Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

February 2001

Technical Services Monthly Report
Library Technology Monthly Report

Technical Services

All teams report a very active month. Order Services’ high level of productivity contributed to an added workload in Cataloging and Authorities Team and the Preservation Team. We are pleased to see so much work moving through our areas.

Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Ann Ercelawn, Chris Waldrop, Mary Ellen Wilson, Pete Wilson, and Roberta Winjum met to discuss Central Serials binding procedures. Refinements include changes in how serials are sent and selected for binding. Order Services will begin keeping “bind upon receipt” information in the Serials Control Records. The changes to the serials binding procedures necessitated some minor changes in the processing of new titles and title changes in Cataloging.

Pat Johnson, Sue Davis, Mary Ellen Wilson, Karen Pillow, Machelle Keen, and Roberta Winjum made some improvements in processing invoices for the commercial binder. During the month, Karen and Machelle both focused on encumbering binding funds and paying binding invoices on Acorn, bringing the payments nearly up to date.

Promptcat records began to arrive with the Blackwell London imprint approval books. Zora Breeding, Becky Atack, Sue Davis and Charlotte Lew met to finalize plans to gather statistics on what kind of cataloging copy was being sent by Promptcat for these books. Charlotte has been re-searching, speed cataloging, and gathering statistics on these approvals in order to evaluate the selection of Promptcat records. Of the 132 BHB items reviewed, Charlotte was able to speed catalog 43 books. Charlotte’s preliminary results confirm that we are getting the best copy available, and purchasing the records is worthwhile. We are continuing to study whether we can lessen the impact on original cataloging by altering the routing of this material.

February 1st, Linda Davis began her work with the Sigaux Duplicate Project. Clint Grantham is also assisting. Working on boxes 58 through 54, Linda has found items to add to Sigaux serials and periodicals at the Annex, in the Central Library, or to the rare Sigaux materials in the Center. She has also found some pieces with signatures, added volumes to monographic sets, and truly unique titles forwarded to Ann Ercelawn and Don Jones for cataloging. On occasion, our already owned Central stacks copies had incorrect cataloging. Of course duplicate monographs are also found during this project.

Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Zora Breeding, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum meet to discuss issues involved in loading the records for netLibrary books. We expect these records (over 10,000) to be loaded very soon.

Following a request from Carlin Sappenfield, various staff were involved in changing locations and procedures for processing books and serials that had been destined for the Observatory library. No further volumes will be sent from Order Services, Cataloging or Preservation to the Observatory. An Annex project changed the Acorn HOME locations from Observatory to Science for 119 Astronomy titles charged to the RS Inventory. In the Annex, 1124 shelves were hastily shifted and compressed to make a staging area for Science Library transfers, as Science makes additional room for Observatory materials. Carlin Sappenfield, Linda Davis, Ann Ercelawn, Machelle Keen, Sue Davis and Peg Earheart worked out arrangements for the Observatory title, Nautical almanac and astronomical ephemeris, to be stored in the Annex.

The Project Team to interface ACORN with the University’s PeopleSoft accounting system is making good headway. Documents relevant to the project can be viewed at http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/bfas/ The project will require clean up of vendor files and changes in the address format as well as the addition of center and account numbers to ACORN fund records. As ACORN becomes the library’s official accounting system, authorization to add/change/delete orders, invoices and vendors will need to be restricted. The support of Management Information Systems, Accounting, and Internal Audit are invaluable to this project.

Personnel

Joe Collins returned to full-time employment in the Annex on Monday, February 26th. We ecstatically welcome his return!

With the addition of Angel Bruner on February 19th, Order Services is fully staffed. Angel is currently receiving monographs of the Collection Manager variety. We are delighted to have Angel on board.

Susan Bell traveled to Chicago to attend the Exhibitors Round Table annual board meeting.

Sue Davis traveled to Washington, D.C. for training on new preservation software under development.

Roberta Winjum attended a netLibrary training session at Tennessee State University on Feb. 27.

Several staff attended Suellen Stringer-Hye’s brown bag on XML.

All staff worked on their annual Performance Evaluations.

