In addition to the normal committee and team meetings of various kinds, many staff attended the SFX presentation; all staff participated in the June data collection for the Cost Study; many participated in interview opportunities with the candidates for the Coordinator of Technical Services, as well as interviews of candidates in other divisions. LTT members, RS team leaders and RSIG members received Vucal accounts and training on the web client for the university's calendaring system. Jody Combs, Marshall Breeding, Peg Earheart, Flo Wilson and Pete Wilson joined the LMC Retreat to discuss our strategic planning efforts. Sue Davis and Rich Murray were elected to serve as co-representatives on the University Staff Advisory Council. Ann Ercelawn helped with the Retirement Learning classes. Ann E. attended an Advanced Pegasus class and a session on using the Electronic Classroom. Zora attended a VU Human Resources training for supervisors called Alphabet Soup, which deals with VU policies in connection with the Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action laws.

Peg Earheart, Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Marshall Breeding, Flo Wilson, Susan Bell, Zora Breeding, Don Jones, Richard Murray, Sue Davis, and Pete Wilson attended the ALA Annual Conference. Rich accepted a one-year appointment to serve on the Resume Reviewing Service Committee of ALA's New Members Round Table; Mary Charles began a one-year tenure as chair of the CCS Nominating Committee. Ann Ercelawn attended the NASIG annual conference in San Diego, and she will serve on NASIG's Nominations and Elections committee during the coming year. Jody Combs and Marshall Breeding attended an Open Archives Initiative workshop entitled "Extending Interoperability of Digital Libraries" in early June, held in San Antonio, TX. On June 5th Suellen Stringer-Hye attended a Conference at the John F Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts on Digital Preservation. Sue Davis attended the annual meeting of the American Institute of Conservators in June.

A meeting of the Procurement Card pilot project participants was held in Purchasing in June; Flo and Norman Nash attended. Declared a success, the project continues as a pilot while they test procedures for restricted centers and grant-funded projects next. Until that's complete, Purchasing is wanting to keep the scope of the current participation at its current level. RS has developed procedures for ordering library materials with the credit card and will place such orders for items that the libraries identify for handling that way. We are also finalizing procedures so that the libraries will be able to do this themselves on selected titles without creating too many later re-entry problems with getting things back into ACORN and Book Fund Accounting.

The annual report for Resource Services will be completed soon and shared with LMC. All of the production and reporting statistics for the last fiscal year will be included.

LIBRARY TECHNOLOGY TEAM

NetFix statistics for June and July show 208 and 199 problems resolved, respectively. Additional statistics and their detail can be viewed through the PTS Report Generator.

Some of the major projects and issues addressed by the Library Technology Team during June and July included:

Staffing. After over three years of providing able, energetic, and creative leadership for the Library Technology Team, Marshall Breeding officially began duties in his new role as Library Technology Officer in the Office of the University Librarian on July 1. Jody Combs also began his new duties as team leader for LTT on that date. Chris Benda (Network Technician) left LTT on July 1st to accept a new position in the Education Library. A search for a person to appoint to the vacated technician position was pursued during late June and through July. Anne Laws began maternity leave in mid-July.

We'd like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to the Library Messengers who have been such a great help to the Annex and the libraries who are making transfers. Their additional rounds to campus libraries for maintaining prompt turnaround for the libraries that are dealing with construction projects have been most helpful.

$8,815.82 in University tenant charges were invoiced in June. Peg held meetings during June-July with a variety of vendors and service representatives including sales reps from Central Business Group (shelving), Terry Haley about the Annex roof which is being replaced, and Stan Thompson, VU Estimator. Peg conducted customized Annex tours. 53 scholars, tenants, and visitors were on site during June and July. Professor Helguera continues to work here in his office daily. Various library staff were also regular visitors.

For June 2000, 527 volumes circulated to campus, and 24 photocopy requests were filled. RS Catalog maintenance activity included 7288 records edited in June, 320 volumes withdrawn, and 8 volumes re-instated. 5 titles were reclassed, 3 recataloged, and 2 reconned.

For July 2000, 352 volumes circulated to campus. Of these, 101 were Central dewey books -- the highest individual category. Other circulations included 28 miracle boxes to Special Collections, and 33 volumes to RS. We received 5,194 new volumes as transfers. RS Catalog maintenance activity included 8,102 records edited in July, 203 volumes withdrawn, and 2 volumes re-instated. 5 titles were reclassed, 1 recataloged, and 7 reconned.

During the months of June and July, Mary Ellen, Monica, and Chris spent considerable time interviewing for the open positions within Order Services. To date, most of these positions have been filled. JoNell Owens has joined OS as a serials receiver, and Dennis Sauls is now working in the mailroom. We welcome them both to our staff.

For most of June, the verifiers concentrated on placing orders before the fiscal year end. Many of these orders were placed using Blackwell's Collection Manager and YBP's GOBI, though with caution, to avoid overspending funds (since the orders are not created in Acorn til the next day or later.) The verifiers also continued to process approval materials through this period, and we were able to pay the invoices for these materials very quickly, since there is no longer a review period for most of these materials. Funds and orders were successfully "rolled over" into the new fiscal year, and Acorn reports have been revised to indicate the new fiscal year.

Once the fiscal year was officially closed, the verifiers turned their attentions to processing the backlog of gifts in Order Services. Their primary tasks this past month have been processing gifts and approvals.

