process SSO shipments as they are sent over from OS. Yuh-Fen Benda resumed cataloging the Godzilla collection and also cataloged 20+ audio books from the LRC. Many videos were cataloged. Linda began a project to create bound-withs for The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. John Haar requested that we add links to the titles newly added to the Cognet electronic book database. Jeff Taylor added links to Acorn for the titles we had in print and Zora cataloged the electronic-only titles. Ann Ercelawn worked on some SFX problems: she requested ISSN assignment for two titles, obtained a title list from ProQuest of their APS titles with PMIDS for loading into SFX, and did some de-duping of Acorn of titles that the programs don't catch.

Mary Charles Lasater headed up a subcommittee of CAAG to review changes made possible for the display of uniform titles. The recommended changes were implemented in time for the reindexing.

Statistics:

TS totals: 1975 new titles cataloged.

CAT totals: 1283 new titles cataloged, 183 of which were original contributions or national level enhancements to the OCLC database and 872 were modified locally.

We recataloged 167 titles and reconned 10 titles.

Linda withdrew 554 items.

Copy Cataloging is current and all the shelves are completely empty.

Fiscal year totals:

30,193 new titles cataloged (includes Music, Government Information and Norma Riddick's Special Collections work, but not Divinity)

CAT year totals: 18,126 new titles cataloged = 60% of total new titles

Recataloged year totals: 2756

Marcive delivered 6603 new or modified authority records. The team reports making changes to 294 name, 154 subject and 22 series headings on Acorn bibliographic records (not part of new cataloging activity). We deleted 82 authority records.

Fiscal year authority totals:

Manual changes: 8795 name; 5036 subject; 1279 series.

Deleted: 2280 authority records

ORDER SERVICES:

June was an extremely busy and productive month for Order Services. With the ever-present commotion of construction, OS was able to remain on target for the fiscal year end.

Statistics:

OS received and processed:

Serials/Periodicals: 3306

Approvals: 743

Added to Acorn:

SSO's:128 (by Gina Berry, in Cataloging)

Gifts: 11

OS placed 2470 new orders and Speed Cataloged 688 titles.

For the entire 2004/2005 fiscal year, OS received a total of 14208 requests, 4797 of which were received during the months of May and June. Subsequently, most of May and June were spent processing these requests to be sure that they were ordered before the end of the fiscal year. Everyone communicated closely with their respective bibliographers to be sure that funds were correctly encumbered. During this time, OS accumulated a backlog of both firm orders to be received and gifts to be added to Acorn. The oldest firm orders to be received are currently from the end of May.

Serial receivers have been very successful at keeping all materials up to date - all receiving of periodicals, serials, continuations, and all invoice processing remained current throughout the month.

On July 1st, all orders were rolled into the new (2006) fiscal year. Verifiers and receivers have now shifted their focus of attention to the firm orders in the mailroom in an effort to bring them up to date. Libraries have begun submitting orders for the new fiscal year, though we are primarily placing only Level 1 and Level 2 orders while we work on the backlog.

Also worthy of mention: on June 7th, Linda Hand, Monica Sanchez, and Mary Ellen Wilson met with Marco Rivers from Internal Audit to review Procurement Card purchases extending back for the last few years. Hundreds of transactions were reviewed, and OS received an excellent review overall for our practices.

PRESERVATION:

Jing Liu helped ably in the book repair lab while Charlotte Lew was on leave visiting family in Taiwan. There is now a moderate backlog in the repair lab, but very little in binding or marking.

Sue Davis addressed several preservation reference questions from the Vanderbilt community ranging from preserving sheet music to removing the musty smell from poorly stored books.

Binding:

835 monographs

7 rebinds

843 periodicals

26 serials

1711 volumes total

Sheranda Lee and Preservation’s special honorary team member, Linda Davis, together updated 621 Acorn periodical and serial holdings records as a result of binding.

Both Karen Pillow and Machelle Keen kept up with encumbering funds and paying invoices as the fiscal year wound to a close, so that there were no year end snags--at least that we know about.

The fiscal 2004/05 binding total amounted to 15,651 volumes. That's almost 4,000 volumes fewer than in 2003/04, but only 2,000 fewer than 2002/03. The general trend appears to indicate a decline in the number of volumes going to the bindery--an expected development as more resources go online.

Marking:

4865 volumes marked including

195 RUSH items

430 additional items not captured by the automated report, many part of a special box-labeling project for Special Collections

As OS sends fewer materials while focusing on year-end orders, the marking shelves are close to empty. Currently all materials are labeled within about a week of receipt.

The 2004/05 total for Marking amounted to 49,633 items. 2003/04's total was 42,963. This year is the first year the team has relied upon an automated Acorn report, which may capture slightly different numbers than the old manual system.

Repair:

123 volumes were repaired with 173 treatments.

The vast majority of items were spine replacement repairs coupled with hinge repairs for Central.

The 2004/05 total for repairs is 3,260 volumes treated with 4,294 treatments. That's a significant increase over the previous year's 2,607 volumes with 3,597 treatments. Wrapper boxes and spine repairs continue to be the two biggest categories.