Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

December 2000

Personnel and Staff Activities

Staff enjoyed holiday brunches, luncheons, and parties, including the Vanderbilt Staff Winter Fest, Central’s Open House, Marilyn Henry’s retirement brunch, and the RS Solstice Party among others. Many staff were able to take additional vacation days at the end of the month. The bad weather made traveling difficult for some, and just getting to work a challenge for others.

Some staff prepared for the upcoming ALA; everyone participated in another week of Cost Study from Dec. 11-15.

Regina Berry started in Order Services as a Serials Receiver on Dec. 11; we said goodbye to Dan Riggs on Dec. 1.

Roberta Winjum attended a three-day Maximizing Human Resources Leadership Training Workshop at Vanderbilt on Dec. 4-6. Anne Laws attended Sirsi Advanced System Admin for Unix Training in Huntsville, AL, Dec. 7, and 8 Suellen Stringer-Hye attended the XML 2000 Conference held in Washington D.C on December 3-8. Flo Wilson attended the fall meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information Dec. 7 and 8 in San Antonio.

Library Technology Update

Some of the projects and issues addressed by the Library Technology Team during December included:

Technical Services Happenings

This month the last box of the Helguera gift collection was sent from the Annex to Cataloging. Although a few odd pieces of the collection remain, most of the material has been cataloged. The push to finish the remaining Helguera serials will continue into January. The project will be completed two months ahead of the one-year deadline and will have added about 2600 Helguera titles to ACORN. While Cataloging is already celebrating the end of processing Helguera gift materials, the Preservation team is only beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The final shelf of Sigaux problems was sent to the Baudelaire Center staff for decisions.

Following input from John Haar, Sue Davis, Mary Ellen Wilson, Zora Breeding, Janet Thomason, Jo Bilyeu, and Roberta Winjum met to discuss a change to the Central paperback binding procedure. Roberta is drafting a policy that allows some binding of Central paperbacks that will be based on set criteria identified by Preservation staff.

A meeting with Nim Chinniah (Administration), Betty Price (Accounting), and Kim Howard (MIS), Norman Nash, Flo Wilson, and Roberta Winjum garnered University support for the review and elimination of the Book Fund Accounting System (BFAS). The Project Team, consisting of Roberta Winjum, Mary Ellen Wilson, Pat Johnson, Dale Poulter, Bill Hook, Bill Walker, and Julia Strickland, will begin meeting after the holidays.

Staff continue to receive computer upgrades, and on the binding and marking part of the team, Ann Mallette and Sheranda Lee received individual machines for the first time.

Annex

Larry Romans, Gretchen Dodge, Flo Wilson, Roberta Winjum, and Peg Earheart worked out specific details in preparation for the Kansas State University's gift of the early volumes of the Government Document Serial Set. Linda Davis, Leonor Van Cotthem, and Joe Collins created the needed space for these to be housed in the Annex. Once the many boxes of this set arrive, they will first be placed in the Stockade area vacated by the Helguera gift boxes.

Circulation:
625 items circulated
11 items requested by local patrons were searched and found to have incorrect citations or were titles the Annex never owned.
181 of our patrons placed their Annex requests via the Web
22 Inter-Library Loan patrons requested articles to be photocopied, for which we reproduced 322 pages.
Another 14 ILL requests had to be declined due to the fragility of the material.

Storage:
New transfers were received from Central, Divinity, Government Information, Law, PColl and VColl. Alumni and Development, and the Vanderbilt Law faculty transferred more boxes of materials into their storage areas here. University Archives received 54 boxes of records from Human Resources into their University "record-keeping" Annex storage. econd quarter billings amounting to almost $9500 were sent out to various tenants.

Buildings & Equipment:
The locking mechanism for the Front entrance received repairs, and later in the month it was actually replaced. Service calls had to be made to our SpaceSaver shelving representative. More patches to the existing roof were made. The heat pump's electrical wiring had connectivity problems and was fixed.

RS Maintenance:
1837 Acorn records edited.
358 withdrawals processed.
2 titles reclassed
No volumes were re-instated during December.

Visitors:
38 visitors were on site during December including representatives from Alumni & Development, Biomedical Library, ITS, Law School faculty and staff, Legal Clinic, LTT, Management Information Systems, Music Library, OUL, Owen School staff & faculty, Preventive Medicine, Special Collections, Student Accounts, and the VU Theatre Department

Hosanna Banks, David Stringfellow, and Professor Helguera continued their normal on-site Annex work. Isabelle Crist visited several times as she worked with the Sigaux dossiers.

