Technical Services Monthly Report

Sept. 2005

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

TS teams all continue to work through various issues dealing with the new web-requested Rush materials. A certain patron (Roberta Winjum) keeps making tricky requests to test certain features that don’t always work as planned. Yuh-Fen Benda and Becky Atack successfully delivered a DVD to a very grateful professor less than an hour before his class (thanks also to the fast work of Order Services). Mary Ellen Wilson and Monica Sanchez met with the three members of OS who are primarily responsible for processing rush requests in OS (aka the Rush Rotation - Suzanne Bell, Angel Bruner, and Sherry Huffer) to discuss their experiences so far with the new rush procedure for rush requests submitted through the OPAC. A few glitches are still being resolved and improvements are still being made.

The Cataloging Documentation and Training Task Force (Don Jones, Becky Atack, Pete Wilson, Denise Chavez and Alice Cunningham, with help from Ann Barnette), continues its work on a detailed outline of needed training documentation.

Roberta Winjum gave a demo and discussion of the VU e-Archive at the Library Directors meeting, and has scheduled several follow-up demos for libraries as a result. She also gave Zora Breeding some preliminary training in how to add items. Best of all, she has received forty documents from a professor who would like to add them to the e-Archive.

Monica Sanchez, Mary Ellen Wilson, Chris Waldrop, and Roberta Winjum toured Ingram’s impressive Lightning Source publishing on demand facilities at Ingram headquarters in LaVergne, TN. William Taylor (formerly of Vanderbilt) graciously arranged the tour. The Lightning Source facility produces books on demand within 24 hours of Ingram's receipt of an order. Following the tour, the four attended the Ingram Publishers’ Showcase. The free books they brought back were greatly enjoyed by many! We hope that other library staff can attend next year.

Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater, Linda Davis, Ann Ercelawn, Chris Waldrop, Monica Sanchez, and Mary Ellen Wilson met with LITS (and other library staff) to discuss the testing and implementation of the Java Client. The three OS staff members hope to begin to use the new client around the end of October, after the conversion to the GL3.0 server. They plan to use the new client as much as possible in preparation for training of the rest of OS staff, who will likely migrate around the beginning of 2006.

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

Staff attended various events held within the VU employee celebration month, including the University’s Staff Recognition Ceremony. This year’s TS honorees include: Dennis Sauls and Roberta Winjum (5 years), Keith Curd, Charlotte Lew, Jean Wright, and Paul Van Cotthem (10 years), Machelle Keen (15 years), Linda Davis, Jo Nell Owens, and Mary Charles Lasater (25 years), and Mary Ellen Wilson (an impressive 30 years). We recognize and honor the contributions of all of them!!

Hurricane Katrina blew a fully trained (repair, binding, and marking) Tulane employee, Carlos Escarfuller, to Vanderbilt, where he enrolled as a student. Preservation was able to hire him as a student assistant for the semester. Carlos has been sharing his Tulane experiences while he is learning our procedures. For example, Tulane stamps the ownership stamp four (yes, 4) times on each book.

Daphne Walker returned to work after a summer's leave. We are always glad to have her back at the repair bench.

Many staff attended Paul Gherman's donuts and coffee meeting during which he discussed the new committee structure. Subsequently, a number of TS staff have been asked to serve on various committees.

Mary Charles reports that the Tennessee Funnel participants began sending more NACO records for her review, after a summer of inactivity.

Mary Beth Blalock brought bibliographer Hilary Rudsenske to Order Services to meet verifiers for her subject areas. Zora Breeding gave Hilary a tour of the GLB TS work area. Zora also brought her newest cataloger, Molly Dahl, to meet library staff at Baker.

Jean Wright and Paul Van Cotthem agreed to serve on the Community Giving Campaign.

Many staff attended the Larry Romans Fan Club picture and party.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

Molly Dahl began her training, with Don Jones as her principal cataloging trainer. Molly has also received training from Zora Breeding, Denise Chavez and Mary Charles Lasater. We are enjoying having her on the team.

Gina Berry keeps on top of the LC copy. We still have a backlog of Wachs gifts (for the regular stacks). Gina, Jeff Taylor and Mary Charles Lasater searched the shelving range full of UN documents brought over from Government Information.

Jeff Taylor received and cataloged another batch of ETDs. Gina Berry continued to bring over Russian books from the inventory. Zora Breeding continued to catalog said Russian books in large quantities.

Mary Charles Lasater reports that she, Yuh-Fen Benda and Jeff Taylor will soon finish the Peabody Ed.D. theses. They plan to celebrate the completion of that portion of the retrospective theses project in October.

Zora Breeding, Don Jones and Ann Ercelawn attended a Science Library staff meeting to discuss cataloging for Science e-books available online in full text.

Statistics:

TS totals: 2621 new titles cataloged.

CAT totals: 1818 new titles cataloged, 202 of which were original contributions or national level enhancements to the OCLC database and 1057 were modified locally

138 titles recataloged; 19 titles reconned

375 items withdrawn

Copy cataloging is largely up to date.

Marcive delivered 5507 new or modified authority records. The team reports making changes to 485 name, 383 subject and 39 series headings on Acorn bibliographic records (not part of new cataloging activity).

29 authority records deleted

ORDER SERVICES:

Statistics:

Items received and processed:

2856 serials and periodicals

1154 approvals

59 gifts

856 new purchase requests received

976 new orders placed

782 new titles speed cataloged

Subsequent to submitting all of the Science and Engineering cancellations, subscription vendors were given the OK to renew our remaining titles. We expect our 2006 renewal invoices shortly. Serials and periodical receiving is current, and receivers continue to work on firm order receiving to bring it up to date as well. Receivers also processed a number of Spanish-language approvals and firm orders that came in around fiscal-year end.

Harrassowitz representative Dena Schoen visited to introduce us to Terry Hill, who will be our new Customer Service Rep.

PRESERVATION:

Although LINCPlus binding software was supposedly fixed, it had only pretended to work. The files we sent to the bindery turned out to be unreadable. Very fortunately for us, the bindery offered to re-input all our data for that shipment. With LINCPlus still broken, Karen Pillow and Machelle Keen reluctantly returned to the old binding software, LARS.

Through George Anglin’s amazing efforts, we successfully migrated the Book Repair Access database to the 2003 version so that Charlotte Lew's PC could be upgraded.

A second piece of good news is that the PEM data that we thought was lost when hardware failed in July was actually still on the PC card. Seven months of Annex temperature and relative humidity data were recovered, still intact and useful.

A representative from Heckman Bindery visited with Sue Davis and Machelle Keen.

Sue Davis consulted with Special Collections on preparing an NEH grant application.

Binding:

587 monographs

109 rebinds

251 periodicals

67 serials

1014 volumes total

1118 new paperbacks sorted and 489 selected for immediate binding (44%).

16 monographs rebarcoded in preparation for binding

308 Acorn records updated as a result of binding

Marking:

4565 volumes

407 RUSH items

Items are being labeled within a hair of a one week turnaround.

The RUSH count was much higher than usual. Part of that count is due to a Rush project. Could the rest be due to patrons finding the Acorn Rush Request button?

Repair:

163 volumes were repaired with 238 treatments.

The majority of the work was split between spine repairs for Central and enclosures for Special Collections.