Technical Services Monthly Report

 May 2006

 

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

 

Tech Services continues to monitor the library community’s response to LC’s decision to discontinue series tracing and series authority work. The Metadata Committee has established a Series Processing Project Team to make recommendations for the library’s handling of series for the long term. For the short term, the TechForce has put in place some workarounds that will enable us to continue past series practice, more or less, while we decide what course of action to take. We hope that some discussion at ALA will help to reach a resolution within the library community and help us make our internal decisions. Once the Series Processing Project Team has made its recommendations, it will be up to TechForce to determine procedures.

 

Chris Waldrop reports that the project team charged with organizing training in the new Workflows Java Client (of which Chris is the chair) has begun meeting. Machelle Keen also serves on this team. The present plan is to begin training on Monday, July 17th, in the GLB Electronic Classroom. Team members are currently contacting representatives in different departments and outlining the training needs.

 

In further preparation for the migration to the Java Client, several staff participated in a teleconference Round Table with other WorkFlows Java client testers and Sirsi representatives. Order Services continues to help test upgrades of WorkFlows Java, and the Preservation Team has discussed how they use WorkFlows and what authorizations and training they will need with the new SIRSI Java client.

 

May saw the beginning of Divinity's renovation directly under the feet of Binding/Marking staff.  The first couple of weeks were quite noisy.

 

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

 

Two interviews were held for the E-Resources Librarian position, Janice Adlington and Sarah Brechner. The Search Committee includes Mary Ellen Wilson, Mary Beth Blalock, Julie Loder, Rick Stringer-Hye, Lisa Shipman, and Roberta Winjum, chair. Many staff members attended the presentations of the candidates

 

Mary Charles Lasater and Roberta Winjum attended both full day sessions of the ExLibris Primo meetings. Several others attended portions of the two day meeting.

 

Monica Sanchez and Mary Ellen Wilson attended the monthly Science Library bibliographers' meeting, to demonstrate how bibliographers may create Requests and set up reports in Blackwell's Collection Manager.

 

Mary Charles Lasater attended a two day ALCTS Metadata Standards & Applications workshop in Chicago.

 

Ann Ercelawn attended the NASIG's annual meeting in Denver.

 

Mary Charles Lasater conducted an all day NACO workshop on corporate body headings for Molly Dahl and 5 Tennessee Funnel participants.

 

Sue Davis taught an Introduction to Preservation Workshop on May 11 followed by a tour of the repair lab where Charlotte Lew showed her wares.

 

Keith Curd, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum assisted with Senior Day.

 

Some were able to attend David Ruddy's presentation on Cornell's DPubS project.

 

Several staff attended the coffee and donuts meeting with Paul Gherman. Many of us attended the Meet and Greet with Tracy Primich as well as her brown bag on the Ford Motor Company Library.       Some attended the Divinity Library Coffee Hours and the GLB staff reception hosted by retired professors.

 

At month's end Charlotte Lew left on an extended trip home to Taiwan (she returns June 20) and Daphne Walker began her summer hiatus (she returns Sept. 6).  Jean Wright’s absence continued.

 

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

 

Jeff Taylor received and processed the print VU theses.  Due to the increased amount of theses submitted electronically, the print shipment was about half the normal year-end size.  Additionally, Jeff processed a small number of Peabody theses.  Ann Barnette finished subject analysis of the last batch of electronic theses.

 

Susan Bell finished editing the VU e-Archive metadata on the History department's Honor theses. She and Roberta Winjum appreciated a very complimentary thank-you from Heidi Welch in the History Department.

 

Yuh Fen Benda worked on cataloging the set of 130 Chinese language volumes of Zhongguo fo si zhi cong kan.  She found that the analytic records for our new edition were only available on RLIN and spent some time on the phone with RLIN support in order to download the client and learn to export records from RLIN (we only use OCLC normally).  We appreciate Yuh-Fen’s willingness to go the extra mile to meet the professors’ needs! 

