Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

March 2001

Technical Services Monthly Report
Library Technology Monthly Report

Technical Services

Division Wide Activities

All of us completed the Annual Review process. We also participated in another week of the Cost Study (3/19-3/23).

Most notable activity for the month: Marking statistics for March are the highest monthly total anyone on the team remembers. The team labeled 5,577 volumes, 203 RUSH items, and 310 unbound serials for a whopping combined total of 6090 items. Sue Davis checked data back to 94/95 and no other month’s totals even come close. Thanks to Preservation staff for this incredible productivity.

The Acorn/PeopleSoft Interface project continues to make good progress. Roberta Winjum worked with Kim Howard and Jennifer Mobley-Harris in the MIS Department to develop the project scope, test plan, and workplan documents. Dale Poulter and Sherlyn Kersey of MIS are working on the interface programs. Yuh-Fen Benda greatly assisted the Project Team by converting several documents to the web. The documents can be found at http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/bfas/.

Zora Breeding, Yuh-Fen Benda, and Mary Ellen Wilson investigated why the Promptcat-supplied OCLC records had not overlaid records for Blackwell British books. They were able to isolate the cause and Mary Ellen adjusted Blackwell profiles and the workflow at Order Services for these materials to correct the problem.

Flo Wilson, Roberta Winjum, Zora Breeding and Dennis Clark met to discuss future possibilities for music cataloging.

Several staff participated in plans for loading the netLibrary records into Acorn, which happened at the very end of the month.

An avalanche of withdrawals from the Annex staff were sent to the Cataloging and Authorities Team as part of several de- selection projects.

Sue Davis set up the two dataloggers for the Climate Notebook field trial and began working with Mike Martin on the software installation. The Annex is pleased to be a participant in this project.

Personnel

Cataloging and Authorities, Annex, and Preservation staff celebrated the completion of the Helguera gift collection with food, a piñata, the presentation of a prestigious award to Rich Murray, and selected poetic readings.

Denise Chavez was feted by by Paul Gherman and Lisa Shipman at a lunch for porcelain Acorn winners and their supervisors.

Machelle Keen turned in 10 Acorn notes for a porcelain Acorn. Congratulations, Machelle.

Preservation happily hired a temporary part time person, DeWanda Lee, to assist with marking and binding production.

Don Jones attended a kick-off lunch for the Faculty/Staff Campaign.

Ann Ercelawn conducted a basic serials cataloging workshop for 19 staff at the University of Kentucky at Lexington.

Zora Breeding met with Bachir Ba of Senegal who was visiting the TV News Archive and wanted to find out how an American library was organized.

Charlotte Lew attended a SOLINET workshop on photograph preservation.

Sue Davis served on a campus group planning the upcoming university-wide staff satisfaction survey.

Annex

Linda Davis focused on Sigaux and Law projects; Clint Grantham focused on Education and Govt. Information projects; Joe Collins and Leonor Van Cotthem were heavily involved with Science projects. This was in addition to the myriad of work for all of the Libraries that they accomplished.

BUILDINGS & EQUIPMENT:
LTT upgraded workstations on March 15-16th.

Burress Roofing continued their work on our new roof, all through the month of March. They are not finished yet, however the temporary roof has stopped the leaks.

Unfortunately, we had temperature/humidity problems due to a HVAC steam coil breakage, requiring a replacement part that has to be manufactured. Work Management staff created a temporary work-around to bring back normal temperature and humidity.

Window breakage in Dewey Daane's Annex office was temporarily patched until a new set of glass blocks could be manufactured. On 4/2 the permanent replacement blocks were installed.

Rounding out the month, equipment-wise, the banks of 2nd floor SpaceSavers required one repair call.

SPECIAL TRANSFERS:
8,650 linear inches of Science Library materials were moved to the Annex on March 8-9. Books and microfilm from the Science Index Section, Science Oversize, Science Periodicals, and regular Science stacks occupied 2 full SpaceSaver ranges. We anticipate it will be late spring before we can incorporate all of the individual titles.

The final Law SuDocs boxes stored in the Annex Alcove returned to campus on March 14, emptying the Alcove. Clint and Joe helped with modifications to each tier of Alcove SpaceSaver shelving. Their changes made the switch to archive "Paige miracle box sizing".

On March 19th, Special Collections staff began the relocation of the manuscript boxes and university archives from the Stockade to the Alcove.

CIRCULATION:
698 items circulated. 66 ILL requests had to be rejected, due to the condition of the material. Surprisingly, we received an additional 13 requests from Vanderbilt campus patrons for materials that have never been stored at the Library Annex.

