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Administrative
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Technical Services |
2641 new titles cataloged by TS 1180 new titles cataloged by CAT 287 records were original contributions or national level enhancements 161 titles recataloged 60 titles reconned 277 items withdrawn 7117 new or modified authority records delivered by Marcive 212 local changes made to names on bib records outside of normal cataloging 24 local changes made to subjects on bib records outside of normal cataloging 182 local changes made to series on bib records outside of normal cataloging 67 authority records deleted 6049 volumes in the TS inventory at the Annex on January 1, 2008 18528 volumes in the TS inventory at its peak in February 1998
OS Received and processed: Serials/Periodicals: 2563 Approvals: 1085 Added to Acorn: SSO's: 152 Gifts: 297 Placed 1243 new orders Speed Cataloged 961 titles, Received 1010 new purchase requests to be ordered
Volumes Sent to the Bindery 1,162 monographs 124 rebinds 379 periodicals 41 serials 1,706 Total Marking 4,404 labeled 389 Rush labeled Repair 504 volumes 651 treatments
The week of the Oracle migration challenged Technical Services to find alternative ways to do its work. A couple of the catalogers used Smartport for the first time or at least used it more extensively than in the past, so the migration provided a good learning experience. Acorn down time created some additional challenges to the Preservation team because both the LincPlus binding software and web-based spine labeling software which are linked to the Acorn server rolled over and died. Because the down time stretched out longer than expected, Sue Davis, with the assistance of Alla Foliyev and Ann Mallette, consulted with Julie Loder, LITS, to find an alternative spine labeling workaround within WorkFlows. By the end of the adventure, a limited stop gap procedure was identified and has now been posted on our web pages. Dale Poulter eventually tracked down the problems with LincPlus and the web-based spine labeling program, so all is back on track once again. The Oracle migration caused some problems with how or whether cross references display in Acorn. LITS will have to rebuild the authority thesaurus for this problem to be resolved. The first attempt to rebuild failed.
Roberta continued in her role as chair of the Electronic Resources Management System (ERMS) Evaluation Project Team, which has been reviewing ERMS proposals received at the end of Dec. A recommendation will be going to the Strategy and Planning Council early in Feb.
Roberta led the Electronic Resources Librarian search committee in Jan. to the successful recruitment of Julie Loder for the position. Julie will begin her new job on Mar. 1, 2008. Ann Ercelawn served on this search committee.
TS staff attended presentations of the remaining candidates for a Systems Librarian in LITS and the final e-resources candidate.
Mary Ellen Wilson continues service on the Grand Jury, generally keeping her out of the office on all but Wednesdays and Thursdays through the middle of March.
January was a busy month with lots of new material arriving from Order Services. As with the beginning of every new semester, there were many rush materials needed for Spring classes.
Zora Breeding, Molly Dahl and Yuh-Fen Benda had their Connexion client upgraded to 2.10 to test for problems or training needs. They found that the new client was only slightly different from the older versions and easy to use. No training will be necessary. The major difference is the ability to see Institutional Records, which are copies of records variously edited by former RLIN institutions. Everyone else using Connexion must upgrade by April 1st.
Cataloging-related activities:
The Walker Management Library received many boxes full of books by Peter Drucker in every language into which his work has been translated. Pete Wilson is cataloging this collection with help from Yuh-Fen Benda for the books in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (many!). The Korean has particularly challenged Yuh-Fen as she does not know this language and has had to learn to transliterate Korean which has very different rules. She also discovered that not all Koreans know these rules either. Zora Breeding helped catalog a few Drucker books in German and Russian.
Jeff Taylor processed another large group of electronic dissertations and Ann Barnette added subject headings to several print and electronic theses.
Ann Ercelawn completed the project to catalog the History of Women periodical titles on microfilm.
Pete Wilson began cataloging a large group of periodicals and serials donated by Pete Riley and Stanley Horn for Special Collections.
Gina Berry and Linda Davis worked more on the never-ending holdings project.
Jeff Taylor cataloged more CDs for Music and reclassified some Peabody videos.