 

LITS finished loading the 18th Century Collections Online records (all 130,000 of them). Nancy Boggess-Korekach joined the Cataloging and Authorities team helping with the review of the unauthorized headings lists.

 

Zora Breeding ordered bibliographic records from OCLC for the Lecture notes in Computer Science titles published since our cancellation of the print in 2004.  She also added URL’s to print records for older Lecture Notes titles and showed Gina Berry how to continue this URL project.

 

Landmarks of Science records were loaded and Denise Chavez checked a page of unauthorized headings from that load.

 

Yuh Fen Benda continued the project to reclassify the Dewey books in the Peabody Youth collection.

 

The Metadata Journal Club read and discussed the report Karen Calhoun wrote for LC and the rebuttal by Thomas Mann.

Karen Calhoun's report: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf

Thomas Mann's review: http://guild2910.org/AFSCMECalhounReviewREV.pdf

 

Statistics:

2628 new titles cataloged by TS 

1675 new titles cataloged by CAT, 283 of which were original contributions or national level enhancements

407 titles recataloged

1 titles reconned

269 items withdrawn

 

11434 new or modified authority records delivered by Marcive

748 local changes made to names on bib records outside of normal cataloging

394 local changes made to subjects on bib records outside of normal cataloging

70 local changes made to series on bib records outside of normal cataloging

37 authority records deleted 

 

6427 volumes in the TS inventory at the Annex as of April 1, 2006

18528 volumes in the TS inventory at its peak in February 1998

 

ORDER SERVICES:

 

Statistics:

Received and processed:

Serials/Periodicals:   2914

Approvals:  845

 

Added to Acorn:

SSO's:  100

Gifts:  49

 

OS received 3728* purchase requests, placed 2767 new orders, and Speed Cataloged 908 titles.

(*this number represents approximately 31% of the this year's total requests so far)

 

Special Projects: Monica Sanchez and Mary Ellen Wilson met with the Verifier/Receivers to review all current subject and task assignments; some responsibilities were shifted to realign subject areas for better coverage.  Firm order receiving was also distributed to better take advantage of such factors as language and subject familiarity.  Current subject responsibilities of OS verifiers may be found at:

<http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/rs/techserv/OrderServices/verliaisons.html>

 

Visitors: Michael Walmsley and Steven Sutton called on Vanderbilt from YBP, and gave a demonstration of GOBI for bibliographers.

 

PRESERVATION:

 

The new freezer was used for the first time to (hopefully) exterminate any remaining insects in three art books from Cuba.  A small bug ran out of one book while the items were in Order

Services, so a good round of freezing was deemed necessary.  No other bugs were discovered.

 

Machelle Keen trained both Amy Stewart-Mailhiot and Teri Bante in the fine art of binding Government Information publications.

 

As a result of Peabody wanting to preservation photocopy several older and previously water damaged theses, Machelle Keen and Sue Davis developed a new procedure to process these materials through the bindery.  The procedure seems to be generally working well thanks to Machelle's efforts.

 

There were some interesting labeling snags with Pascal Pia collection items that should have been Baudelaire, but were sent to the repair lab for boxes by Special Collections. 

 

Charlotte Lew and Sue Davis tackled a unique housing question for a volume with a large outside tassel. After multiple discussions and sketching out possibilities, they created a portfolio design not tried before.  The tassel is protected in a small cylinder of Tyvek.

 

Linda Davis came to our rescue by helping to rebarcode our rebind monograph backlog to prepare them for binding.  A big thank you goes to Linda.

 

Binding:

615 monographs

33 rebinds

695 periodicals

36 serials

1379 volumes total

966 new Central paperbacks sorted and 398 selected for immediate binding (41%). 

216 records Acorn periodical/serial records updated as a result of binding..

 

Marking:

4539 volumes

250 RUSH items

The regular labeling turn around is within the team goal of one week.

 

Repair:

 272 volumes were repaired with 398 treatments.