Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

July 2001

Technical Services Monthly Report
Library Information Technology Services Monthly Report

Technical Services

PERSONNEL:

Staff throughout Technical Services attended the second annual Library Staff Forum held on July 19. We especially enjoyed our own Pete Wilson’s participation in the panel to discuss issues related to the Strategic Plan.

Several staff attended the Divinity candidate’s presentation. Some staff also helped with the Retirement Learning classes in GLB.

Laurie Power passed her comps and has thus completed her MLS degree from UT. Congratulations, Laurie!

Spencer Koury joined us for his 2nd Annex year, after his study-trip to Greece.

Ann Ercelawn presented a basic serials cataloging workshop at North Dakota State University for MINITEX (their version of Solinet).

Rich Murray has accepted a two-year appointment to the Europe & Canada Subcommittee of ALA's International Relations Committee.

ANNEX:

Highlights:
The Dyer Observatory Collection was transferred on July 26-27th. Portions of the collection went to the Science Library. The equivalent of 157.5 full shelves of books arrived July 27th at our Library Annex including the LC Periodical collection and portions of the Dewey Decimal collection. We appreciate the assistance with the move received from Science and Engineering Library staff, especially John Whelan. As Annex staff process the material from the staging area, they find the usual database inconsistencies that a move of this size evokes. Annex staff will be affixing bar codes and creating call records before placing the materials in our permanent shelving arrangements.

July 10th, Linda Davis began working with the 1000 volume Management/Central comparison project. The Management Library sent to the Annex their copies of selected titles that are jointly owned by Central and Management. With approval of the Central and Management bibliographers, Linda will select the best copy for retention in the Annex. When differences in editions are discovered, or the material is a 1st printing, we will keep both copies in the Annex.

Peg Earheart, Yvonne Boyer, Don Jones, Clint Grantham and Linda Davis met to plan a re-verification of the Pascal Pia duplicate collection stored at the Annex, as some of these volumes are not duplicates or they may contain VIP dedications. We will reevaluate the project based on findings after processing the first 200 titles.

The Robinson Collection continued to receive attention from the Music Library staff.

Paul Gherman brought Associate Provost Dennis Hall to the Library Annex on July 19th. Peg Earheart provided a 45-minute tour and orientation. Peg also led an Annex Orientation in July for staff from the Education Library and the Owen Management Library.

On July 23, new staff from VU Security, accompanied by one of the experienced officers came for a brief tour of all 3 floors of the Annex.

Circulation:
157 patrons requested Annex materials via the Web.
717 items circulated to campus libraries.
41 patrons requested 445 pages of photocopies.
54 ILL requests that we were unable to lend. This was because the material was too fragile to ship, or the citations were incorrect.

7 requests from Vanderbilt campus patrons could not be filled.

Storage:

The equivalent of 197.5 fully loaded library shelves of new Annex transfers were received from the campus libraries in July. These included materials from Central, Law, Management, Music LP's, Observatory, and Science. We also received new VColl transfers from the Catalogers and reclassified VColls from Special Collections retrospective holdings still at the GLB. We only received 3 new books from the Catalogers to be stored in the RS Inventory.

Following shifting and inter-shelving the QB call numbers from the July move, the Annex is beginning to approach maximums for QA, QB, and QC space.

Central Collection Development is using space in our Stockade for their growth. Annex received the Crispin collection, and the Alden collection will be arriving 8/3. Negotiations are underway for another faculty gift collection in the near future.

The Legal Clinic increased materials in the University tenant storage area. They are particularly concerned about their longer- term storage needs and Library Annex growth.

Management Information Systems is hard at work reducing some of their older storage files. They plan no longer to store their materials off-site after this 2001/2002 fiscal year.

Special Collections acquired many new boxes of materials from Campus Planning and from Human Resource Services.

The Law School faculty requested increased storage, but VU movers as of 7/31 had not yet brought their material.

RS Maintenance:
4,838 Acorn records edited
6 Central titles reinstated
1 title reconned
1 title re-cataloged
2,946 withdrawals processed, surpassing last month! Of these withdrawals, 2780 were for the Education Library
21 intra-library transfers processed for campus libraries’ collections

Visitors:
31 graduate students, faculty, and staff visited us in July.

Buildings and Equipment:
Another new compressor had to be installed in our 2nd floor HVAC. A frozen pipe in our 1st floor HVAC caused another leak and flooding. The Bouchard Sprinkler system's compressor had to be replaced. We experienced two total building power outages in July

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

Books and other end-of-year purchases have been filling our shelves. The team has managed to keep up with cataloging and find the time to work on various other projects.