Yuh-Fen Benda, Zora Breeding and Molly Dahl were besieged by rush videos for Spring semester classes. Yuh-Fen’s new Chinese professor is teaching a film studies course on Kung Fu and required many special orders. Molly had videos dealing with tango, or Carlos Gardel. Zora just had the usual stuff for the regular film studies fund, including a set of films about flamenco.
Jean Wright completed as much work as possible pending collection decisions on the coverage all of the holdings in the SuDocs LC classification. She then began work on publications in Y 3.T25:2 … for the TVA. She is finding inconsistencies in hard copy vs. fiche formats and locations/items. She has also found many records that were supplied for material that we either did not receive or have withdrawn or weeded.
Zora created a document LC call number formatting in Acorn to assist the Preservation team in its labeling activities. It's posted at: http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/rs/techserv/CAT/LCcallnumbers.htm
Authorities-related activities:
During the period of the Oracle migration, Mary Charles Lasater was able to review lots of NACO records for Steven Nordstrom and various Tennessee NACO funnel members.
Ann Ercelawn reviewed the unauthorized headings list for subjects on SFX records and made a number of edits on OCLC to correct the records at the national level. She also corresponded with OCLC and LC about why obsolete subject headings are not being corrected.
Denise Chavez worked on correcting more film genre headings and adding death dates to NACO records.
Zora Breeding sent in a load request form for about 60,000 records for the Making of the Modern World electronic resource. She, Nancy Boggess and Mary Charles Lasater will coordinate the loading of these records beginning in mid February.
Ann Ercelawn responded to a number of SFX problem inquiries from patrons, activated SFX titles and made corrections to the KnowledgeBase.
Pete Wilson did some preliminary work on the metadata plan for the Robert Penn Warren tapes.
Ann Ercelawn participated in discussions about choosing an ERMS, which included contacting libraries using the 2 systems under consideration.
Zora met with Mary Beth Blalock (on her last day) to receive some archival copies of electronic resources that need to be added to Acorn and sent to the Annex. Most of these are in the form of CDroms, although we also have the content of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online product on Super DLTtape.
Zora Breeding assembled a Podcast Group to work on the metadata for the podcasts of the VU News Service that Special Collections will submit to the VU e-Archive. Group members will be: Zora, Pete Wilson, Molly Dahl, Ann Ercelawn, Jeff Taylor and Yan-Zia Zhong.
Roberta Winjum accompanied Paul Gherman and Bill Hook on a visit to the Ingram Digital Products plant in Lavergne, including a tour their state-of -the-art print on demand facilities. Discussions about possible partnerships between Ingram, Microsoft and ASERL for a digitization project are in the very preliminary stages. Ingram is also one of many vendors of e-books and has a number of products related to the MyiLibrary e-book platform that they would like us to consider.
Mary Ellen worked with Keith Cribbs in Disbursement Services to identify Order Services’ workflow regarding invoice payment for their records and procedures.
Order Services team members who work with the group mailboxes prepared for their migration to Outlook mail. Several on the team also worked directly with LITS (particularly Dale Poulter) to identify some of the areas where we are experiencing slowness in Acorn, and have since seen some improvement.
Mary Ellen completed a Disaster Preparedness notebook for TS/Baker.
The Swets, Harrassowitz, and Ebsco renewal invoices were loaded into Acorn.
Overall, incoming order requests have been light, and all materials and orders are up to date.
January was a very full and busy month for the Preservation team. With holiday vacations behind them, Pres staff tackled stuffed marking shelves, a burgeoning binding backlog, and 2 wrapper box orders in the repair lab.
BINDING:
The team sent three shipments to the HF Bindery in VA. There will be a surge of periodicals from the Science Library for the next month or two before those numbers settle back down again. Monographs seem to be holding steady. As are music scores, which present the most complex binding challenges for both the Pres staff and the bindery. Alla rebarcoded 197 monographs in preparation for rebinding.
At the end of June, 2008, the current binding contract will expire. Sue is beginning an intensive review process. HF Bindery has sent a tentative price list for the next fiscal year, but the numbers have yet to be finalized along with a contract. The Pres Team met with a representative from Bridgeport National Bindery, a possible competitor for HF Bindery. While it does not appear that this Massachusetts bindery offers a better product, service, or price than our current vendor, it was a useful meeting.
