Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

January 2001

STAFFING NOTES

Annex accepted Joe Collins’ resignation.  His last day to work with us will be February 9th.

Isabelle Crist joined LTT.  She will be working on a recently developed project to begin digitizing photographs from the Special Collections Photo Archives.

Ravi Taval, a student assistant, began work for Binding and Marking on Jan. 31. He will help primarily in the labeling process.

Progress continues on the Computer Systems Administrator III search.  From  first-round phone interviews with 12 candidates, a "short list" of 6 has been selected for further interviews.

All teams worked on preparing for the annual review process including the development of team goals, objectives and project lists.  LTT has begun planning for a half-day annual review retreat as part of this process.

All LTT team members attended a Dreamweaver training session led by Mike Martin on the 26th. We have set as a team goal to have each member of the team offer a training session, demonstration, or presentation for all other team members once each month during the coming year.

Staff attending the Jan. 12-16 ALA midwinter meeting in Washington, D.C. include: Susan Bell, Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater, Rich Murray, Dale Poulter, Norma Riddick, Flo Wilson, and Roberta Winjum. Travel reports are filed in the RS Travel folder.

LA III’s and IV’s on all teams attended the brown bag lunch led by Paul Gherman and Lisa Shipman to discuss salary and classification issues.

Several attended the Brown Bag with Linda Williamson and the Coffee and Open House with Chancellor Gee.

LIBRARY TECHNOLOGY

Over 175 problems were resolved in January.  The publicweb server has had several abends in the past week, and while we were able to respond quickly and so suffered no extended downtime, we are investigating causes and hope to have these resolved as quickly as possible.  Twenty viruses were intercepted in incoming email.

Projects worked on during the month included: 

Developed a network operating system upgrade procedure planned for the near future.  Replaced 15 workstations and added memory to a number of Dell workstations. 

Finalized work on and implemented active desktop user interface for Education Library public workstations.  Revised active desktop interface for Management Library public workstations, updated out-dated web pages on Management Library web server. Completed new LTT web pages for "pre-release" review by TSC.

Updated 24 existing cdrom-based products and installed 4 new cdrom-based products.  Added Heard Library logo to WebSPIRS pages.  Finalized WEBSPIRS upgrade.  Upgraded Beilstein and SciFinder clients at Science and Engineering Library, transferring this responsibility to Susan with Judy as backup. 

Continued development of KUDZU, a virtual catalog of 12 ASERL member libraries, going live on Feb 5. 

Worked on Sigaux Web Exhibit.  Implemented several changes to HOW DO I? section of Public Web Pages.  Designed and created several new UUGI web pages. 

Drafted proposal for staff training for Staff Development Committee review. 

Made several Acorn user and format policy changes.

Began early production/late planning of Special Collections Photographic Archive Project, digitized nearly 100 photos. 

Held Technology Support Coordinators' meeting. 

The full LTT report is available on the web.

ANNEX

Two persistent Blair Blvd. Area water main breaks wreaked havoc with Library Annex property and facilities. The basement area was flooded for the course of nearly two weeks. Several library staff, many Work Management and campus facilities staff, and outside contractors assisted throughout the month of January. Some library furniture stored in the basement was damaged, creating the impetus to discard some furniture no longer needed.

The Annex roof continues to leak with patches made as needed.  A new roof is scheduled to begin installation on Jan. 26^th,.taking around 6 weeks to complete.

January 17th we filled our 1st Kudzu ILL request.  In 2 years time, we have grown in our consortia lending arrangements, having begun IRIS lending in January 1999.

Circulation:  Circulated 827 items; 173 patrons requested materials via the Web.  Photocopied 456 pages for 43 articles requested. 

Storage:  100 linear feet of new campus transfers.  69 linear feet returned to campus (primarily for Govt. Information).  Graduate School increased their storage space, and TV News will soon increase their space.  The Kadar Holocaust Exhibit returned from its Florida exhibition.

Maintenance:  Edited 2285 Acorn records; 131 withdrawals processed; 4 Central titles re-instated; 4 titles reclassed and reconned.

Visitors:  99 visitors were on site.  4 Annex tours were given to Central Reference staff, Dennis

Clark and Music staff, OUL staff, and Campus facilities staff. 

TECHNICAL SERVICES PROJECTS UPDATES

Cataloging is complete for the Helguera collection, except for a few stray items, and the end is also in sight for Helguera binding and repair. We cataloged somewhere over 2700 total titles, around 350 of which were serials/periodicals. Tech Services members who worked on the Helguera project include:  Becky Atack, Ann Barnette, Denise Chavez, Mary Charles Lasater, Rich Murray, Norma Riddick, and Pete Wilson from Cataloging and Authorities; Sue Davis, Karen Coles, Machelle Keen, Charlotte Lew, Ann Mallette, Karen Pillow, Sheranda Lee, and Daphne Walker from Preservation; and Peg Earheart, Joe Collins, and Clint Grantham from the Annex.   A big thanks to all of those involved, and to those who helped in other areas so these staff could devote their time to the Helguera materials.

