Technical Services Monthly Report

Nov. 2006

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

TS staff, particularly on the CAT team, enjoyed the last days of the C client (at least those of us too stubborn to give it up a day earlier than necessary).

The SFX maintenance project team was reorganized into the 'SFX Management Group', an ongoing committee with operational responsibilities, which Janice Adlington is chairing, and which will report through Technical Services. Continuing members are Dale Poulter, Rick Stringer-Hye, Kitty Porter, Ann Ercelawn, and Rachel Vacek; Linda Tesar has joined the new group.

Yan-Xia Zhong added 67 records for Peabody thesis cards in November. Angel Bruner also continued work on thesis cards. Mary Charles Lasater caught up with reviewing thesis records created by Order Services and sent the shelf list cards back to Chris Benda.

Becky Atack spent some time training John Mangrum in Order Services on series-related issues. Monica Sanchez sat in on the training sessions.

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

The Preservation Team is looking forward to Alla Foliyev, our new hire, starting in December. Initially Alla will be mostly involved in binding and marking activities, but she will be trained in book repair as time allows.

Roberta Winjum attended the annual Charleston Conference on Book and Serial Acquisitions from Nov. 8-11 and did a presentation on how we use the MARCit! records.

Mary Charles Lasater and Janice Adlington attended the November 8-10 meeting with Ex Libris and the University of Minnesota regarding Primo developments.

Sue Davis is part of an ad hoc group formed by Paul Gherman to look at criteria for a second storage facility.

Janice Adlington and Ann Ercelawn participated in the Findit@VU session hosted by the SFX group, which many staff members attended.

Zora Breeding participated on the Central bibliographer search committee which hosted the first of our candidate interviews. Many staff attended the Central bibliographer candidate presentation.

Don Jones met with the Music cataloger search committee and conducted a couple of phone reference interviews.

Gina Berry and Molly Dahl attended Janet Thomason’s class on fire safety and the fire alarm systems in Central.

Ann Ercelawn and Roberta Winjum attended a lecture on Operation Homecoming.

Ann Ercelawn attended a demonstration on features of the LOCKSS project.

Some staff attended the Facebook webcast as well as two lunch-time web presentations sponsored by the Vanderbilt web-spiders group on "Usability-Driven Home Page Design".

All enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday, and we had a skeleton crew working on the Friday after.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

Jeff Taylor received and processed another new shipment of bound VU theses, as well as a flood of ETDs as the students rushed to turn them in for December graduation. Ann Barnette finished subject analysis on last month’s shipment of theses to make room for November’s.

Susan Bell completed metadata for the most recent submissions of the History Honors theses for the VU e-Archive.

Yuh-Fen Benda finished cataloging all the Japanese anime DVDs ordered for Professor Figal for Spring reserve. She was also busy getting information from vendors and meeting with Mary Beth Blalock, Yvonne Boyer and the Asian studies professors about yet more material she may need to order. Yuh-Fen has just realized that those great deals she makes for orders eventually result in huge piles of books needing cataloging.

Jean Wright processed a collection of titles that Amy Stewart-Mailhiot identified to send to Vanderbilt while she was still at the public library.

The team implemented a new Rush procedure where we use a distribution list to enlist volunteers to walk “Hand-Deliver” materials over to the other libraries and it has worked out very well and given more team members an opportunity to get outside.

Linda Davis took the last two weeks of the month off due to her daughter’s surgery (which went well). Gina Berry stepped in to handle the Maintenance tasks in her absence. A big thanks to Gina for helping out!

Molly Dahl added a script for Google Analytics to our Cataloging Manual in order to see how much traffic our website is getting, and what type of platforms they're using (Windows vs. Mac OS), etc. She reports that most of the traffic is from the team, but we are getting some visitors from Google. To date, our farthest visitor is from Leeds.

Ann Ercelawn did another test run of MARCit records for titles without ISSN for ExLibris.

Mary Charles Lasater worked with Science on how they treat their DVDs and reclassified some existing titles to LC.

Statistics:

2262 new titles cataloged by TS

1433 new titles cataloged by CAT

200 of which were original contributions or national level enhancements

184 titles recataloged

34 titles reconned

507 items withdrawn

4895 new or modified authority records delivered by Marcive

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

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

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

68 authority records deleted

6225 volumes in the TS inventory at the Annex on Dec. 1, 2006

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

E-RESOURCES:

With LITS's assistance, Janice Adlington has started a blog for announcing database trials.

http://weblog.library.vanderbilt.edu/etrials/. The blog is currently experimental, and linked from the Test Pilot site.

Janice has been exploring Endnote Web, a new web-based citation management product included in our Web of Knowledge subscription, with a view to promoting this service in the spring semester.

ORDER SERVICES:

Statistics:

Received and processed:

Serials/Periodicals: 2893

Approvals: 896

Added to Acorn:

SSO's: 86

Gifts: 108

OS placed 998 new orders, and Speed Cataloged 636 titles.

In addition to the more routine, a few items to report:

Angel Craddock reports that of the 24 requests for rush processing, 10 titles were immediately available for processing.

Overall, many of the verifiers report "saving moolah" by continuing to weed out duplicate requests prior to ordering, and helping as backup to their fellow team members where needed.

Monica and Linda Hand met with an internal auditor to review Order Services’ procurement card purchases.

PRESERVATION:

Binding:

614 monographs

22 rebinds

312 periodicals

54 Serials

1002 volumes total

Sheranda Lee has picked up her new responsibilities well, including sorting monographs for different kinds of binding.

Ann Carey updated 410 Acorn periodical records and reviewed 28 serial records as a result of binding.

Eric Fairfield, Vice President of the HF Group, sent us a sample of a newly developed book cloth that the binding industry hopes to substitute for the traditional F-grade buckram (the heavy cloth you see on bound periodicals and many monographs). The new cloth is thinner and easier to manipulate, but tests out as strong as the older buckram. The new cloth is made in only 10 colors, so choices will be fewer than the current range of color options. It would also be cheaper for the industry to use. If you are interested in looking at the sample cloth and a book bound with it, contact Sue Davis. While the bindery company is asking our opinion about the cloth, it seems likely that the company will switch unless too many customers object. They will continue to carry the older and heavier buckram, but will charge more for items bound with it.

Marking:

3690 volumes including

302 RUSH items

Ann Mallette was mostly on her own during November handling all levels of marking, including special projects. The marking shelves filled up quickly in November and the oldest materials are now about 2 weeks old.

Sue Davis and Ann Mallette tackled the newly arrived leased Leisure Reading core collection that Central wished to have security stripped.

Repair:

189 volumes were repaired with 292 treatments

Charlotte and Sue responded to a wet book alert from Special Collections after a collection shipped from New York arrived in soggy boxes. Fortunately, the really wet items were few and were still wet enough to salvage the coated paper from blocking into a solid mass. After drying and pressing, the items are in reasonably good condition.

Julie Loder gave Sue a one-on-one training session about the label designer feature in Java WorkFlows. It has many more features and flexibility than previous versions of Sirsi labeling programming.

Charlotte and Sue started investigating the bells and whistles of the new repair lab scanner/copier. A pilot project is a small volume belonging to Central.