Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

August 2001

Technical Services Monthly Report
Library Information Technology Services Monthly Report

Technical Services

Technical Services team leaders Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum participated in an August 27 retreat. The retreat was very productive and resulted in a list of recommendations that have been approved by Flo Wilson, and will be forwarded to Technical Services staff. Highlights of the recommendations include plans for Technical Services to become more proactive in making proposals for improvements, and the establishment of task forces as a way of investigating common issues across team boundaries.

The change to automatic discharging was implemented mid-month. We are concerned with the circulation flag being automatically unchecked when an item is charged. For now we are assuming the flag will be correct when the item is discharged. For the Preservation Team, while charging now takes slightly longer per item than it previously did, the hope is that discharging will soon speed up, as the items with multiple charges will disappear from the system.

With the reopening of the Music Library, we are again sending materials to them. Our first shipment of Music CD’s and scores cataloged by Flourish were received back at the end of the month and are receiving their final processing.

PERSONNEL:

Congratulations to Denise Chavez who received the tenth Acorn Note toward her third porcelain ACORN! She and Mary Charles Lasater attended the Acorn Note luncheon with Paul Gherman and Lisa Shipman in honor of her second porcelain acorn. Congratulations also to Machelle Keen who also received a porcelain ACORN; she and Sue Davis attended the luncheon as well.

Clint Grantham is a member of a new CAG task force studying potential enhanced services.

Peg Earheart actively participated in the SmartForce web-based tutorial evaluation group over the month of August. She gave a short presentation to the Training Coordinators and prepared handouts for Annex staff and other interested parties.

Sue Davis served on the 2001 Commodore Award Nomination committee and helped select this year's recipients of the important award.

Sue Davis also attended Heckman Bindery's annual Customer Council meeting Aug. 6- 8 and enjoyed the opportunity to tour the plant and discuss issues face-to-face.

Rich Murray, Laurie Power, and Don Jones volunteered to help with Central’s Student Orientation.

Many staff attended Sara Harwell’s farewell reception, the Music Library Open House, and the presentation given by the candidate for the German/Economics bibliographer position held on August 31.

ANNEX:

Highlights: A random sample of Library Annex books, recording height and width of each book was collected via the hard work of Susanna Southard, Joe Collins, Peg Earheart, and Flo Wilson, with some statistical advice from Malcolm Getz.

The Annex circulation report has been renamed "Items Retrieved". With this change comes a philosophical modification on what Annex staff record statistically. Also, the "Shelves in Use” report is now called "Linear Footage in Use" report.

The summer’s massive Astronomy transfers continue to have their Acorn records correlated, created, and corrected by Linda Davis and Leonor Van Cotthem. Joe Collins has an excellent shifting and interweaving system in place for these new transfers. In addition to also receiving individual former Observatory titles as recent preservation treatments, we also received the summer binding shipment of Astronomy periodicals from 1997-2001 during the month of August.

Recon of Education Dewey Annex materials is continuing at a steady pace. Clint Grantham and Mary Charles Lasater are working on this project. We anticipate it will take us a year to complete.

Music Reference materials, stored as "temporary construction storage for Music” are being reviewed. Dennis Clark is working on a project with Peg's help to determine which volumes will return permanently to Music. Others will be removed from Annex staging areas and made a part of the Annex 2nd floor stacks.

Items Retrieved:
349 items pulled for patrons.
148 patrons requested Annex materials via the Web.
706 pages photocopied for 54 ILL patrons.

RS Maintenance:
3,771 Acorn records edited.
1,896 withdrawals processed
5 volumes re-instated
11 titles reconned
1 title was recataloged
48 intra-library transfers for the campus libraries, which will remain on campus

Storage: 191 linear feet of library materials were received as transfers from Central, Divinity, Law, Management, Music, and Science. New VColl dissertations for Year 2000 arrived for shelving.

Of note, we received the summer shipment of Management Periodical and Management Reference Annex transfers; and 159 linear inches of Music LP transfers. As mentioned in the Divinity Library's August report, the Library Annex now stores the Nahum Glatzer Papers and also his Offprint and Ephemera materials. Central Collection Development had the delivery of the Aden Collection and the Poggenburg collection sent directly to the Annex Stockade in August.

We prepared room for increases in Law faculty square footage storage, the current year's Graduate School's many boxes of application booklets; and we reduced tenant storage for Management Information Systems and for the Owen Management School faculty.

Buildings and Equipment: Only one power outage occurred this month, but it did cause us to go into temperature and humidity alarm-state. As for new equipment, Clint received a replacement printer; and Peg now has Office 2000.