Sue shared potential bindery cost increase estimates with the Collection Committee.
Sue met with Mary Beth Blalock to discuss the returned samples of new binding method options for Chinese materials. Since the Chinese language doesn't transliterate to English in a useful way for Chinese readers, the spine information needs to be retained during the binding process (or Charlotte must hand create titles in Chinese characters.). The bindery has developed a couple of new twists to two existing binding methods to answer this unique need. Mary Beth selected her preferred approach, which uses the Copicover method, but adds glued-in cover flaps. There is an additional cost per volume, but cover information is more completely saved during the binding process.MARKING:
There was an atypical distribution of RUSH requests in January. While Central was the largest recipient with 215, Management. came second with 74 because of a special exhibit of materials by author Peter Drucker. Divinity rounded out the top three with 52.
The marking shelves filled up to the brim over the holidays, but the backlog was firmly back under control by month's end. Special Collections' Archives Annex move preparatory work will involve Pres labeling staff. Special Collections would like Pres to generate spine labels for wrapper boxes produced earlier when the policy was to leave the boxes blank. We don't yet have a count of how many items will need labels or other project details.
REPAIR:
Charlotte Lew reports that with the 2 most recent wrapper box shipments, the backlog in the lab has significantly diminished. The bulk of the month's work focused on Divinity materials, including a special clamshell box hand constructed by Charlotte.
Sue reports completion of the annual ARL preservation statistics questionnaire.
Sue created a faculty delivery/RUSH request document and shared it with Cataloging as well as the Pres team.
Roberta attended the American Library Association midwinter meeting in Philadelphia. She currently chairs the Heads of Technical Services of Medium-Sized Research Libraries Discussion Group and serves on the Swets Customer Advisory Board and Coutts Oasis Advisory Board. She also did a presentation on “The Academic Library Perspective: Copy Cataloging in Light of the LC Working Group Recommendations” to the ALCTS CCS Copy Cataloging Discussion Group. In addition, she attended the Taiga Conference (AUL’s from around the country) held the day before ALA.
Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater and Molly Dahl attended the ALA Midwinter conference in Philadelphia. At ALA, Mary Charles Lasater, in her role as chair of ALCTS Cataloging and Classification Section, hosted a Forum on the Report of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control which was very well attended and successful. Molly Dahl began her internship on the ALCTS Subject Analysis Committee and found it quite exciting.
Mary Ellen Wilson, Chris Waldrop, Bryan Kurowski, Bill Hook, and Roberta met to discuss procedures related to our “big deal” electronic resource packages, and clarify who is responsible for what.
Mary Charles began preparations for conducting a week of NACO training in Missouri in early February. She is reviewing many recent changes in NACO rules and plans to offer an update on NACO training for local NACO participants on February 18 and 19.
TechForce met three times in January.
Charlotte met with Special Collections to begin a boxing project related to the eventual move to the renovated Archives Annex.
Cataloging team members attended a team meeting.
The Preservation team attended a team meeting.
Sue attended a typical set of monthly meetings including USAC, T & TSC, andCollections Committee.
Sue gave a tour of the Preservation work areas to Amy Dumouchel just a few days before Amy departed for her new job in PA.
Sue and Charlotte consulted with Robert Rich about some tricky music score preservation questions.
Sue provided advice to a university staff member who is preserving old print family documents.
Mary Charles Lasater, Zora Breeding and Pete Wilson attended a Metadata Committee meeting.
Ann Ercelawn attended a meeting of the SFX group. ERMS group meetings, and a Staff Development Committee meeting..
Molly Dahl attended a meeting about the launch of Primo.
Becky Atack attended the University Advisory Staff Council meeting and reviewed several Hardship Fund applications by email.
Susan Bell attended a presentation hosted by Peabody called Mystique behind the seal: unlocking the mysteries of the Newbery and Geisel awards.
Chris Waldrop and Mary Ellen met with Roberta, Bill Hook, and Bryan Kurowski to discuss the Science Direct invoice.