Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

April 2000

STAFFING
Effective the end of April 2000, Sylvia Martin retired from the Vanderbilt University Library. She will be missed. A search is underway for a new Coordinator of Technical Services. At the end of the month, Jamie Nichol (VTS) left the Baker Mailroom to pursue other interests; Quincy Fitzgerald from VTS is now working in the mailroom until we can hire a more permanent replacement for this position. Debbie Williams turned in her resignation to pursue employment with the Metro Police Department. Anne Laws began her new position on the Acorn support group within LTT.

RS STAFFING, MEETINGS AND ACTIVITIES
All RS staff participated in the Cost Study project and most were able to attend the retirement reception in Sylvia Martin's honor. Those RS staff who serve on various standing library committees continued their participation. Ann Ercelawn conducted a preconference workshop on serials cataloging at the Alabama Library Association meeting. A special section on trends in cataloging that Ann co-edited appeared in the latest issue of Library Collections, Acquisitions and Technical Services. Rich Murray attended a one day Fred Pryor seminar in Nashville entitled "How to Manage Multiple Projects & Meet Deadlines." Rich was also inducted into Beta Phi Mu on April 25. Don Jones and Marilyn Henry attended meetings related to the Faculty Staff Campaign. Sue Davis has been recalled to serve on the Staff/Faculty Hardship Fund Committee during the absence of a regular member. Anne Laws, Suellen Stringer-Hye, and Jody Combs prepared for the upcoming Library Staff Forum. Marshall Breeding's article, "Consolidation and Convergence: Elsevier Science Acquires Endeavor Information Systems" appeared in the May 2000 issue of Information Today, along with his bi-monthly Systems Librarian column on the topic "The Battle for bandwidth."

PROCUREMENT CARD
As the Library began its participation in the University's trial of the Procurement Card, Pat Johnson, Flo Wilson, Marilyn Henry, Rita Breen, Mary Ellen Wilson, Judy Carter and Marshall Breeding received training on procedures and practices. Mary Ellen, Pat, and Marilyn are making good progress on identifying procedures for use in purchasing library materials with the procurement card so that we can ensure that they get properly added to BFAS and ACORN. Purchasing has been helpful in suggesting additional capabilities that will allow us to track necessary information.

ANNEX
Massive collection transfers continued from Law (SuDocs collection); more modest though substantial transfers came from Special Collections (manuscripts), Education (Dewey vault materials being transferred to Special Collections, Library Science materials), Music (reference, working copies, etc. in preparation for construction), Government Information (additional runs of the Serial Set), Pia serials, both new and retrospective Vanderbilt theses, and miscellaneous individual gifts. Several moving companies as well as the Library messengers are involved in these projects. Locations changes on ACORN for all these materials are in progress. In all, 849 linear feet of new transfers were received.

578 items circulated, a 55% decrease from April of 1999. 32 ILL patron requested articles photocopied, involving 359 pages. 147 of our patrons requested their Annex retrievals via the Web. 19 visitors were on site.

The boxed Helguera Collection continues to be sent from Annex storage, to the Cataloging staff at a rate of 2 boxes, minimum, per week. When cataloged, they return to the Annex stacks. It is interesting to note the gamut of LC classifications of the Helguera materials, which on one sample day included A, B, BX, F, H, J, K, L, P, Q, and VK. We have already had requests for circulation of holdings from these new additions.

RS Maintenance staff are "out of the business" of manually updating OCLC records for materials just cataloged, now that this is being done through a more automated process. Regular maintenance activity included 3,565 Acorn record edits, 3 reinstatements, 434 withdrawals, 1 title reconned, 7 titles reclassed and 46 intra-library transfers. 5 ILL requests for RS Inventory books were received, and these will be cataloged upon return to Vanderbilt.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES
The flow of materials from Baker was slow for LC and PCC materials, but steady for materials needing cataloger attention. The team began using the new offline updating service from OCLC on about April 4.

