Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

June 2001

Technical Services Monthly Report
Library Information Technology Services Monthly Report

Technical Services

Division Wide Activities:

Linda Davis and Clint Grantham completed their work on the Sigaux Duplicate Re-verification Project in early June. Don Jones, Ann Ercelawn and Yvonne Boyer have helped with cataloging and cleanup of unique titles and editions that were found in this 5- month project. What now remain at the Annex are 32 shelves of true duplicates. Peg Earheart is meeting with Yvonne on July 3rd, to discuss the remaining Sigaux duplicates and Pascal Pia duplicates.

All of Resource Services participated in another week of the Cost Study June 11-15th.

Personnel:

Anna Searfoss Kammerer returned for the summer and agreed to help with the serials holdings cleanup project, which she originally worked on several years ago. Ann Ercelawn re-trained her to do this work. As Ann points out, Anna was the first person to work on this project and the only one who was willing to come back and tackle it again!

Resource Services staff lost a much beloved coworker this month, Clarise DeQuasie, after her long illness. She is truly missed.

Zora Breeding and Suellen Stringer-Hye co-presented a training session on the Semantic Web for the TennShare meeting on June 8. Vanderbilt Library hosted this meeting in GLB’s Electronic Classroom with the help of Pat Johnson and Roberta Winjum. Sue Davis was among the attendees.

Peg Earheart and Roberta Winjum participated in the LMC Retreat on June 12th.

Many staff attended the ALA Annual conference in San Francisco June 15-19. Attendees include: Susan Bell, Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Peg Earheart, Ann Ercelawn, Don Jones, Mary Charles Lasater, Rich Murray, Pete Wilson, and Roberta Winjum. Travel reports can be found in the RS/Travel folder.

Several RS staff braved the threatening severe weather and attended the June 26 staff event at Percy Warner Park, where it was sunny and pleasant.

Several staff attended the brown bag given by Paul Stadler, visiting librarian from Switzerland. Several also attended the Brown Bag on Personal Safety sponsored by Staff Development on June 27.

Annex:

Special Hi-lights:
The Annex closed the fiscal year with 77,720 more volumes in the Library Annex than at the beginning of our year! 651,862 volumes are now stored off-site. This does not include the storage statistics for microfiche or University Archives boxes. Total circulation for the fiscal year was 7,525 individual items. The previous year’s circulation was 7,083.

The Robinson Collection, stored on much of 1st Floor Range #1, is receiving active attention daily from the Music Library Staff. These particular gifts are titles that Special Collections is offering first to Music, and then to Central and Divinity Bibliographers. Music Library staff are alternating daily afternoon Annex visits to verify the collection. When they have finished their selections, John Haar will make arrangement for Annex visits by the other Libraries mentioned above.

The Annex continues to receive boxed materials intended for the Music Library. We are temporarily storing their newest materials for them this summer during their renovation. At the moment, we have 10 boxes of such stored here.

On June 1st, Jody Combs installed an upgrade to the Annex Library 5 server. He returned on June 15th, after our 1 1/2 hour power outage to help with the server.

Circulation:
189 patrons requested Annex materials via the Web. 521 items were circulated to the campus libraries. 31 patrons requested 358 pages of photocopies.

39 ILL requests could not be loaned because the material was too fragile to ship, or the citations were incorrect. 12 requests from Vanderbilt campus patrons could not be filled because materials were not stored in the Annex.

Storage:
44 linear feet of new Annex transfers were received from the campus libraries including materials from Central, Law, Music LP’s, and Science. We also received VColl transfers from the Catalogers and Special Collections. Additionally, we received 13 new books to be stored in the RS Inventory.

Kevin Zeman completed the Law "shelve by title" compression and shift; and space is now ready for another complete range of Law transfers (Anticipated time table is now August for next bulk Law shipment.)

Maureen Conklin spent considerable time and energy on the History shift, but we had to stop and re-assign her to the L-PZ shift. (This enables us to expand the H-K space that we find is more of a priority.)