Annex

Did you know? Our Library Annex has the second largest aggregation of VUL books within a single building.

That building has been plagued in February with roof leaks (especially during the winter rains), and seepage from a January water main break. To remedy the leaks and flooding: Burress Roofing began their 6 week project of removing the old roof, and putting in the temporary roof, beginning February 19th. It is anticipated the temporary roof will be completely installed by Friday afternoon, March 2nd. Then we anticipate another 4 weeks for the permanent roofing materials to be applied.

The VU Moving crew and BFI spent portions of two weeks discarding the Annex basement materials damaged during the water main break seepages during two weeks of January.

The installation of the new High Water alarm system was completed February 27th. A secondary pump was installed in the vault. When the vault, which runs the length of the building, retains water, the water seeps into the basement.

Peg Earheart had meetings and/or planning sessions with Jon Erickson; Carlin Sappenfield; Bonnie Arant Ertelt, Acorn Chronicle; Terry Haley, VU Building and Construction Inspector; Al Stewart, Central Business Group; Floyd Kendall, VU Project Manager for Plant Operations; Teddy Gaddy, Tri- Star Electric; Tom and Don from EMS; A-1 Courier Service; Daniel, Burress Roofing; and VU Police and Security.

Peg Earheart and Sara Harwell provided an in-depth tour of Special Collections and University Archives Annex physical holdings for Juanita Murray on February 26th.

Circulation:
777 items circulated (yes, really 777!) to Central, Divinity, Education, Government Information, Inter-Library Loan, Law, Management, Music, Pascal Pia Collection at the Baudelaire Center, RS Cataloging, Science and Special Collections
241 patrons requested materials via the Web, a new all-time high for Web requests
541 pages were photocopied for 49 Inter-Library Loan articles requested
72 ILL requests had to be declined due to the fragility of the material or incorrect citation. Only 63 Inter-Library loans could be
filled. ILL requests for books charged to the RS Inventory included Central, Divinity, and Science titles.

Storage:
96 linear feet of new transfers were received from Central, Divinity, and Law.

Linda Davis and Joe Collins worked on a Law transfer and reclass project with Linda Tesar. Some retrospective "Shelve by title" Law serials are now being classed.

In early Feb., Joe Collins created new and distinctive signage for many of our 2nd floor end caps.

Joe Collins and Linda Davis worked on a project to relabel Divinity archives. Using creative shelving arrangements, the Annex is able to store 1/3 more Divinity Glatzer and Divinity Schocken miracle boxes - all within the same amount of cubic space.

Television News Archive sent 37 additional boxes during February.

During the month of February, A-1 Courier Service movers began the removal of boxed Law Library SuDocs. Once the Law Project is completed; and a shelving re-configuration done; these shelves await (with great interest, I might add) usage by Special Collections for their Paige miracle boxes.

Clint Grantham worked with Gretchen Dodge on the transfer from the Annex to her of the Climatological Data unbound pieces.

RS Maintenance:
2 titles reconned
2 titles recataloged
3 volumes re-instated
789 withdrawals processed. 500 of these withdrawals were from the Education Youth Collection. All of these withdrawals which are unique titles also impact the Authorities staff.
2404 Acorn records were edited (Maintenance staff will no longer reclassify call numbers; we will be forwarding such requests directly to the Cataloging Team)

Visitors:
31 visitors and tenants were on site from: Arts and Science, ITS, Law faculty and staff, Management Information Systems, O.U.L., Resource Services, Special Collections, Student Accounts, Tennessee Repertory Theatre, VU Theatre Department.

Cataloging and Authorities

We received a large shipment of Vanderbilt theses (14 boxes) which are being processed.

Ann Ercelawn reports an abundance of new e-journal titles this month in SpringerLink, Catchword, Project Muse and JSTOR. She has trained Yuh-Fen Benda to assist with modifying associated Acorn records and Yuh-Fen worked on providing access to a large set of Ingenta titles.

Mary Charles Lasater, Jeff Taylor and Zora Breeding worked on preparing the Music cataloging contracts for the outsourcing project with Flourish. Jeff Taylor is devoting more of his time to processing new Music scores and CDs. He reports that the new receipts for Music remain steady, although the stream seems to have slacked a bit.