Highlights:
Rich Murray has agreed to spearhead an investigation on ways to eliminate the cataloging inventory and has started assessing the type of material currently at the Annex and the level of cataloging available for it. The team is looking forward to helping with this project.

Susan Bell has begun planning for how best to process the State of Tennessee school textbooks that VU Education Library has been chosen to receive by Commissioner Phyllis Streiff. Each Commissioner is sent teacher and student textbooks and supplementary materials from about 12 different publishers from which to choose the textbooks that will be used in Tennessee classrooms. Susan plans to have the materials routed directly to CAT, bypassing OS, which should streamline processing and ease the workload on OS.

Don Jones reports that he has completed cataloging, clean up and problem solving on the last of the Sigaux “duplicates” sent to him by Linda Davis. Ann Ercelawn has also finished the few remaining Sigaux titles, some new JSTOR titles and is nearing the end of the long list of Wiley e-journal titles.

Mary Charles Lasater completed cataloging the individual titles in EngNETbase. Mary Charles is also dabbling a bit in CORC, OCLC’s system for web site cataloging. She and Yuh-Fen Benda have been working on cleaning out the last of the Pinyin conversion problems. Mary Charles Lasater and Zora Breeding helped to test the results of the rebuilt headings on Acorn3. Denise Chavez has been concentrating on working through the split headings “Error 9” report with help from Becky Atack and others. The Authorities Unit is hoping to have this project finished by January. Withdrawals also occupy much of Denise, Sue Richardson, and Mary Charles’s time.

Rich Murray has been fully initiated into the intricacies of Baudelaire cataloging, having received and processed a couple of shipments of new arrivals. Anna Kammerer completed her summer work for us in adding call numbers and notes to holdings, completing nearly 2,700 records. Roughly 13,000 records remain on the printouts. A large batch of VU theses has been received and Jeff Taylor has done the initial processing. Circulating copies have been sent to the libraries and the Special Collections copies are being enriched with subject access. A small shipment of Peabody theses was also processed.

The Music materials have finally been sent to Flourish for cataloging outsourcing. Roberta Winjum worked with Mary Charles Lasater, Zora Breeding, Jeff Taylor, Becky Atack, and Nancy Boggess-Korekach to work out the final details. Fern Hieb, the Flourish cataloger, has received the material and begun work. She has spoken to Mary Charles, Jeff, Zora, and Roberta by phone to work through set-up and processing details.

Mary Charles Lasater reports that VU created 46,586 new authority records during the last fiscal year. Of those 39,305 were names, 2,946 were titles, 3,123 subjects and 1,212 were for medical subjects (MeSH). Another 50,865 records were modified. The team manually corrected 26,820 headings on bibliographic records (as authority work and not as part of regular cataloging of new titles). This is in addition to all the changes made automatically by the authority vendor.

End-of-the-year cataloging statistics were also compiled in July. CAT members cataloged 26,179 of the total 37,524 titles processed by RS. Most of the remaining 11,345 titles were speed- cataloged in OS.

ORDER SERVICES:

Highlights:
The first few days of July were taken up with new fiscal year rollovers. These went fairly smoothly (with considerable help from LITS), and we were able to resume routine processing in OS by the time everyone returned from their July 4th Holiday.

Not only were funds, vendors, and orders "rolled" into the new fiscal year, but a number of routine reports are fiscal-year specific, and had to be revised for the new year. We also took this opportunity to revise and simplify many of the routine firm-order claim reports to be sure that orders were being claimed appropriately. Following these revisions of reports, Mary Ellen Wilson met with OS staff responsible for claiming to review the changes that had been made.

For the first time, we prepaid two additional subscription vendors. In addition to prepaying EBSCO, which gives us a 9/10 percent service charge reduction, we also prepaid Harrassowitz, for a $4375 benefit, and Swets-Blackwell, for a 2.05 percent reduction in our service charge. The savings to the libraries, likely to total over $20,000, will be shared among all division libraries when the title- specific charges from these vendors are processed in Acorn as itemized invoices are received.

Throughout the month, OS staff have continued to focus on the processing of the many firm orders being received as a result of fiscal year-end ordering. Verifiers are processing RUSH orders and some routine orders, but are concentrating primarily on gifts, approvals, and assisting with the receipt of the many materials ordered on GOBI and Collection Manager. Serials receivers are keeping the serials and periodicals current - both are being processed within 1-2 working days of their receipt.

PRESERVATION:

Highlights:
Sue Davis, Charlotte Lew, and Yong Chen, along with Kathy Smith, Sara Harwell, and Molly Dohrman from Special Collections, have made three trips to the Education Library basement. The group is inspecting, surface cleaning, and boxing items from the historic University of Nashville collection that has been stored there for many years. The total number of items in the collection has been estimated around 1,000. So far, the “cleaning” crew estimates it has sorted through 600+ items. It is dirty work, but well worth it. It will take several more trips to finish the project.

