Technical Services Monthly Report

May 2005

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

Order Services saw end of year ordering make its big upward spike for the year. Year-end purchases increase the flow of materials through Cataloging and Marking as well. Summer binding activities also kicked into full gear as libraries began sending us materials saved up over the academic year. Finally, the academic year usually ends with massive returns of checked out books. Many of those books end up in the repair lab for treatment.

Office renovation in the Baker Building began (All we wanted was new carpet!), and we're all learning the fine art of living and working in chaos. The electrical power has been disconnected from the front bank of workstations, and so both Yan-Xia Zhong and Linda Hand had to relocate their offices. Yan-Xia now resides in Gina Berry’s former office (and so also has a new phone number, 4-1998), and Linda has temporarily relocated to another workstation as the construction continues.

The Cataloging Documentation and Training Task Force prepared and sent out a brief survey on documentation usage and needs. They are also tracking down relevant existing procedure and policy documents, some to be revised and posted to the web and others to be removed or archived.

Mary Charles Lasater is heading a subgroup of CAAG charged with reviewing and making changes to the Sirsi policies dealing with the author/title 100/240 entries to improve indexing and references. This work will need to be completed before the July 4th reindexing.

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

Sue hosted a daylong SOLINET workshop on disaster preparedness on May 20. Charlotte Lew was among the attendees.

Ann Ercelawn helped the Metalib committee test the software, hold an open house and conduct usability studies with library patrons.

Pete Wilson attended an in-person beginners' class on Dreamweaver at New Horizons. He will be working on putting more cataloging documentation on the web.

Ann Ercelawn attended NASIG's annual conference in Minneapolis.

We celebrated Linda Davis's 25th anniversary with Vanderbilt!

Michael Scott left us in the middle of May and CAT seems quieter and a bit sadder without his buoyant presence. We miss you, Michael, and hope you will be very happy at Yale!

Machelle Keen has been released from all physical restrictions on her activities following her back injury, and we’re thrilled that she’s mostly well and can resume most of her normal tasks.

Charlotte Lew left for a month long visit home on May 25.

Daphne Walker left two weeks early for her summer break.

Various staff attended the Spring Staff Event, Paul's meeting to discuss the Organization Committee report, the faculty appreciation of Central library staff party, the Metalib open house and Marshall Breeding's brown bag on Current Trends in Library Automation.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

Yuh-Fen Benda reports that she is making progress cataloging the Japanese DVD set of Godzilla movies. She also cataloged the first Braille books that anyone remembers receiving (they are going to the Youth collection at Peabody). Don Jones reviewed the last of the Wachs books at Baker and cataloged some of the problem Wachs books destined for the Central stacks. Mary Charles Lasater, Jeff Taylor and Yuh-Fen worked on the Ed.D.'s and are in sight of the end of the project. Jeff, Mary Charles and Ann Barnette worked on additional electronic theses. Jean Wright worked on a shelving project for Government Information, matching portions of the State Department classification to the Acorn records.

Gina Berry continued her training with Becky Atack and also received training from Yuh-Fen Benda. Gina has amazingly managed to wipe out the LC backlog and is cataloging this material within a few days of receipt. She has also processed a couple of shipments of SSOs and some Russian approvals. Keep up the good work, Gina!

Temporary distribution of Michael Scott's subject responsibilities include: 0410 Latin American Anthropology to Pete Wilson; 1800 Classics to Zora Breeding; 8300 fund for Spanish literature to Ann Barnette.

The team spent time working on Connexion. Many team members have switched over to the new software completely and others are furiously trying to get as much done on Passport as is humanly possible before the June 4 cutoff date.

Statistics:

TS totals: 2706 new titles cataloged.

CAT totals: 1667 new titles cataloged, 243 of which were original contributions or national level enhancements to the OCLC database and 907 were modified locally.

We recataloged 164 titles and reconned 30 titles.

641 items withdrawn

Marcive delivered 7,110 new or modified authority records. The team reports making changes to 588 name, 68 subject and 90 series headings on Acorn bibliographic records (not part of new cataloging activity). 90 authority records deleted.

ORDER SERVICES:

This month was heavy for ordering new materials, as the last day for routine requests this fiscal year was May 31. We are quickly seeing the fruits of this labor as our vendors begin to supply the materials that we've ordered.

Our energy and spirits were lifted when Larry Romans, Amy Stewart-Mailhiot, and Paula Covington brought doughnuts on behalf of the Central bibliographers.

In spite of the chaos during the Baker construction project, we have been able to keep up with the current processing of serials/periodicals/continuations and approval materials - invoices for these materials are current. Verifiers are working closely with their respective bibliographers to monitor the balance on funds as we draw closer to the end of the fiscal year.

Of Note: The Music approval profile has been submitted to Blackwell, and we expect that approval plan to begin shipping books around July 1st.

OS also placed our first individual order for an e-book for the Central library (The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia). While we have already added thousands of e-books from NetLibrary, the process of ordering individual e-books from publishers is quite different, and we were able to use this purchase to guide us in setting up a procedure for this process.

Statistics:

4036 requests received during the month. This number was more than double April's offering.

2594 new orders created.

1035 titles cataloged upon receipt

OS also received and processed 3010 serials/periodicals, 830 approvals, and 78 gifts. In addition, 105 SS0's were received, most of which were sent to Cataloging for Gina Berry to process, and we appreciate her help.

PRESERVATION:

Sue Davis installed the new PEMs (dataloggers) in Special Collections and the Annex and is preparing the old ones for recalibration. In the process of uploading the data from the latest PEM readings, she discovered that the card reader hardware had died. LITS is helping with replacing the card reader. On a related note, Sue set up a classic hygrothermograph (uses paper charts) in the Baudelaire Center and showed Yvonne Boyer how to change out the charts.

Jing Liu is assisting in the repair lab while Charlotte Lew and Daphne Walker are gone. She is also assisting with the increased processing in Binding/Marking.

Sue Davis is exploring the improved labeling feature of the new Sirsi Java Client. It's still too early in testing to tell if this new programming is any improvement over our in-house web-based labeling system.

A Heckman Bindery salesman paid his first visit to our library since we cancelled our account with them last fall.

Binding:

588 monographs

144 rebinds

736 periodicals

65 serials

1533 volumes total

1197 new paperbacks sorted (the highest total since last August) and 615 selected for immediate binding (51%).

162 monographs rebarcoded in preparation for binding

482 Acorn holdings records updated as a result of binding

The number of binding errors remains quite low, although Machelle Keen has spotted a few doozies lately. Mid Atlantic promptly fixes their mistakes.

Marking:

4,571 items including

133 unbound serials

201 RUSH items

75 Level 2 items

reels of microfilm labeled

There were additionally 92 miscellaneous items not picked up by the automated Acorn report.

Even though the numbers are high, we are still within a labeling turnaround time of one week for the regular materials. While Ann Mallette doesn't do it all by herself, she really deserves credit for keeping the materials flowing. She also provides much of the GLB delivery service from the team.

Repair:

302 volumes were repaired with 404 treatments.

This total includes 2 wrapper box orders. Materials from Baudelaire, Central, Divinity, Peabody, Law, Science/Engineering, and Special Collections were treated.