244 of our patrons requested their Annex retrievals via the Web. (Compare this to only 167 Web requests in March of 2000 and 58 in March of 1999!) Additionally, 51 Inter-Library Loan patrons requested articles to be photocopied, for which we reproduced 528 pages.

STORAGE:
777 linear feet of new transfers were received from Central, Divinity, Law, and Science stacks projects. Additionally, we received new transfers from the Helguera Collection, Pascal Pia serials, new VColl and PColl receipts.

University tenant storage increased for the Law faculty. The 3rd quarter 1180's were sent out to our 42 University tenants.

RS MAINTENANCE:
4 Central titles re-instated
733 withdrawals processed (595 for Education Library & 107 for Science Library)
2,453 Acorn records edited
4 Central titles reconned

VISITORS:
97 on site visitors from: Arts and Science, Central Library, Information Technology Services, Law, Legal Clinic, Music Library, M.I.S., O.U. L., Office of Student Accounts, Owen, Resource Services, VU Theatre Department, and various service representatives. On March 28th David Crenshaw, a free- lance photographer, visited the Annex.

Cataloging and Authorities

Cataloging and Authorities team members participated in a variety of activities during the month. Jeff Taylor processed the circulating copies of both a batch of VU theses that arrived at the end of last month and a batch of Peabody theses that arrived at the beginning of this month. Mary Charles Lasater has been testing Unicorn 2000 and reports that she likes some of the changes (immediate indexing!).

Denise Chavez worked feverishly to try to keep up with searching for and deleting authority records that no longer have a matching bibliographic record. This eliminates the blind references that would result. Mary Charles was heavily involved in making corrections to subject headings in the Arts as a result of major changes being made by the Library of Congress.

Norma has made progress on adding the Sam Fleming gifts. She has also been training Sara Harwell and Hosanna Banks to input manuscript records into Acorn. Ann Ercelawn has been adding ejournal titles for BioOne serials, as well as titles from SPARC, ASM, ProQuest, and Optical Society of America. She continues work on the Pia serials, as well as some Sigaux titles.

Order Services

Verifiers met to study the redistribution of responsibilities covering order requests, approvals, and gifts. Some changes will be taking place in areas of responsibility, and an effort has been made to have sufficient backups in all areas. As Order Services makes these changes, the responsibilities of the verifiers and the monograph receivers blend, giving everyone more experience in both areas.

In the meantime, OS prepares for the increase in order requests that comes at this time of year. Most of the requests in hand have been received within the last 2-3 weeks, with a few heavier subjects dating back to the first week of March. Approvals are up to date, with the exception of a few shipments of Latin American approvals that were received all at once.

The receiving of firm orders and continuation orders is up to date - these materials are being processed well within the week of receipt in the mailroom, though the books received on Collection Manager and GOBI (by far the largest groups of materials) are approximately 4 - 5 weeks old.

Serials and periodicals are moving along speedily, and have been for some time now. Periodicals and unbound serials are being received almost as quickly as they're being opened. The oldest serials with invoices are less than a week old. In addition, all serials and periodicals that were formerly routed to the Observatory, with a few exceptions, are now going to Science.

Visits from Nijhoff sales representative, Ellen Endres-Raffuel, and BookHouse representative, Peter Bence, rounded out the month. Mary Ellen and Roberta also met with Laura Davis from Internal Audit to discuss authorization limits in Acorn Acquisitions following the elimination of the BFAS system.

Preservation

As noted in the Division-wide highlights, and as one team member described it, March was overwhelming. The team faced a non-stop river of both marking and binding, not to mention repair. There were a few days during the month when the whole team worked only on labeling books.

BINDING: In 3 shipments to Heckman Bindery we sent 738 monographs, 998 periodicals, 441 serials, and 12 rebinds. Because of the large periodical and serial load, we were not able to keep up with monograph binding. We hope to focus on that backlog in our next shipment and have already started work on it.

Machelle Keen, Karen Coles, and Sheranda Lee updated 816 Acorn records as a result of binding.

Sue Davis received word that Heckman Bindery plans to raise its prices for the new fiscal year by an average of 3.5%. We will find out details in early April.

Central monograph binding statistics indicate a larger percentage of items going to the bindery during March. Of the total 1,318 Central items, 460 (35%) were selected for immediate binding.

REPAIR: Much of the month the repair staff worked on two Central Reference titles. Many of these volumes required intensive treatments. The other main focus was catching up on the backlog of spine replacement repairs. 126 volumes were treated with 237 repairs.

Library Technology