Technical Services Monthly Report
Feb. 2006
DIVISION-WIDE
ACTIVITIES:
Members of the Cataloging Documentation and Training Task Force,
Don Jones, Becky Atack, Pete Wilson, Alice Cunningham
and including Molly Dahl, who has been working on the look and feel of the
Cataloging Manual, met with TechForce to report on
the final stages of the group's work.
Molly was given Webmaster status for the manual. It is looking very good.
Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater,
Roberta Winjum, Mary Beth Blalock, and Nancy Boggess-Korekach, among others, began working on getting
MARC records loaded for the Eighteenth Century Collections Online. The reason these are causing more than the
usual amount of discussion is that the number of records exceeds 127,000. This will be the largest outside record load
we have ever made and will have a significant impact on searching and
authorities control.
An important new piece of emergency response equipment was
installed in the 8th floor GLB book repair lab area --a full-size upright
freezer that can house wet books and papers in the event of a flood. Most of you know that it's important to
freeze wet paper items within 48 hours to prevent mold growth if the items
can't be dried quickly. Hopefully there
won't be much call for the freezer, but it's great to have one on hand. In past local disasters it would have come in
quite handy.
Progress with the VU e-Archive: Chris Benda
volunteered his help with the VU e-Archive as a class project for the semester.
Ann Ercelawn and Roberta Winjum
worked with Chris on procedures for creating metadata for the Social discourse collection. In addition, the History Department has
chosen the e-Archive as a place to store their Baccalaureate Honors Theses.
Professor Frank Wcislo and Heidi Welch worked with
Roberta to learn how to add them. Roberta
then enlisted the help of Susan Bell, who is using her history expertise to
create the descriptive metadata for each thesis.
Ann Ercelawn met with Machelle Keen and Linda Davis to review periodical binding
workflow and created a document spelling out who has responsibility for the
various tasks involved with bound periodicals.
PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:
Don Jones attended meetings of the Reserves Standardization Task
Force and also became part of a subcommittee, with Mandy Henk
and Amy Stewart-Mailhiot, working on MARC templates
in Workflows for the different types of reserve items, i.e. books, articles,
DVDs, tests, etc.
Carlos Escarfuller, who worked briefly
as a temporary employee with the Preservation Team after he was chased out of
Many staff attended the demonstration of ExLibris's
Primo product, the fireside lunch at the
CATALOGING
AND AUTHORITIES:
Noteworthy beginning:
The CAT team decided to launch a Metadata Journal Club as a team
building activity and to gain more knowledge on the subject. We will be reading and discussing various
articles dealing with the future of cataloging and metadata issues. Our first readings were the presentation
Karen Calhoun gave at ALA San Antonio on the future of cataloging and an
article by Clifford Lynch titled "The New Context for Bibliographic
Control In the New Millennium."
Authorities news:
Mary Charles Lasater reports that the
SFX records and the EEBO load made the unauthorized headings list huge. It seems that the SFX records were not being
sent through Marcive for processing. Mary Charles has Dale Poulter
looking into the matter to remedy this situation. This should reduce the amount of unauthorized
list work that must be dealt with.
Mary Charles is also pleased to announce that a new policy allows
NACO libraries to add death dates to existing authority headings. Among the headings with newly added death
dates, she has seen Princess Di, Jackie O. and Leonard Bernstein.
Out-of-the-ordinary:
Yuh-Fen Benda met with
Prof. Tracy Miller regarding the upcoming visit of Dr. Heijdra,
the Chinese bibliographer and head of public services at
Linda Davis worked on a project to reclassify Government
Information CDROMs which will now be housed together
with Central CDROMs.
Jean Wright began a project with Amy Stewart-Mailhiot
and Peggy Earheart to catalog, re-mark, and shift a
number of volumes in various series of the "Catalog[ue] of copyright entries."
Molly Dahl started working with Marshall Breeding on the
Ecclesiastical Sources for Slave Societies project, which involves adding
information to records, "a little PERL action," and manipulating
images and thumbnails.
Yuh-Fen Benda worked with
Central Circulation staff to resolve some problems discovered during the 2nd
floor transfer project. Linda Davis
worked on creating some bound-withs for volumes from
this project being transferred to the Annex.
Zora Breeding, Becky Atack
and Molly Dahl created our CAT goals document for 2006. Some team members have begun working on
annual evaluations.
Gina Berry, Ann Barnette, Jeff Taylor
and Mary Charles Lasater continued to work on the UN
documents as time permitted.
Ann Barnette began searching the History
inventory list and she and Zora Breeding have been
cataloging some of those lovely gems.
Pete Wilson also pulled some inventory materials.
Statistics:
2215 new titles cataloged by TS
1405 new titles cataloged by CAT, 126 of which were original
contributions or national level enhancements
187 titles recataloged
1 title reconned
511 items withdrawn
5010 new or modified authority records delivered by Marcive
813 local changes made to names on bib records outside of normal
cataloging
212 local changes made to subjects on bib records outside of
normal cataloging
40 local changes made to series on bib records outside of normal
cataloging
81 authority records deleted
6700 volumes in the TS inventory at the Annex in January 2006
18528 volumes in the TS inventory at its peak in February 1998
ORDER SERVICES:
Statistics:
Received and processed:
Serials/Periodicals: 2660
Approvals: 887
Added to Acorn:
SSO's: 36
Gifts: 144
OS placed 1310 new orders, and
Speed Cataloged 805 titles. Received 955 new requests.
Special Projects: Staff worked on their job descriptions; began
working on their performance
reviews; Monica Sanchez has been working closely
with John Mangrum in his training.
PRESERVATION:
Sue Davis uploaded PEM data and generated temperature/relative
humidity
reports for Special Collections and the Annex.
Sue provided a one-on-one introduction to preservation training session
for Barry Bennett, the new mailroom assistant.
She also consulted with a
Sue spent time updating the Introduction to Preservation Concepts
workshop and is almost ready to offer the class again very soon. If you are
interested in such a class, please contact Sue.
Binding:
552
monographs
7 rebinds
402
periodicals
43 serials
1004
volumes total
240 Acorn records updated as a result of binding
875 new
paperbacks sorted and 357 selected for immediate binding (41%).
Machelle Keen and Karen Pillow are still
experiencing some kinks in the LINCPlus software, and
Dale Poulter is working with the developer to fix
them. Meanwhile Machelle and Karen are able to use
the software for the majority of the materials going to the bindery.
Marking:
5181 volumes
224 RUSH
items
The Marking shelves now look emptier than they have in a couple of
months. Our labeling turnaround has
dropped back to our preferred one week timeframe.
Repair:
284 volumes were repaired with 405
treatments
A couple of wrapper box shipments arrived for staff to finish
processing the items. The time consuming
step of measuring each book for boxes actually took place in January, but the
items are only counted when all the processing steps have been completed. Staff also did quite a few spine and hinge
repairs.