Technical Services Monthly Report
Oct. 2006
DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:
The
Cataloging Documentation and Training Task Force (Don Jones, Becky Atack, Pete Wilson, Alice Cunningham with special assistance from Molly Dahl) officially completed their charge with the posting
of the Cataloging Manual on the TS web page.
John Haar, Mary Ellen Wilson, Chris
Waldrop, and Janice Adlington met to "create an
action plan
addressing concerns about ejournal
subscriptions" raised by the Collections Committee. This will be discussed in the December
meeting.
Janice Adlington has posted a revised
PowerPoint presentation and the comments to the G:\Everyone\LibQual directory,
in response to a request from the Central library. The LibQual
normative data for the ARL libraries will be available in December, and the LibQual Project Team has been asked to present a staff
brown bag early in the spring semester.
Zora
Breeding and Roberta Winjum met with the LITS Acorn
group to discuss the problems with shelflisting (reviewing
existing call numbers in order to classify a new item correctly) in the Java
client. Order Services also worked with LITS throughout the
month to fix some of the remaining problems with the client, such as diacritics
and display issues in SmartPort.
Tech Services
teams participated in our second annual Feng Shui Day, a time we set aside for improving our chi by
cleaning up accumulated e-mail and papers and organizing other chaotic areas of
our workspace. It really helps.
PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:
Many enjoyed
the Library Service Awards ceremony. Staff
Service Awards Honorees for the year included: Karen Pillow, 30 years, Ann
Ercelawn and Monica Sanchez, 20 years, Ibtisam
Latif and Debbie Williams, 15 years, and Angel Craddock,
5 years. We also
congratulate Yuh-Fen Benda
for winning an Innovation and Creativity Award for her work with the Asian
Studies materials. We are very proud
of her!
Janice Adlington and Roberta Winjum attended the LITA Forum held in
Ann Ercelawn was asked by the ExLibris
MARCit folks to join a focus group, and spent time
testing their matching algorithm for non-ISSN titles.
Yuh-Fen Benda took a trip to
Susan Bell
and Don Jones attended the Peabody Faculty Authors Book Party and Reception.
Some staff
attended the Coffee and Donuts meeting with Paul Gherman.
Several attended the Owen Open House, the Divinity Open House and
Vanderbilt’s Meet the Candidates session.
At the end of the month, Alice
Cunningham helped to plan and organize a Technical
Services Halloween costume party. Angel Craddock assembled a slide show that
may be viewed by going to: <http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/rs/techserv/Shared/justforfun.html> and clicking on Tech Services Halloween 2006.
Sue has also been absent significant chunks of time due to an ongoing
family medical crisis.
CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:
Linda Davis
reports that she had more than the usual amount of withdrawals, particularly
for Science and Peabody. Jeff Taylor cataloged
bunches of Music CDs. Yuh-Fen Benda feverishly ordered
some 30+ anime DVDs for spring reserve.
Gina Berry plowed through labeling problems and started training to be
the back-up for Linda Davis’s Maintenance duties. Denise Chavez placed her first supply order
for the team.
Susan Bell
finished the metadata on several additional History Department Honors Theses
being added to the VU e-Archive. Pete
Wilson cataloged a few additional podcasts for
Special Collections. Mary Charles Lasater, with a little help from Zora
Breeding, cataloged the new titles in the Gale Virtual Reference electronic
database.
Jean Wright
continued the valiant effort she, Amy Stewart-Mailhiot
and Peg Earheart are making to get all the
Jeff Taylor
processed new bound
Ann Ercelawn successfully lobbied MARCIVE to develop a new
series report for Vanderbilt and spent some time reviewing the reports.
At the end of
the month, we reassigned Yuh-Fen’s remaining Rush
responsibilities. We agreed to set up a
new distribution list for the team members who are volunteers to hand deliver
Rush requests to the libraries, eliminating the need for someone to act as
dispatcher. Becky agreed to take back
responsibility for finding material that has been cataloged but can’t be
located in the Marking area.
Statistics:
2449 new
titles cataloged by TS
1429 new
titles cataloged by CAT
198 of which
were original contributions or national level enhancements
191 titles recataloged
23 titles reconned
595 items withdrawn.
5784 new or
modified authority records delivered by Marcive
314 local
changes made to names on bib records outside of normal cataloging
67 local
changes made to subjects on bib records outside of normal cataloging
61 local
changes made to series on bib records outside of normal cataloging
36 authority
records deleted
E-RESOURCES:
Janice Adlington participated in a Serials
Solutions/Sirsi conference call and a Serials Solutions
ERM public webinar.
Received and processed:
2886 Serials/Periodicals
1059 Approvals
Added to Acorn:
131 SSO's
45 gifts
1200 new orders placed
1026 titles speed cataloged
807 requests received
Yan Xia Zhong continued to work on the
Linda Hand and Monica Sanchez
report that they have been ordering large numbers of rush orders for the
libraries online.
Angel Craddock continues to
work on the Rush mailboxes and other rush materials. In addition to her routine
duties and problem solving, Angel was also called upon as our Tech Support
Coordinator to help team members throughout the month with their
computers. Angel also worked on
Mary Ellen observed a demo of
Blackwell's Echo product, an e-book platform that is a joint venture with ebrary. For more information, see http://www.blackwell.com/library_services/ecommons/ECHO/
Monica Sanchez and Mary Ellen
met with the Science bibliographers to answer questions regarding Collection
Manager; CM now has a new functionality that allows bibliographers to create
Lists that may be shared with others, including Order Services, for ease of
ordering. This function was demonstrated, and we have begun to receive orders
using these lists. (Please contact Mary Ellen if you have any questions, or would
like a demonstration.)
OS received the first books and
first batch of records for the new Italian approval plan. The records have been loaded into Acorn, and
the books are being processed.
The Preservation Team was still down one position and Daphne has
not yet returned from her leave, yet the production numbers are much higher
than usual. Everyone has been working
well and pulling hard together. Ann
Carey has been a godsend in both binding/marking and book repair; she is
quickly learning the ropes in both places. Sheranda Lee
has worked hard to learn her new job as quickly as she can; Karen Pillow has
spent a lot of time training Sheranda; Ann Mallette has valiantly held down the fort in marking and
kept us supplied with chocolate; and
Everyone is continuing to learn the ins and outs of the Acorn Java
Client.
Binding:
1402 monographs
29 rebinds
759 periodicals
119 serials
2310 volumes total
300 periodical and serial Acorn records updated as a result of
binding.
The team also tackled receiving some volumes that had been
returned earlier, but not yet processed back into the collection. The team also had to deal with a few
persistent bindery service problems-- chronic trimming off of cover flaps that
contain important information, attaching covers to wrong text blocks, and
pickup and delivery mistakes. We hope
the bindery can remove these blemishes from their usually good service record.
Marking:
3834 volumes, including
267 RUSH items
The marking shelves generally stayed within their 1 week
turnaround time even though the rate of receipt is back up and Science
requested a special labeling project for items heading to the Annex.
Repair:
273 volumes were repaired
with 387 treatments
A big wrapper box order and major inroads in the spine repair
backlog produced fat numbers for the lab.