Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

April 2001

Technical Services Monthly Report
Library Information Technology Services Monthly Report

Technical Services

Division Wide Activities:

Technical Services Teams made plans for the materials received and processed while the Music Library is closed this summer, May 5-August 10th. During this time, newly received periodical issues will be held in Order Services. Compact discs will continue to be cataloged and sent to the Music Library in its temporary location. Any other cataloged materials that would have normally been sent to the Music Library will be boxed and sent to the Library Annex instead. Music Library staff will regularly visit the Annex to unpack, sort, and arrange materials in the 1st floor Alcove.

The Sigaux project is on schedule. We anticipate a June completion. Linda Davis continues to find Sigaux added volumes at Central and Sigaux periodicals that have no holdings records on Acorn. Clint Grantham also worked on 8 boxes of Sigaux duplicate materials, of which he says 95% are indeed duplicates. The Annex needs to empty the entire range now occupied by Sigaux and Pia duplicates to create space for additional Central stacks materials to be transferred this summer. Don Jones and Ann Ercelawn worked on some continuing Sigaux problems. Some duplicate records were found. Also, some of the records created by Techpro for Sigaux titles are missing but investigations at our end to locate these records have so far been unsuccessful.

The Acorn/PeopleSoft Interface Project Team entered its testing phase during April. Yuh-Fen Benda continued to work with Roberta Winjum to convert and post documents related to the project on the web. Following much testing and tweaking of extraction and check number backfeed programs, a successful Day One Simulation Test on Apr. 26-27 led to an Executive Sponsors’ decision on Apr. 30 to approve the planned implementation date of May 3. In preparation for the change, Order Services staff has participated in training for new procedures this month, and some members have spent time in helping to test the new interface. Changes in authorizations to Acorn Acquisitions functions were implemented the week of April 21 to satisfy Internal Audit requirements. The final BFAS check run will be May 2, and the first PeopleSoft checks will be generated for May 4 mailing, and daily thereafter. We expect that all procedures are now in place and that payments will continue unabated.

Mary Charles Lasater continued to test Unicorn 2000 and Zora Breeding was also finally able to install the test version and begin some preliminary testing. Neither reports any surprises.

Personnel:

Rich Murray, Pete Wilson, Sue Davis, and Peg Earheart attended the lunch with Professor Helguera on the completion of processing his gift collection. They, along with Paul Gherman, John Haar, Paula Covington, and Julie Loder represented a subset of the many people who worked on some aspect of the complex project of acquiring, inventorying, cleaning, preserving, cataloging, labeling, and storing the collection donated by Professor Helguera.

Don Jones met with fellow Faculty Staff Campaign representatives in order to get the year’s efforts under way.

Mary Charles worked on preparing a presentation on using a vendor for authority control support for the upcoming UUGI conference.

Charlotte Lew and Sue Davis presented a program on book repair at the TLA annual conference in downtown Nashville. Machelle Keen and Roberta Winjum attended the conference.

The Preservation Team received Karen Coles' resignation due to her impending motherhood. We are sad to see her leave, but wish her well.

Annex:

Special Projects:

The massive incorporation of March 2001 Science serials continued throughout April with Leonor Van Cotthem and Joe Collins creating call records and dividing and shifting Z stacks to inter-shelve indexes and serials. The hope is to finish this Science project before the Observatory titles are transferred.

Clint Grantham specialized in queued Government Information transfers, which will require all summer to complete. Clint also worked on the massive Education withdrawal project with Lee Ann Lannom.

The Robinson Collection gifts that Special Collections did not select for their own holdings are awaiting decisions by Music, Divinity, and Central bibliographers. Dennis Clark will identify some as future gifts for the Music Library. John Haar will make arrangements for viewing by other selectors.

Peg Earheart met with Dennis Clark, Jason Feszco, Ted Gaddy, Daniel Kelly, Floyd Kendall, Terry Haley, and Al Stewart during April, and hosted one Annex tour and orientation on April 30th.

Circulation:

795 items circulated to Central, Divinity, Education, Government Information, Law, Management, Music, Pascal Pia, RS Cataloging, Science, Sigaux Dossier Collection, and Special Collections (Vcolls and archive boxes). This included books, boxes, videos, long-playing record albums, ERIC microfiche, and microfilms.

39 ILL patrons requested articles photocopied. Annex staff photocopied 422 pages for them. 37 separate ILL requests had to be rejected for lending, due to the condition of the material. 144 patrons requested their Annex retrievals via the Web.

Storage:

20 linear feet of new transfers were received from Central, Law, and Science.

The Phase III Law Construction has created a storage crisis for the Legal Clinic. Materials were delivered to the Annex for temporary storage on 4/30.

Special Collections acquired 54 more boxes for the University archives in early April. Then, near the end of April, the Office of the Graduate School gifted them with departmental materials. Boxes, cabinets, and filing cabinets of materials, already stored at the Annex were turned over to University Archives.

RS Maintenance:

1,917 Acorn records edited.
3 Central titles re-instated.
762 withdrawals; 597 for the Education Library 40 intra-library transfers processed for campus libraries’ collections.

6 RS Inventory titles circulated to Inter-Library Loan patrons. 1 was in English, 1 in French, and 4 were Spanish language titles. 98 volumes added to the Inventory from Baker and GLB staff. Of the 795 volumes that circulated from the Annex in April, 196 were RS Inventory being sent to the Cataloging team.