Sue Davis uploaded data from the two PEMS in Special Collections and Annex for a second time. She generated reports for Juanita Murray and Peggy Earheart using the new software. The last step in the process is to email the data to RIT.

Sue participated in the continuing discussions about how to implement automatic discharging in Acorn. August 9 is the day the new feature will be implemented.

Finally, the Preservation team couldn't have kept its head above water in July without the help of three temporary staff, Anna Kammerer, Leslie Grantham, and Yong Chen. Their assistance enabled the team to make a significant dent in the backlogs both in Binding/Marking and Repair.

Binding:
2,126 volumes sent, including:
1,291 new monographs
83 rebinds
593 periodicals
159 serials

During the summer months our libraries try to squeeze in as much binding as they can. Because most other institutions also follow this same pattern, Heckman Bindery is sometimes overwhelmed by the large shipments. This results in less than 100% being returned with a 2-week turnaround. Most held-back items return by the following week, but we have noticed a real increase in items held back during July.

As a result of binding, Sheranda and Machelle updated 475 Acorn records.

During July Machelle sorted through 1,591 new Central monographs and selected 1,237 (77.7%) for immediate binding. Of the 8,219 Central monographs sorted since January 2001, 3,744 (45.6%) were sent for immediate binding.

Marking:
4,396 books labeled
182 RUSH items
211 unbound serials
253 microfilm reels
1,282 fiche envelopes stamped

The fiscal year-end surge of materials shows up on the Marking shelves as well as in binding.

Repair:
228 volumes repaired with 382 treatments
While there were a variety of repairs made, the bulk of July's work was in two areas: spine replacement repairs and wrapper boxes.

Library Information Technology Services

In July, along with regular services and duties, LITS has been involved in planning, pricing, procuring and implementing major and minor additions and changes to the computing infrastructure. We have wrestled with a couple of major personnel changes. It has also been a very challenging month for email-born viruses.

LITS PERSONNEL

First, under the heading of personnel news. In late June, George Anglin joined the team as Computer Systems Administrator III. George, who most recently worked at the Tennessee Department of Wildlife Resources as network manager, will be taking a primary role in the day-to-day management of our Novell network and has already begun helping us with our NT/Windows 2000 servers. Toward the end of July, Susan Banks announced that, with extreme regret, she needs to take an extended leave of absence for family reasons beginning in early August. We are working to develop a plan to cover the services Susan has provided for the libraries and should be able to announce the specifics of our short-term plan soon. We will all miss Susan's conscientious and capable work. Perhaps more importantly, we will miss her consistently professional, positive and caring approach to her work and to those with whom she works.

ACORN PRODUCTION SERVER REPLACEMENT

Toward the end of June we ordered two D1000 storage arrays, with the initial plan of supplementing the current Acorn production server's storage capacity. We have been monitoring disk usage on Acorn and determined that we would need additional capacity in three to six months. At around the same time, it became possible for us to acquire, at a steeply discounted price, a new SUN 420R. We immediately began to consider the possibility of replacing the current production hardware, a five year old SUN Enterprise 5000, with the new server and add the D1000 storage arrays to the 420R. Rapid, but thorough research with SUN and SIRSI, along with extended research by team members, convinced us that this was not only a viable approach, but highly advisable. The new server will have additional storage capacity (which is expandable) and is much faster than the 5000. Much of July has been spent preparing for this hardware replacement, which will occur over the weekend of August 3rd, 2001. As with the earlier Unicorn software upgrade, we will take advantage of the existence of our Acorn backup server to minimize downtime for our staff and patrons during the hardware replacement.

REVISED WEBCAT INTERFACE

Please take a look at

http://acorntest.library.vanderbilt.edu/

for a preview of the changes proposed by the Acorn/Virtual Catalog Task Force for implementation sometime in August. Changes include:

1) Look and feel consistent with Heard Web pages,
2) The Print/Capture button and page now Print/Email
3) VULibraries button now logoff,
4) video search on left sidebar

The page is optimized for IE5.0 resolution 800X600 but will work on other platforms, browsers and resolutions as well. We plan to put the new pages in place as we upgrade the Acorn production server hardware over the weekend of August 3.