A meeting regarding Sigaux duplicates was held with Yvonne Boyer, Ann Ercelawn, Linda Davis, Don Jones, and Peg Earheart on  Jan. 24.  As of February 1st, RS Maintenance staff will begin a project to review 58 boxes of items identified as Sigaux duplicates, mostly periodicals for which our holdings information would not have been available on OCLC.  RS Maintenance will work through at least 2 boxes per week, forwarding as needed to Cataloging staff.  Yvonne Boyer will be consulted for collection questions.  Materials that truly are duplicates will continue to be stored at the Annex, at least until summer 2001.

Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater, and Jeff Taylor met with Roberta Winjum and Mary Ellen Wilson to come up with a strategy on how to inventory the Music materials whose cataloging will be outsourced to a firm called Flourish.  The materials that are being sent are the items (mainly CDs and scores) remaining from the material Shirley Watts sent over before her retirement. 

The Project Team charged with the elimination of the Book Fund Accounting System held meetings on Jan. 8 and 18. The group’s progress was greatly helped by the input of Kevin Walker and Kim Smith of University Accounting. In an additional Jan. 25 session, Kim, Dale Poulter, Sherilyn Kersey (MIS) and Roberta Winjum, laid out some plans for data input and output for team discussion in Feb. One obstacle is how to extract vendor information, as our vendor file is quite large and overlaps with many vendors now in PeopleSoft. Kim Smith will join the project team and we are hopeful that Sherilyn will also be able to join.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES

Besides wrapping up work on the Helguera collection, there were efforts to catalog the newly acquired Siguax materials (Don Jones), more of the Pia materials (Ann Ercelawn and Don), many music cds (Norma), music laser discs (Jeff), some Rush tests for Education (Susan), more of the curriculum lab Cox grant materials (Susan) and more Waldinger books (Zora).  Yuh-Fen Benda processed the 30 or so gift replacements that were provided by Julie Loder according to the new procedure for this material. Mary Charles Lasater worked through more of the Pinyin headings changes in preparation to speaking on the topic at ALA.  Denise resumed work on the split headings report.  Mary Charles has been testing the Classification Web product and reports that it is more user-friendly than the CD-ROM product we now have.

At John Haar’s request, Zora investigated our microfilm records for Early English Books to determine if we could identify only those corresponding to various “Units.”  We are interested in adding URLs to those records that correspond to the titles in Early English Books Online.

Mary Charles Lasater reports that our unauthorized heading lists produced during December were shorter. We suspect that the Marcive authority processing is helping to reduce the size of this list.

ORDER SERVICES

Rita Breen, Monica Sanchez, Chris Waldrop, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum visited the headquarters of Ingram Books in LaVergne, TN on Jan. 10. We learned valuable information that may enable some processing improvements in Rush orders, Leisure Books, Ingram’s “no-hassle” returns, standing orders, and iPage use. We hope for more collaboration in the future.

An EBSCO luncheon to honor Marilyn scheduled for Jan. 19 had to be postponed until Feb. 2 due to inclement weather.

Interviews for Dan Riggs’s replacement began at the end of January.

We have changed processing of Spanish approvals slightly. Because we continue to have a backlog of these materials, we will now send invoice copies to Paula Covington upon receipt instead of at the time of processing. We hope this will provide her with better control of her approval budget.

Toward the end of the month, all verifiers were temporarily assigned to work on a backlog of Blackwell US approval materials. Blackwell UK approvals are current.

Collection Manager books have accumulated some backlog; the oldest material was received on Nov. 13, 2000. We are processing firm order receipts from Jan 9 and later. Most outstanding orders are from January, although a few with December dates remain.

Periodicals and serials unbound are up to date. For bound serials with invoices, the oldest material was received on 1/9/2001. Regina Berry is now part of the serials rotation.

PRESERVATION

January continued the trend of high level binding, marking, and repair activity.

The new Central monograph binding procedure was implemented in early January.  The first month's statistics show that we bound about 22.3% of Central's paperbacks.  Machelle sorted 574 items from Cataloging and 215 items from Order Services for a total of 789 Central paperback monographs.  She selected 176 volumes for binding.  We will continue to collect statistics for at least a few months more to see if the pattern remains the same.  A proposed change to Central serials binding is pending.

Sue joined the planning discussions for the Special Collections photo-digitizing project.  She also consulted in the Law Library because of a roof leak on government document materials.

BINDING:  557 monographs; 10 rebinds; 607 periodicals; 108 serials

Machelle Keen, Karen Coles, and Sheranda Lee updated 977 Acorn records as a result of binding. 

The Heckman representative paid a visit on Jan. 16.  At the time we had no serious quality control problems to report to him except for some ongoing mylar binding issues.  But in the next return shipment, excess glue damaged 16 Central periodicals.  These have since been returned to be correctly bound.

BOOK REPAIR: 265 volumes were treated with 364 treatments.  The emphasis in January was to complete processing a large order of wrapper enclosures and to finish constructing in-house portfolio enclosures for Special Collection items.  The Special Collection project will continue for a few more months.

Staff in the repair lab also spent considerable time working with Pete Wilson on Helguera serial materials, devoting our efforts to salvaging various pieces.  Charlotte Lew's good detective work enabled us to combine scattered issues into one treatment package for each title.

MARKING: Estimated totals include: 3,600 regular marking; 338 unbound serials; 230 RUSH items (beginning of semester surge); 1,305 stamped microfiche envelopes. 

LTT has changed our marking workstations to specific marking login accounts again.  Hopefully, this effort will help save settings that fluctuated from person to person and caused some interesting labeling results. 

5 February 2001