Visitors:

49 on-site visitors included Economics, History, and Law faculty; and representatives of Central, I.T.S., Management Information Systems, Music, Office of the University Librarian, Resource Services Cataloging, Science, Special Collections, Student Accounts, and the VU Theatre Department.

Buildings and Equipment:

The permanent glass block replacements for the window in Prof. Dewey Daane's office and the glass film were installed during the month.

Corrections to the new roof installation (requested from two separate roof inspections) took until April 26th to finalize. The initial work on the roof had begun Feb. 19th.

Three power failures in April affected HVAC and security systems and required service calls. Climate in the building, particularly the 2nd floor, remained inconsistent. This was caused by the steam coil problem, and also from the 3rd HVAC compressor being inoperable.

Cataloging and Authorities Team:

Cataloging experienced a rare phenomenon – a fairly routine month. This translates into getting a great deal of cataloging done, something much enjoyed. Along with the normal new materials in all subjects, several other efforts were underway. Rich Murray and Zora Breeding pulled extensively from the Spanish and Russian inventory collections, respectively. Ann Ercelawn made continued progress on cataloging the Pia serials, Norma Riddick on the Sam Flemming gifts, Susan Bell on Curriculum Lab materials, Zora on the Waldinger gifts, Jeff Taylor on the music materials, including a large number of scores for euphonium sonatas. Ann E. and Yuh- Fen Benda worked on additional ProQuest ejournal titles and Ann worked also on Project Muse and SPARC titles. Yuh-Fen began the project of bringing in analytics for the Scottish History Society set at the Annex, as requested by Peter Brush on behalf of Professor Todd.

Mary Charles Lasater continued to make progress on the changes to the Arts subject headings. She and Denise Chavez have also concentrated on working through the withdrawn title lists sent over from Maintenance and Denise sent another file of deleted headings to Marcive. Becky Atack contributed many authority records to the national file, including some for which she corresponded with three academics, one in the UK, one in Canada, and one in Tasmania. Pete Wilson contributed an unusually large number of records to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. Laurie Power also reports a larger than usual amount of pcc contributions. More pcc contributions meant that Don checked more than the usual amount of contributions before they were coded for national consumption. Jean Wright continued work on conversion of some SuDocs classified documents, worked through problems with GPO update records from Marcive, and continued to prepare lists of titles the library is offering to other institutions as per the regional agreement.

Yuh-Fen and Zora took a trip to the Annex to look at the crates of Chinese gift materials that have been languishing there for many years. Yuh-Fen was able to determine with some certainty what materials were included in this collection. This was made very difficult because of the lack of any sort of publication information on the 1000 or so volumes in this collection.

Order Services:

Everything is picking up in Order Services - order requests are beginning to come in more heavily as we approach year-end. On April 11, Mary Ellen Wilson sent the letter advising divisions of year- end processing routines, and requesting that all regular orders be sent to Order Services by May 21.

Verifiers are working hard to process new requests while keeping approval shipments current. Firm orders are being received at a fair pace as well, and are being processed within 3-4 weeks of their receipt. Serials and periodicals are being processed within 2 days at the most.

During the month, Mary Ellen, Monica, and Roberta met with John Laraway, Sales Representative from Blackwells, and Bob Schatz, North American Sales Manager from Everetts, UK. Mary Ellen and Monica met with a group from the Memphis Theological Seminary, hosted by Bill Hook, to discuss Acquisitions in Sirsi.

Preservation:

The end of semester crunch in public services areas is beginning to have a significant effect on the Preservation Team. Many more monograph items are starting to come through for binding or rebinding resulting in a growing backlog.

Binding:

April's statistics indicate a drop from the previous month in the total number of items sent to the Heckman Bindery. However, the drop is likely temporary as the summer binding season gets into full swing. 995 new monographs, 63 rebinds, 484 periodicals, and 153 serials were sent out in two shipments.

There is a growing backlog of monographs, mostly Central paperbacks, waiting to go to the bindery. The team is making a concerted effort to catch up in the next binding shipment. Machelle Keen reports a substantial backlog of re-barcoding due to the heavy returns of paperbacks from Central's patrons.

As a result of binding, Karen Coles, Sheranda Lee, and Machelle Keen updated 1,159 Acorn records.

Of the 1,238 Central paperback monographs that Machelle sorted in April, 32% (398) were selected for immediate binding.

The 2001-2002 Heckman binding price list has now been posted to the RS documentation page at:

http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/rs/restricted/Heckprices2001.ht m

The prices reflect an average 3.5% increase.

Marking:

The team labeled 3,682 books, 137 RUSH items, and 255 unbound serials. The marking shelves remain full with the labeling lag time averaging just over a week. There is a backlog of microfiche to stamp and Leisure Reading books to jacket.

Repair:

114 volumes were repaired or re-housed with 166 treatments. A majority of the month's work focused on building portfolios and pockets for the last of the Helguera collection items, Special Collection items, and Baudelaire items.

The book repair lab's bio-safety hood passed its annual inspection and re-certification.

Other:

Sue met with two vendors during April. One was the Heckman Bindery Representative. The other was a representative of Northern Micrographics, a company that digitizes documents.

Sue and Charlotte continue to participate in the Special Collections photo-digitizing project planning sessions.

Mike Martin installed Climate Notebook software on Sue's computer. The next step involves a reader for the SRAM card used to download and upload the data from the dataloggers. So far, that has proved more elusive.

Library Technology