Many of the firm orders currently being received for processing are materials that were originally ordered on Collection Manager. Due to the large number of these shipments, we have temporary procedures in place to allow for immediate payment of the invoices, with subsequent flagging and routing of the books.

Serial receivers have kept up extraordinarily well with receiving serials, in part due to the return of Yan-Xia Zhong, but also because of the assistance of Suzanne Bell with serials with invoices, Linda Hand with periodicals, and Jo Nell Owens who completed a massive serial/periodical cancellation project for Education and is now being trained to enter the serials rotation. At the present time, the oldest unbound serials are a week old, the oldest serials with invoices were received July 17th, and the oldest periodicals were received today.

Chris Waldrop has taken over the processing of serial/periodical replacements (formerly handled by Sylvia Martin) and has been ordering these or requesting free replacements for periodicals that were received but lost, as well as working on title changes for the various libraries.

It has been a busy summer with our most notable change being the loss of Diane Grantham to other employment opportunities. Norma Riddick took her usual summer off and her materials were dispersed among her backups. The team had a new student, Jim Strader, for a brief period during June/July, who worked on holdings clean-up.

The flow of materials from Order Services remained slow during June, allowing the team to work on problems, projects and inventory materials. In July, as OS concentrated on processing gift collections, we saw an influx of German, Russian and Spanish language materials, including the first of the Waldinger gift collection. We continued to process the Helguera gifts, proceeding ahead of schedule, although not at the same pace as prior to the summer. Several electronic collections were worked on, including IEEE, EOC and ScienceDirect e-journals, and the Women Writer's Online titles. A new batch of VU theses arrived in early June and the Peabody theses arrived in July. As usual, Jeff processed the circulating copies within days of their arrival.

Mary Charles, Becky, Jeff, and Zora met again with Shirley Watts concerning the cataloging and processing of Music scores and CDs. Zora and Susan attended a meeting at Education with Mary Beth Blalock and Flo Wilson to discuss cataloging a group of standardized tests that had previously gone uncataloged, as well as some curriculum lab issues. Zora met with Barbara Clarke of the Women's Center to train her to process the material that the Center shares with the other libraries. Zora also attended a meeting with members of LTT and Mary Ellen to discuss finding an alternative method of sending records to Marcive.

The team formed a subcommittee to study local impact of the national library community's adoption of Pinyin romanization as the new standard to replace Wade-Giles. Pete (chair), Mary Charles, and Susan, with aid from Yuh-Fen Shu, will explore what this national level project, which is already underway, will mean to Acorn. OCLC, RLG and the Library of Congress are cooperating to change all existing headings for Chinese names, uniform titles and geographic headings from Wade-Giles to Pinyin. Bibliographic records for Chinese language materials will also be converted. Pinyin has long been the standard in all but the library community. While this conversion has been in the planning stages for years, changes are finally beginning to be made in the national authority file.

The dog days of summer haven't yet produced the binding rush we expected. However, the book repair lab has been busier than usual. The silver lining in the cloud is that the reduced binding load has freed up Machelle (and occasionally other team members as well) to assist in the repair lab.

BINDING: June binding stats appear to be roughly average ones, but July's stats look very low. The July figure is based on only one binding shipment (when there are usually two) sent out during the month. The shipment going out this week will technically fall into August's totals. June's totals amounted to 1, 973 items: 722 new monographs, 217 rebinds, 996 periodicals, and 38 serials. July's totals are 164 new monographs, 4 rebinds, 301 periodicals, and 43 serials. Added together they equal 512 items for the month's single shipment.

As soon as the team wraps up processing invoices from the previous fiscal year, we would like to start encumbering and paying on Acorn for 2000/2001. Before we can begin each library will need to make sure that funds have been allocated appropriately in Acorn.

BOOK REPAIR: Unfortunately, book repair data for July is unavailable because the customized reports are not working in our Access database. (Jody will fix this when he returns from vacation next week.) June's numbers reflect one of the busiest months on record with over 372 volumes treated. We predict that July's numbers will be equally high.

We are happy to announce the completion of the Law Library project--we ordered and prepared hundreds of wrappers over the last few months. The rest of the time was spent working on custom enclosures for Special Collections and lots and lots of spine repairs. Our student assistant, Yong Chen, has been very productive and helped whittle down our backlog. There are at least two large projects waiting in the wings, so we don't expect to slow down for a long while. Charlotte and Sue met with a bookcloth vendor in June and happily discovered that scraps from the manufacturer can mean a bargain bonanza for us.

MARKING: Marking totals appear to be low average. 3,998 regular, 113 RUSH, and 187 unbound serial volumes were labeled in June. 3,382 regular, 102 RUSH, and 236 unbound serial volumes were labeled in July. We also stamped a whopping 1,086 microfiche envelopes in July. Over the last week or so, the quantity of items coming for labeling has definitely picked up. The year end ordering crunch has arrived.

The team is fine-tuning a new manual labeling procedure constructed by Anne Laws. A manual labeling alternative is necessary for non-LC systems such as SuDocs, Curriculum Lab, or Dewey Decimal. Anne pieced together a solution using WorkFlows, Keyboard Express and Notepad--and good brainpower.

Sue assisted Flo in completing yet another preservation-related ARL survey.