Jeff Taylor and Aurel Ionica completed work on the latest batch of 800 ProQuest database changes. Rich Murray, Norma Riddick, Pete Wilson, Denise Chavez, and Ann Barnette continue to process the Helguera gift collection and are proceeding ahead of schedule, having processed over 300 titles in April. Ann Ercelawn worked on a set of AIP journals. Pete continued cataloging the Vanderbilt publications for Special Collections. Jeff worked through the latest broken links report. He also added another 80 links to National Academy Press titles which are newly available online. Jean Wright reports that recon is progressing on the last drawer of the Dewey shelf list of pre-1972 U.S. documents. She is beginning to plan the "mop up" operation.

In authorities news, Mary Charles Lasater reports that she worked on subfield v coding changes in preparation for LTT to send authority records for Nov.-Jan. back through adutext to re-establish links with bib records that were broken due to policy changes at this time. She also worked on changing our local 'discipline plus theses' subject headings from 690s to 655s. This will make these headings (ex. Biology--Theses) browse-able in the Genre Index -- they had been available only through keyword since the policy changes needed for loading MeSH were made. Mary Charles also reports that our vendor authority update tripled in April. Her subsequent inquiries to LC indicated that OCLC is doing a machine conversion project to update indicator values on authority records. Zora, Pete and Rich met with Paula Covington and Mary Ellen Wilson, Monica Sanchez and Paul van Cotthem to discuss our participation in the PLAC Latin American cooperative cataloging project. Zora met with members of LTT, Mary Ellen and Linda Manning and Barbara Clarke to discuss the next steps in integrating the Women's Center holdings into Acorn. Zora also met with Flo Wilson, Mary Ellen and Shirley Watts concerning ordering and processing Music materials as Shirley plans her retirement. .

ORDER SERVICES
Orders: Requests are picking up - Requests awaiting processing are from within the month of April, mainly within the last two weeks, with the exception of a few orders in Latin American studies dated the end of March. We continue to place as many of these orders as practical on GOBI and Collection Manager.

Receiving: Receivers are currently working on firm ordered materials received within the last 2 1/2 weeks. Serials are being processed within a week to week and a half of their receipt at Baker, Periodicals within 48-72 hours.

This month, Mary Ellen contacted OCLC via Solinet to modify our PromptCat profiles to include all encoding levels and additional cataloging sources. As we discontinued the shelf-ready service from Blackwell, all materials that had previously been shipped shelf-ready directly to the libraries should now be being shipped once again to Baker.

PRESERVATION
April can best be described as hectic. The numbers don't really reflect higher totals than usual, but we certainly feel that way as new procedures were developed and adapted..

Binding: Central's decision to not bind upon receipt has already had a big impact on our binding statistics. By way of comparison, we sent 1,424 new monographs to the bindery in March. In April the number dropped to 877. Periodicals totaled 362 volumes for April. We also sent 69 serials and 22 monograph rebinds for a grand total of 1,330 items. Even though it isn't quite summer yet, we are already seeing more quality control binding problems. Machelle edited 121 Central periodicals records to reflect binding activity.

We began to encumber binding funds and pay binding invoices on Acorn. Not all funds are straightened out yet and we are in a learning curve, but the process seems to be working and hopefully will benefit the libraries.

Book Repair: Several hundred older, fragile, and sometimes very dirty Law Library volumes were shipped to the repair lab to be measured for boxes. As part of its large shift to Annex storage, the Law Library is boxing its rarer materials. The lab is also in the midst of a major enclosure project for Special Collections. Meanwhile, general circulating materials are coming from Central, too. Unfortunately, our student assistant left early for final exams. For the month, we repaired 217 volumes with 282 treatments. It looks like summer will be a busy one all around. The biosafety cabinet passed its annual recertification test and is ready for another year of moldy oldies.

Marking: Marking has picked up significantly with Central's binding policy change. The total number of volumes labeled amounted to 3,930. We also labeled 121 RUSH items, 272 unbound serials, and stamped 402 microfiche envelopes for Government Information.

LIBRARY TECHNOLOGY

A total of 231 problems were resolved.

2 May 2000

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