Nunzia Giuse, Marcia Epelbaum, Gayle Grantham, Frances Lynch, Danny McCollum, Jeremy Nordmoe, Mary Teloh, Flo Wilson, and Peg Earheart met to discuss potential Biomedical Library Storage at the Library Annex.

Roberta Winjum received a more comprehensive tour and orientation of our Annex operations. David Carpenter came over to view questions Peg Earheart had regarding the AE collection. John Haar and Sara Harwell received a customized tour of specific Annex areas of Special Collections and University archives holdings.

Cataloging and Authorities

Mary Charles Lasater finished working through the October and November Marcive reports containing changed Pinyin headings. The process requires a large amount of manual changing of bibliographic records. The bibliographic records in Chinese and with Chinese title headings, name/title headings, and/or notes will need to be sent to a vendor for conversion. Currently no vendors are ready to supply this service. Mary Charles is looking forward to finding out what other libraries are doing at the upcoming ALA, where she will be speaking on the topic of our current efforts with Pinyin conversion.

Partial team statistics for the week of the cost study:
565 new monographic titles cataloged,
29 new serial titles;
37 monographic titles recataloged,
47 serial titles recataloged

Team members had an opportunity to spend time on projects, problems, and inventory materials. Ann Ercelawn worked on Sigaux new acquisitions and Don Jones handled some old Sigaux problems that surfaced recently. In the process, Don became a master of the bound- with procedure. Ann also concentrated on cataloging new e- journals, including a set for Music (IIMPFT), additional JSTOR titles, and the new Nature journals. Zora Breeding cataloged a gift set of Georgian poets translated into Russian, as well as more of the Waldinger collection. She wrote and posted the new procedure for adding replacement copies to the RS Documentation page. Zora also adjusted the Education non-book tables for cdroms and dvds. With the end of the Helguera project, Denise Chavez was able to return her attention to the split headings report in addition to her regular duties. Rich Murray was able to devote time to revise the Subject Guides page on the library's public web page, an effort that involved working through some software problems. Norma Riddick and Jeff Taylor cataloged more music CDs. Jeff also reconned a few old theses with bizarre titles that hadn't been on Acorn because no one could figure out how to enter them on the computer. The backlog of Music materials that was sent over before Shirley Watts retired has been approved to be sent to an independent Music cataloger. She will be able to start on our project in the summer of 2001.

Mary Charles Lasater reports that the new unauthorized headings lists still contain some headings for titles that were cataloged at Baker, so while the process of sending bibs to Marcive for authority work is better, it does not appear to be "perfect" yet. She will follow up on the process.

Order Services

At the end of December we were processing firm orders received in the mailroom in mid-December. Due to absences over the holidays, attention had to be focused on receiving periodicals and bound serials. For this reason, the oldest bound serials and serials with invoices are from November. Periodicals and unbound serials are very current, however, and attention will be shifted to bound serials and serials with invoices beginning next week.

Regina Berry has been extremely helpful in keeping the overflow of periodicals in check. Because of the holidays and the number of periodicals, she hasn't yet entered the serials rotation, but will beginning next week.

It should also be mentioned that Sharon Wagoner checked in many of Central's newspapers during the week of December 25th. This also helped us keep the overflow under control. We certainly appreciate Sharon's help during this period.

In early December, Monica and Mary Ellen met with Stuart Grinell of Ambassador Books.

Preservation

The Preservation team was very busy with routine binding, marking, and repair. The statistics reflect a high level of activity.

Binding:
Binding continued to be much heavier than expected this time of year. The one shipment (usually there are two in a month) included

462 new monographs,
45 rebinds,
290 periodicals,
156 serials
Total 953 items.

There is a small monograph backlog because of the increased periodical activity.

The heavy periodical/serial binding also translated into high levels of Acorn holdings updating. Together Machelle Keen, Sheranda Lee, and Karen Coles updated 597 records.

Marking:
Marking was also very heavy. The whole team pitched in to help keep the materials flowing. Even so, the shelves seemed to always be full.

3,855 items labeled,
108 RUSH items,
171 unbound serials,
48 microfilm boxes.

Repair:

19 volumes were repaired with 185 treatments.
December's focus was on spine repairs for Central.

9 January 2001