Technical Services Monthly Report
Apr. 2006
DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:
Discussion in the CAT team on the project to catalog the
electronic versions of some cancelled print series in Science was suspended
when we found out that they were reinstating all the series cancelled in
2005. For the Preservation Team the
reinstatement will mean additional binding activity.
Members of the Cataloging Documentation and Training Task Force,
Don Jones, Becky Atack, Pete Wilson, Denise Chavez
and Molly Dahl wrapped up work on the Cataloging Manual.
We completed the annual evaluation process.
Team
leaders gave Tracy Primich an orientation and tour of
each Tech Services team.
The Cataloging and Authorities Team, Metadata Committee, and TechForce ended the month trying to figure out what impact LC's decision to stop tracing series would have on
processing and retrieval. Several staff monitored the various cataloging lists
to track the reaction and response from the library community.
PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:
Mary Charles Lasater and Denise Chavez
attended the TLA conference in
Training: Mary Charles
conducted NACO training prior to the TLA conference for several new
Many attended Bill Hook's brown bag on the Divinity Library's
remodeling.
A few staff attended the Webcast:
Archiving and Preserving the Web.
Several staff helped with the library book sale.
MYSTERY OF THE MONTH: One
sunny April day Jing Liu noticed a book lying on the
roof outside the repair lab and went out a window to retrieve it. Turns out it was a library book, The Tempest,
by Shakespeare. It was a small, thin
volume and was not checked out. There was no patron record connected to it
either. The volume had no visible damage except possibly some injury from
landing after a hard throw. We don't
know how it got there or how long it had been there, but there was no
weather-related damage. Public windows
are locked shut and the only other windows facing that area are the book repair
lab and those belonging to a Central bibliographer. So, how did the book get there?
CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:
Jeff Taylor reports that April was the heaviest month yet for
electronic theses, with everyone trying to get theirs in before the deadline
for May graduation. It appears that more than half of all students are now
submitting electronically.
Gina Berry, Ann Barnette, Jeff Taylor
and Mary Charles Lasater continue to work on the UN
documents.
Susan Bell continued adding the History department's Honor
baccalaureate theses to the VU e-Archives.
Denise Chavez spoke to Lara Beth Lehman about the possibility of
using Keyboard Express macros for adding notes to Acorn records for winners of
the Caldecott, Newbery and other selected awards.
Linda Davis completed work on the bound-with project for Central.
Yuh-Fen Benda negotiated
the purchase of a 130 volume set of Fu Si Zhi. She also recataloged
some Chinese videos at the request of Professor Miller.
Zora Breeding continued to investigate the Lecture
notes in computer science electronic set available from OCLC and requested a
price quote from Solinet. These titles were cancelled in 2004 and will
not be reinstated in print. She also
added urls to an additional 60 Lecture Notes in
Computer Science titles.
Sirsi Java client: Pete Wilson, as a member of the
Metadata Committee, and Jeff Taylor, as our copy cataloging guinea pig, had the
Java client installed on their machines and began looking at it. Julie Loder also
upgraded the Java client for Zora Breeding and Linda
Davis. After CATs
reported several problems and workflow issues to Julie Loder,
Roberta Winjum suggested that we suspend using Java
until the soon-to-be-released upgrade which may resolve some of the issues we
are having is installed.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online: The weekly loads of the
bibliographic records are ongoing. Mary
Charles and Denise showed Gina Berry, Molly Dahl and Linda Davis how to review
the unauthorized lists so they could join the other team members in reviewing a
page a week of these unauthorized lists (the rest of us had worked on similar
projects in the past).
Journal club: The team read
and discussed the article "MODS" by Rebecca Guenther and the article
"A bibliographic metadata infrastructure for the twenty-first
century" by Roy Tennant. Chris Benda gave us a very informative presentation on Dublin
Core which he had created for a library school class.
Statistics:
2209 new titles cataloged by TS
1378 new titles cataloged by CAT, 205 of which were original
contributions or national level enhancements
186 titles recataloged
0 titles reconned
257 items withdrawn
16055 new or modified authority records delivered by Marcive
1283 local changes made to names on bib records outside of normal
cataloging
110 local changes made to subjects on bib records outside of
normal cataloging
107 local changes made to series on bib records outside of normal
cataloging
109 authority records deleted
6455 volumes in the TS inventory at the Annex as of April 1, 2006,
compared to 18528 volumes in the TS inventory at its peak in February 1998
ORDER
SERVICES:
Statistics:
Received and processed:
Serials/Periodicals: 2618
Approvals: 754
Added to Acorn:
SSO's: 48
Gifts: 95
Speed Cataloged 828 titles
OS received 1161 new requests, and placed 1220 new orders.
Ordering continues to show a slight increase; slips (non-Rush) awaiting ordering are no older than the last week of April.
Libraries have been asked to submit all requests for orders by May
31st so that OS staff may have time to place the orders before the end of the
fiscal year.
Firm orders that have been received and are awaiting
processing are no more than 3-4 weeks old. All approvals, foreign and domestic,
are current.
Monica Sanchez and Mary Ellen Wilson attended a Webex demonstration on Collection Manager presented for the
Central bibliographers. Afterward, there was discussion of using CM's request feature to submit orders to OS for speedier
processing. We have since received
several requests from Central bibliographers using this method.
We received a visit from several representatives of Ebsco Subscription Services: Ree
Sherer (VP and General Manager,
John Laraway from Blackwells
visited, and met with several library representatives to discuss approval and
slip profiles.
PRESERVATION:
Sue Davis attended a local SOLINET disaster response planning
workshop along with members of OUL.
After the workshop, Bill Hook and Sue met to discuss further work on the
library's disaster response plan. Sue is
currently tackling a major rewrite and reorganization draft.
Sue Davis and Charlotte Lew taught an
Introduction to Preservation Concepts Workshop for two Annex staff and one team
member.
The bio-safety hood passed its annual inspection with flying
colors. This important tool is used
frequently to inspect and clean items suspected having mold.
Preservation treated a special patient in the repair lab on April
13---Zora Breeding. Somehow a sticky glue insect trap
had attached itself to her arm (you will need to ask Zora
those details) and the glue was ferociously stubborn. After careful, but firm rubbing with ethanol
alcohol and moisturizer, the two doctors were able to remove most of the glue
without taking the skin with it. A
follow up house call later in the day showed that the patient was fully
recovered from the trauma. The fee for the special service has not yet been
determined.
Binding:
478 monographs
521 periodicals
88 serials
1087volumes total
831 new monograph paperbacks sorted and 344 selected for immediate
binding (41%).
391 Acorn records updated as a result of periodical and serial
binding.
Marking:
4479 volumes
226 RUSH items
The marking shelves stayed under control nicely until the end of
the month when a large number of books came to marking from the repair lab. Year-end
ordering has picked up, so our new books have also begun to pick up. We are currently labeling all items within a
week of their arrival.
Repair
468 volumes were treated with 664 treatments.
The current backlog has reached 781 items.
It was a record month in Repair.
Many items were part of the Divinity Annex transfer project, but items
from Central, Baudelaire, Law, Music, Science, and Special Collections were
also treated. Semester end book returns greatly increased the number of items
coming to the lab for repair.