Visitors: 38 visitors were on site during August.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES TEAM:

We continue to be swamped by the flood of new materials, gifts, projects, vacations, etc. Susan Bell and Becky Atack began to process the first shipments from Education of the State of TN textbooks donated to the Curriculum Lab. Jeff Taylor was challenged by a large box of Music CDs that came through as RUSH (he may have set a rush record). Yuh-Fen Benda, with help from Rich Murray and Ann Barnette, processed a 60-volume set of art books in Chinese. Ann Ercelawn completed the Wiley e-journals list. We received the 400 IMF working papers and began initial assessment of cataloging needs. Denise Chavez and Mary Charles Lasater continued to deal with the large numbers of withdrawals. Mary Charles continues to review NACO contributions for Penn State but will soon be able to declare them "independent". Denise worked on the Error 9 split file project. Jean Wright reports that the Dewey to SuDocs conversion project is nearing completion, with out-of-scope material being made ready to offer to other participants. Rich Murray, with help from Susan Bell, continues to survey the inventory materials in preparation for making a recommendation on a possible inventory reduction project. Don Jones helped to review many of our contributions to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. Ann Ercelawn’s contributions to CONSER were also higher than normal this month.

The mid-month rebuild of the indexes went smoothly. Mary Charles Lasater was extremely busy for some time checking the status of reported problems to see what effect, if any, the re-indexing has had. Members of the team who serve on CAAG also reviewed the rebuild and made recommendations for how often this should ideally be scheduled.

Zora Breeding met with Barbara Clarke of the Women’s Center to discuss adding and editing records for the Center’s unique materials (previously, Barbara had been adding copies to Acorn for materials the Center duplicates with other libraries).

Statistics for the month: 2546 titles cataloged by CAT team.

ORDER SERVICES:

We are currently processing firm orders received within the month of August; while the numbers have slacked off a bit since last month, we would still classify the volume of receipts as moderately heavy.

In addition to her routine invoice payments, Sherry Huffer continues to assist in the processing of Collection Manager and GOBI orders, to help to speed the receipt process.

Verifiers continue to work on clearing out some of the gift backlog, as well as approvals and firm orders. Alice Cunningham has put the "approval room" to good use by shelving the gifts awaiting processing by subject and date for ease of access.

Serials, periodicals, and continuation orders remain up to date and in ship-shape. Chris Waldrop spent some of his time this month processing the IMF working papers and a significantly large backfile order of Loeb Classical Library.

This just in: In the month of August, OS processed 1323 approvals, and created 1436 new orders. Serial receivers received just over 4200 serial/periodical issues. We also speed cataloged 862 titles.

PRESERVATION:

August continued the summer crazies in all our units. The fiscal year-end order crunch continued to heavily impact binding and marking operations. As we lost our student and temporary help over the course of the month, our backlogs started creeping upwards once again. Three team members put in overtime hours to help keep the work flowing.

We are currently looking for a student assistant for the fall semester. We are happy to announce that Annex staff will assume one of our backlogged tasks—stamping microfiche. Procedural adjustments are in the works.

The team kept statistics in August on how many RUSH requests, recalls, and overdues they searched and how long it took. As a team, we spent 5 hours and 39 minutes searching for 47 items. We will continue tracking this for another month.

Binding: Another banner month for binding, especially monographs. We sent a total of 2,291 volumes to the bindery, which included 1,588 monographs, 471 periodicals, and 232 serials. For comparison, the average number of volumes sent to the bindery in 2000/2001 was 1,398 per month. Because recent shipments have been so large, we are behind in receiving returned volumes.

Of the 1,379 new Central monographs Machelle Keen sorted, she selected 1,107 for immediate binding. That is approximately 80% of the total. The high percentage is accounted for by a higher than usual number of fragile gift materials and stapled pamphlet-type materials, e.g. the IMF working papers, which require binding upon receipt.

As a result of binding Sheranda Lee and Machelle Keen updated 878 Acorn holdings records.

Marking: As with binding, marking statistics reflect high levels of activity. The team labeled 4,546 volumes, 181 RUSH books, 215 unbound serials, and 514 microfilm reels. For comparison, the average number of volumes marked in 2000/2001 was 4,000 per month. There were days when everyone participated in marking just to keep the shelves from overflowing.

Repair: 194 volumes were repaired with 289 treatments. The majority of August's work focused on Central materials, including several large Reference atlases.

Other: Sue Davis and Charlotte Lew (along with Special Collections staff) continued sorting and cleaning University of Nashville books in the basement of the Education Library. The project will take a few more months to complete.

