Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

November 2000

Regina Berry has accepted the Serial Receiver position in Order Services. Regina comes to us from the Sarratt Student Center, in the Office of Schedules and Reservations. She has previous experience working with periodicals at the University of Washington. Regina will begin on December 11.

Order Services has also received the resignation of Dan Riggs effective Dec. 1. We wish Dan and Sandra well in their new life in Colorado.

Training, Development, and Service

Many staff attended Flo Wilson’s presentation on the Cost Study on Nov. 9. Several staff attended the third part of the Dreamweaver training. Several also attended the presentation by the candidate for the Music Library Director.

Mary Charles Lasater was an invited participant in the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the ew Millennium, sponsored by the Library of Congress, in Washington, DC November 15-17.

Susan Bell served as a consultant for the "ProQuest University" ALA mid-winter pre-conference. She also ssisted the library Training Coordinators in putting together the survey on staff training needs.

Ann Ercelawn attended a beta test of the SCCTP MARC Holdings workshop held in Athens, Ga.

Sue Davis and Charlotte Lew taught another session of "Introduction to Preservation Concepts" on November 9. Joe Collins was among the attendees.

Sue Davis and Suellen Stringer-Hye attended the November 17 Information Alliance workshop in Lexington, KY.

Roberta Winjum attended the Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition on Nov. 1-4.

Mike Martin attended a session of Safe Zone sensitivity training, aimed at promoting a better campus environment for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender students.

Library Technology

The library experienced no major library-wide service interruptions in November. There were several occurrences of sluggish LAN performance, however, and ongoing investigations are attempting to address these. 19 viruses were intercepted by the virus email scanner; the most prevalent was the TROJ_NAVIDAD.A virus. 195 netfix problems were taken care of and closed out.

Some of the projects which were addressed during the month included:

--Installation of 24 workstations
--Continued work on redesign and update of LTT web pages
--Installed 6 new CD-ROM products and upgraded 13
--Began installations of Office 2000
--Began development of KUDZU, a virtual catalog for ASERL members
--Worked with SIRSI and OST on loading the EBSCO invoice into Unicorn
--Evaluated several server monitoring/reporting software applications
--Coordinated installation of new network ports in the GLB
--Made ACORN policy changes for holding codes, item types and locations for Divinity and Education
--Continued work toward beta testing Unicorn 2000
--Moved responsibility for generating web statistics to Susan Banks
--Deployed third-party survey tool, Zoomerang, for two web-based surveys

Technical Services Activities

Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Mary Ellen Wilson, Janet Thomason, Jo Bilyeu, and Roberta Winjum met to re-examine Central binding policies. The current policy has caused some volumes to be sent to the stacks unbound that logically should be bound. New procedures will give RS guidelines to make some binding decisions.

Zora also worked with Julie Loder and Janet Thomason on the RS procedure for adding replacement books and brought the topic to RSIG.

Roberta Winjum has been working with Marilyn Henry to learn procedures of Marilyn’s job and plan for coverage following her retirement at the end of December.

Order Services now has free access to Ingram’s web database, ipage. Ipage can be used for on-line verification and ordering. We hope it will also be useful for staff personal orders. If anyone would like a password for access, please contact Roberta

Roberta has begun reviewing the problems found in Preservation related to books processed earlier in the tech services stream. Roberta is using this review to better understand the complexities of procedures and to identify common oversights. She hopes to use this information to give helpful feedback to staff and improve procedures.

Cataloging and Authorities

November cataloging efforts are notable for the completion or near- completion of several important projects:

Rich Murray, Ann Barnette, Norma Riddick and Pete Wilson, with support from Denise Chavez and Becky Atack, are wrapping up the Helguera gift collection. They expect to be finished cataloging Helguera monographs in early December.

Ann Ercelawn completed cataloging the e-journal titles in the Emerald Library.

Don Jones and Ann Ercelawn worked on cleaning up some problem Sigaux records left over from the Techpro outsourcing project.

Jeff Taylor finished cataloging the last of the 100 CD set of Great Pianists for Music.

Susan Bell cataloged a mass of Curriculum Lab materials.

Zora Breeding cataloged large numbers of Waldinger gift books as they arrive from Baker and the repair lab.

Denise Chavez processed another 100 withdrawals.

Mary Charles Lasater worked through a large amount of Pinyin changes that came in the Marcive monthly report.

Order Services

Receiving: Periodicals, unbound serials, and most of the non-book materials are going out within the same week they are received. The oldest materials with invoices (firm orders and serials) are just over four weeks old.

The Ebsco invoice has been received and entered into the Book Fund Accounting System. The invoice will be posted against Acorn using a program Dale Poulter has written to automate the process. Dale and Mary Ellen Wilson have been thoroughly testing this program in Acorn Test. OS will be forwarding to each library a copy of their portion of the Ebsco invoice for their information.

Preservation

Reminder: Due to the Christmas holiday, there will be only one binding shipment pickup/delivery during December (12/14).

Sue Davis submitted the annual ARL Preservation Statistics Questionnaire data by the Dec. 1 deadline.

Sue also completed deliveries begun in October of sample Rescubes to each library on campus. These corrugated plastic boxes are new additions to library disaster response kits. Because they are plastic, they can withstand sopping wet books or other items better than cardboard. A larger supply of Rescubes is housed in the Preservation Office in case a collection emergency does arise.

Two volumes of a valuable series in Central were discovered to have mold problems. Charlotte reviewed all 50 volumes on the shelf, found no other infestation, and cleaned the two with existing mold.

The binding and marking load for Nov. were similar to a 'summer rush'. A small backlog of monographs waiting for binding is due to the large influx of periodicals.

Statistics for Binding Sent:
549 new monographs,
21 rebinds,
783 periodicals,
184 serials
1537 total
Records Updated: 440

Book Repair:
276 volumes were treated with 404 treatments during the month, including many wrappers, portfolios, and pockets for Central, Law, and Special Collections.

Marking:
3789 regular items,
149 RUSH,
274 unbound serials
The team also stamped 813 microfiche envelopes.

Annex

Circulation: 60 items
Patron Web requests: 259 (and still growing!)
ILL photocopies: 44 requests for 474 pages from Annex books
Unfilled requests**: 39
**Requests that we could not send because of a poor citation or item not held in the Annex

Transfers:
53 linear feet of materials were transferred. These included 2000 theses and dissertations and materials from Central, Government Information and miscellaneous gifts.

RS Maintenance:
2305 Acorn records edited
277 withdrawals
1 reinstatement
4 recon titles
105 titles reclassified
95 intra-library transfers

Visitors:
51 scholars, tenants, and visitors from:

Arts and Science,
Central Library,
Divinity Library,
Information Technology Services,
Management Information Systems,
Office of the University Librarian,
Office of Student Accounts,
Owen School
Special Collections
VU Theatre Department