Joe Collins continues to "pitch-hit" throughout both floors of the Annex in regards to storage space shifts. He relocated files, LP’s, boxes, books, microfilm on both the 1st and 2nd floors during June.

Leonor Van Cotthem continues to make great progress on the Annex stacks bar-coding project when she is not helping with Inter- Library Loan photocopying and borrowing requests.

We received no new transfers from the University tenants in June. The fourth quarter 1180's were mailed to them on June 4th.

As mentioned in previous Hi-lights, the ownership of the Annex- stored Office of the Graduate Schools' massive records was transferred to University Archives. Special Collections' David Stringfellow continues the nearly daily physical transfer of the materials into miracle boxes and inclusion in the University Archives section of the Annex.

RS Maintenance:
4,315 Acorn records were edited.
12 Central titles were re-instated.
2 titles were recataloged for Central.
An outstanding 2,922 withdrawals were processed. Of these withdrawals, 2594 were for the Education Library. 2 intra-library transfers were processed for the campus libraries’ collections.

Visitors:
35 graduate students, faculty, and staff from Law, Music, Owen Management School, I.T.S., Management Information Systems, Office of the University Librarian, Preventive Medicine, Resource Services, Special Collections, Student Accounts, and the VU Theatre Department visited the Library Annex in June.

Daily visitors, Professor Helguera and Eugene Berger, are making considerable progress with the Helguera materials.

Other Activities:
Meetings, email, and/or phone calls between Peg Earheart and the campus libraries were accomplished in preparation for projects or transfers beginning in July. These included:

(1) Astronomy materials to transfer from Observatory to Annex via Ozburn-Hessey (project on hold until Mr. Jones from Ozburn Hessey returns from vacation; and Jon Erickson and John Whelan return from conferences).

(2) Education circulating ERIC microfiche. 4 additional cabinets will be sent for Annex storage. (Chancellor Wyatt's personal cabinets to be relocated so that these ERIC cabinets can be sequentially stored)

(3) 1000 Management volumes transferring to the Annex which are duplicates of Central titles. (Project initiated by Brent Mai/John Haar.) Central volumes still in Central stacks and not at Annex will be requested by Linda Davis from Jo Bilyeu. The best physical copy will be retained in the Annex; and the duplicate withdrawn.

(4) U.S. Patents and Gazettes. Science will be sending the sets for the years 1999-2000.

(5) University archives. Approximately 125 boxes from Campus Planning and another 50 boxes from HRS will arrive in early July.

(6) Law Library. 127 shelves of Law SuDocs will arrive later in the summer.

(7) SmartForce web-based tutorials -- email correspondence by Peg (even while on vacation) with both Mary Marler (I.T.S.) and Ron Jones (S.F.). Basically, the small Vanderbilt test group is not yet ready to begin the SmartForce testing until July.

Cataloging and Authorities:

As usual, the support staff were able to handle all cataloging emergencies in our absence. While the librarians were away at ALA, Laurie Power and Ann Barnette consulted with Dale Manning about the new Leisure Reading audio books, and Ann cataloged the first seven titles.

The flow of new materials during the beginning of the month was still lighter than usual, so team members devoted time to projects and problem cleanup. Various staff worked on the split headings report, authority work, Pinyin conversion, etc. Authorities staff have been trying to keep up with the withdrawals being sent over from Maintenance, as there were more than 700 sent this month. System challenges have caused a delay in being able to run the unauthorized reports, so this activity has also been backing up. Ann Ercelawn has been working on Wiley e-journals and has contributed some publication patterns to OCLC records. Laurie Power went to OS at their request to talk about what items should come to her through the series authority stream. Jean Wright continues to work on finding SuDocs Classification numbers to use in offering the Dewey "out of scope" Materials.