Library Information Technology Services

As with all units, August is a busy time for LITS finishing projects in preparation for the return of students for the Fall semester. This month we have also faced the challenge of doing this with one less team member, Susan Banks, who filled a critical role in managing our networked CDROM services. Susan began an extended leave at the beginning of the month. Several LITS team members have taken on added duties in order to cover the services Susan provided. In particular, Dale, Mike and Anne have spent significant time this month with added responsibilities and learning new procedures. It should be noted that as they have done this, other team members have also taken on additional duties in order to free up their time to take on these new tasks. We are continuing to work out the details of an interim plan that will help maintain these services.

As mentioned last month, in addition to our more "routine" duties and workflow, we tackled a series of challenging projects this month and are happy to report that they have generally gone quite well.

First, early in the month we moved KUDZU and Athena from the older hardware platform that had hosted them to the new permanent hardware platform. This, along with a new version of the SiteSearch software used by these services, have resulted in significant increases in performance and stability for these services.

Early in the month we replaced the hardware platform for our production ACORN server and, at the same time, upgraded the interface to Webcat. Both aspects of this project went smoothly and, with the presence of the backup ACORN server previously installed, resulted in a minimum of downtime for our patrons and staff. We have received reports of significant performance improvements with the new hardware and comments from patrons and faculty about how much better the new webcat interface looks. We are also pleased to note that we now have greatly increased storage capacity for future growth in ACORN.

In mid-month, and as a result of the ACORN platform upgrade, we were able to take on a project that we have been hoping to do for some time: rebuild the indexes for ACORN. With the increase in performance on the new platform, this project that would have required five days of downtime, took only 36 hours. In addition, with the backup server in place, we were able to provide webcat searching for 34 of those 36 hours. The index rebuild went as planned. For the most part, it accomplished what we were hoping it would-- providing better keyword searching and reducing most of the "phantom" references in the catalog. The project was successful enough that we are working now to find ways to regularly schedule time into the year for this kind of work.

We have been researching and planning to upgrade our network operating system for some time. The next step in the process is to upgrade the netware client used by all library staff to access the Novell network. This month, with the help of Divinity Library staff, we were able to successfully test the deployment strategy for the new client. As this is being written, we are planning to do a system-wide deployment of the new client (version 4.8) on Friday September 7th. This will affect only staff and only those staff who are on the Novell network of the Heard Library system. Once all staff workstation have been upgraded, we will be able to move more quickly toward upgrading our "master" server to the new operating system--which should be "transparent" for staff workstations. We are hoping to be able to do this by the end of September or mid-October.

This month we have also been developing, testing and improving a new web-based system and its underlying concepts, dubbed "Request Management System," that will replace the current "netfix" system and its interface. Marshall Breeding is doing the code development work on this project with a great deal of input from LITS staff, the Technology Support Coordinators, and the Training Coordinators. We hope that the new interface and its new features, when released, will allow us not only to track requests and problem reports, but communicate more efficiently and effectively about the status of requests. It will also allow those making requests to communicate more easily with LITS staff members to provide additional information and communicate changes in the status of a given request. We hope to be able to release the new system for general use sometime in September.

Earlier this summer, Walker Library had asked LITS to consider purchasing and installing IBM NetVista X40's for use as public workstations. These are handsome "all-in-one" units composed of LCD flat panel screens, cpu and drives mounted in the base holding the LCD, keyboard and mouse. We agreed that it would be useful to deploy such units in a limited release as a way of learning whether they could be used in locations that would benefit from the smaller footprint unit as well as suiting the needs of Walker's environment. We had also agreed to deploy these units with Windows 2000 as the workstation operating system. LITS staff spent considerable time in July acquiring these units and in August preparing them for their deployment. They are to be deployed in the first and second weeks of September and we will be watching their performance and reliability closely to determine if similar units might be used in other locations.

This summer we had several libraries ask for us to help develop "online" application forms for student employees. We spent a good deal of time coordinating the various requests to develop an integrated approach. This result is now online, with supporting forms and scripts, and integrated into the Heard Library web page under "Library Information: Jobs for Students".

We also continued work with the libraries and ITS staff to move development of the wireless, supplemental network forward in the libraries: additional access points will soon be in place in Central Reference, Central Reserves, Central Microform Media, Central Periodicals, and Divinity Reference.

We also spent time this month planning, ordering, and preparing for upcoming projects including: ordering 35 more Dell Optiplex GX 400 workstations for staff workstation replacements, developing specifications and soliciting bids for a large capacity storage area network (SAN) with an initial capacity of 512 gigabytes (half a terabyte) and a planned upgrade to a full terabyte, a new cd/dvd-rom server to replace our aging (some would say obsolete) mercury cdrom jukebox, an evaluation of a Leif high-end digital camera for use with digitizing projects, initial development on a request for a new server room, and many requests for new network port installations and bids for many others.