Norma Riddick began cataloging the Sam M. Fleming gift books for Special Collections. She also had a "get acquainted" meeting with Juanita Murray, the new head of Special Collections.

The Pinyin committee met to discuss whether to pursue vendor conversion of our bibliographic records. The group decided to wait at this time.

From Authorities: Mary Charles Lasater reports that the Library of Congress changes to the Arts and Architecture subject headings are beginning to arrive through our Marcive service. Several team members are again working on the split headings reports. Denise Chavez is going through the reports of withdrawn titles and deleting authority headings for names no longer in our database to prevent blind references.

Zora Breeding helped Nancy Boggess-Korekach with her project of making a version of the holdings code tables that is tailored to RS staff. Zora has also created a web version of the CAAG Workflows training, available from the CAAG web page.

Nancy Boggess-Korekach and Zora Breeding had some discussions about how to modify the microfilm records corresponding to titles in Early English Books Online in order to add a link for the online resource to the Acorn records.

Order Services

Mary Ellen Wilson has been working to clean up what didn't automatically post from the Ebsco invoice load. The entire invoice is now posted, and all invoices have been changed to the "paid" status in Acorn.

On the 21st of February, Monica Sanchez and Rita Breen attended a workshop presented by Alibris on searching out of print books online.

Representatives of Ebsco and Swets-Blackwell visited us this month. Some departures of top personnel at Swets-Blackwell (Mike Markwith) and Faxon-RoweCom (Dan Tonkery) are creating a buzz among vendor representatives.

We received information from Blackwells that, effective March 2, they will begin charging all of their customers a 1.5% increase for freight charges. (A copy of this letter is being sent to all division directors.)

The oldest serials on the shelves at this time are less than one month old. This is especially impressive considering that February is such a short month. The oldest items are dated February 9th. Periodicals and unbound serials are being checked-in within one to two days of receipt. Currently no non- book material is waiting to be received.

The approval project, which involved temporarily devoting extra Order Services staff to process approval books, was a big success. Thanks to the hard work of all the verifiers, we are now up to date on all approval plans. The oldest purchase requests in Order Services for most subjects were received the second week of February. Rush orders are up to date. We also made considerable progress receiving Collection Manager books. The oldest material has invoices dated from mid-January. The oldest firm orders have invoices dated around the first week of February. Continuations and rush materials are up to date. We were also very lucky to have a volunteer, Brent Horton, spend time helping out in the mailroom.

Preservation

The team's production numbers for February reflect another large increase in binding, marking, and repair activity. Because of the higher level of incoming materials, there are a few pockets of small backlogs.

As beta test site (along with 180 other institutions), we will be testing two new datalogger environmental monitors and software designed to perform analysis of the collected temperature and relative humidity data.

Charlotte Lew and Sue Davis consulted with Special Collections about a new project involving large board/mylar folders for Vanderbilt University campus maps and drawings.

Sue Davis continues to participate in the Photo Archives digital project planning.

BINDING:
633 monographs
84 rebinds
836 periodicals
240 serials
1793 total volumes**
**That total is the highest since last June.

Machelle Keen, Karen Coles, and Sheranda Lee updated a combined total of 966 Acorn records.

Machelle Keen continues to keep statistics on Central's monograph binding decisions. During February, 211 paperbacks (approximately 18.3%) were selected for binding from the 1151 processed for Central. Based on the numbers from the first two months, we feel the change in procedures for Central monograph binding has been a success.

Almost all of the remaining Helguera materials have now been sent to Heckman for binding.

Heckman Bindery has alerted us to the fact that the manufacturer has discontinued a few buckram colors. They have suggested alternatives. We will be contacting each library about the specific changes.

MARKING:
3,947 books labeled,
205 RUSH items,
317 unbound serials.
At the moment volumes being labeled were received Feb. 23rd.

REPAIR:
230 volumes were treated with 303 treatments.
A large segment of that total included enclosures for Special Collections and Helguera materials. There are still about 25 Helguera volumes awaiting treatment

Library Technology