REBUILD HEADINGS PROJECT

With the new server, it has become feasible to consider rebuilding the headings index in Acorn. This process will result in significantly improved keyword searching and dramatically reduced blind references, occasionally encountered currently in Acorn searching. We have considered performing this maintenance in the past but it requires that the server be completely down during the entire process and, with the Enterprise 5000, would have taken approximately 5-6 days. Even with the new backup server we were very hesitant to consider such an extended down time. However, tests on the new hardware indicate that the rebuild headings process will take approximately 36 hours. With use of the backup server, we and the Acorn workgroups involved think it feasible to perform this work over the weekend of August 12, when all but two of the libraries are closed anyway. We will be sending out a proposed schedule for this work early in August.

KUDZU

Earlier this year, Heard Library entered into agreements to host the server for KUDZU, using our SiteSearch software (also used for Athena and formerly for IRIS). This involved purchasing, configuring and installing a new server (again, we selected the SUN 420R) and an upgrade to the SiteSearch software. It also involved a great deal of communication with the other 14 libraries involved. Upgrading the virtual catalog server was a little more time consuming than planned, since it was decided to also upgrade the SiteSearch software at the same time and introduce new funtionality. One of the new features allows the users to see any holdings of an item by their home library before place an ILL request. Dale also implemented IP authentication for Vanderbilt users into Athena (much like that used for KUDZU). The new virtual catalog server will go into production on August 1st and, in addition to increased functionality, will add a much needed increase in speed.

HEARD LIBRARY BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM

For the past year, we have been investigating the potential use of a web based bulletin board service to increase communications options for library staff, as well as for use in communicating with the campus at large. In some of these conversations, we had asked the Staff Development Committee whether this type of service might be of value in a redesigned training program for library staff. Eventually, a bulletin board service was integrated into the training approach recommended by the Development Committee. In July, we installed a new Windows 2000 server to our server farm, it is dedicated to the Ultimate Bulletin Board software that provides this service. The committee has agreed to a three month trial period, during which time they will evaluate its usefulness for this purpose. It has already found additional uses with the Staff Forum and with the Virtual Reference Services committee. We hope that it will provide additional opportunities for staff to share knowledge and information with each other. And perhaps we will find ways to use it to communicate with our patrons.

SECURE WEBMAIL

As the campus migrates toward a more secure networking environment, one of our key concerns has been to make sure that none of our services require usernames and password be transmitted "in the clear" (in clear text which might be intercepted and read by eavesdropping on the network media). Our Webmail interface to the Heard email system is the only service we have supported that did this. In July we installed a Windows 2000 server configured to run the new secure version of Webmail. This server went "live" the last week of July with a minimum of problems.

DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

We continue to work on building an infrastructure for digitizing processes in the libraries. As reported earlier, we have acquired a Macintosh G4 (dual processor, 512MB RAM, for those who are interested) for use with digitizing photographs and slides. Attached to the G4 is a Nikon Coolscan 4000 slide scanner with a batch feeder. This month we also began testing a LEAF digital camera for use with fragile photographs and taking pictures of three dimensional artifacts. The equipment is located in the Special Collections library, where it will have its principal use in beginning the process of digitizing the Photographic Archive.

WORKSTATION REPLACEMENTS/NEW NETWORK PORT INSTALLATIONS/WIRELESS IN GLB

Workstation replacements slowed a bit in July as we installed the last few of the new workstations we have "in stock." A new group of approximately 33- 35 will be ordered shortly.

We have arranged for several new network ports in the General Library Building, some requiring new conduit to be run. We have also arranged a survey for wireless access in several locations in the GLB. Subsequently, decisions were made to install wireless access points to cover the Central Reference Room, Microform Media, Periodicals, and the Central Reserves Reading Room. Shortly we will also evaluate wireless access for the Divinity Reference Room.

MALWARE

This has been an unusually active month for email-born viruses, worms, and trojan horses (collectively known as "malware"). Our email scanner has turned away about 200 infected messages, almost all of these showing up since July 19th. While it is gratifying that this layer of our antivirus strategy is working effectively, it is also a reminder of how important it is to continue to be cautious in handling attachments and in maintaining a strong antivirus strategy.

The most common malware this month, by a large margin, has been the TROJ_SIRCAM.A trojan horse. This trojan scans the Windows Outlook address book, if present, and sends copies of itself AND random local documents on the user's workstation to everyone in the address book. Understandably, this has raised a number of personal and corporate privacy issues. Fortunately, for us, our email scanner has been very effective at screening out this virus and we do not generally use the Windows address book features for our email operations. Nevertheless, we continue to caution our users to be prudent in opening attachments, particularly at home when using third-party email service providers.

STAFF FORUM

Many staff members were involved in the Staff Forum this month and many more attended. All are to be thanked and congratulated. I especially want to thank Mike Martin and Anne Laws, on our team, for their tireless efforts and persistently cheerful and positive attitudes in helping to pull this event together and in following up with the Heard Bulletin Board associated with the event.