After ALA, the year-end material began to arrive and everyone is gearing up to become cataloging buzz saws again. Norma Riddick is gone for the summer and materials in her subject areas have picked up along with the rest. Rich Murray has been working on history, Zora Breeding on classics and history in German, and Jeff Taylor is dealing with the increase in Music materials. A large new batch of theses (16 boxes full) also arrived on Jeff’s doorstep and he has been processing these like mad.

Zora, Rich and Roberta took a trip to the Annex to look at the Inventory. It was amazing to see what ca. 12,000 titles looks like!

Order Services:

For most of June, the verifiers concentrated on placing orders before the fiscal year end. OS also continued to process approval materials and their invoices throughout this period to keep both up to date.

All orders that could be placed were completed in plenty of time for fiscal year end. We are holding some orders for which the funds were fully encumbered. These will be placed at the beginning of the new fiscal year.

The elimination of BFAS has allowed us to order and pay right up until the very last day of the fiscal year, allowing us greater flexibility with last-minute year-end orders and invoices.

Once the fiscal year was officially closed, OS began focusing on processing gifts, approvals, and firm orders. The quantity of materials coming into the mailroom is directly proportional to the large number of orders we have been placing over the past few weeks, so as many people as possible are working on processing these materials. The oldest firm orders being processed (including those ordered on Collection Manager and GOBI) are 3-4 weeks old.

Serial receivers have done an extraordinary job of keeping serials up to date all month. At the present time, unbound serials and periodicals are being processed within 24-48 hours of receipt. The oldest serials with invoices are no more than 3-4 days old, primarily due to holding them during year-end rollovers.

Funds and orders were successfully "rolled over" into the new fiscal year (as of July 3rd) and Dale Poulter was able to use scripts to migrate all of the claim information from 2001 to 2002 open orders. (Unicorn reports do not do this automatically.) Nancy Boggess- Korekach has globally edited all of the funds in 2001 to prevent any ordering or payments against them. As of today, we have begun receiving and posting invoices in the new (2002) fiscal year.

Preservation:

June was catch-up month. With 3 additional staff, two of them temporaries (Anna Kammerer and Leslie Grantham) and one student assistant (Yong Chen), the team was able to put a major dent in the backlogs that had grown during spring semester, both upstairs and down. We even managed to tackle the microfiche backlog, which is nobody's favorite.

Binding:
June's binding statistics are the second highest for the fiscal year. We sent 1,237 monographs, 735 periodicals, and 162 serials to the bindery for a total of 2,134 volumes in two shipments.

Machelle Keen sorted 1,148 new Central monographs and selected 694, or 60% for immediate binding.

Sheranda Lee and Machelle Keen updated 798 Acorn records as a result of serials and periodicals binding.

With the close of the fiscal year, Karen Pillow and Machelle Keen completed the first year of encumbering and paying binding funds on Acorn.

NOTE: Heckman Bindery prices increase about 3% with our July shipments. Check the RS web page at http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/rs/restricted/Heckprices2001.htm for the complete price list.

Marking:
The team labeled 3,476 volumes, 171 RUSH volumes, 217 unbound serials and 38 microfilm reels. The team also stamped 1,405 microfiche envelopes.

Repair:
197 volumes were treated with 293 repairs. The largest portion of the repairs focused on Central spine replacements. The other major effort was to complete special work for the Baudelaire and Sigaux collections.

Special Hi-lights:
At the request of Juanita Murray and Mary Beth Blalock, Sue Davis and Charlotte Lew inspected remaining items from the old University of Nashville and Cumberland University collections currently housed in the basement of the Education Library. The collection is in a poor environment with many volumes in poor condition. Efforts will soon be underway to clean, move, and inventory the items.

Sue Davis, Roberta Winjum, Janet Thomason, and Anne Laws are investigating the automatic discharge option now available in Unicorn. As often is the case, what appear to be simple choices on the surface are far more complex underneath. A pilot project is likely.

Library Information Technology Services