Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

October 2001

Technical Services Monthly Report
Library Information Technology Services Monthly Report

Resource Services Division

Jody Combs, Mary Charles Lasater, Lisa Shipman, Chris Waldrop, and Roberta Winjum are members of the Telecommuting Task Force, looking at possibilities for RS staff to work from home.

Peg Earheart, Pat Johnson, and Mary Ellen Wilson are members of a Resource Services task force to develop a policy for release time for social events and holidays.

Early in the month, Roberta Winjum, Dale Poulter and Mary Ellen Wilson met with Deborah Broadwater and Julia Strickland at the Biomedical Library to discuss the automation of subscription invoice payment in Acorn, particularly with Swets-Blackwell. Interestingly, this collaboration was born as a result of a comment Deborah heard during Dale’s award at the Staff Recognition Ceremonies.

Technical Services
October 2001

DIVISION WIDE ACTIVITIES:

Following recommendations of the Tech Services Team Leaders Retreat, in October Tech Services began in earnest to establish various task forces to visit current work issues and work flow, and improve the interaction among various teams.

1) The Tech Services Workflow Task Force is preparing and studying numerous complex flow charts for ordering, cataloging, and preservation activities. Peg Earheart also attended a meeting of the group to describe Annex Maintenance activities.

2) Yuh Fen Benda, Yan-Xia Zhong, Brian Kurowski, and Laurie Power, chair, serve on a task force to study Series Processing Workflow.

3) A task force has been formed to work on recommendations made in the Inventory Reduction Project (IRP) report, prepared by Rich Murray, who also chairs that group. Rich’s report may be read at http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/rs/inventoryproject.htm. Other IRP committee members include Susan Bell, Nancy Boggess- Korekach, Zora Breeding, Pete Wilson, Don Jones, Peg Earheart, and Sue Davis.

Staff also attended the Technical Services "Hawaiian" event on Oct. 18, and had a chance to interact with others across our various teams. This was the first (and most social) of what are intended to be ongoing meetings of Tech Services as a group.

PERSONNEL:

Mary Charles is preparing for the NACO training that she will be giving in Chicago in November.

Rich Murray, Susan Bell, Zora Breeding, Linda Davis, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum attended the Dreamweaver class given by Suellen Stringer-Hye.

Yuh-Fen Benda attended a Solinet cataloging basics training session at Lipscomb University.

Jean Wright attended a meeting of the Tennessee GODORT at the Nashville Public Library.

Roberta Winjum attended the Charleston Conference on Book and Serial Acquisitions from Oct. 30-Nov. 3.

Dale Poulter, Ann Ercelawn, Rick Stringer-Hye, and Roberta Winjum met to discuss batch loading MARC records for InfoTrac databases provided by Tennessee Electronic Library sometime in Dec.

Ann Ercelawn serves on the GLB’s Ad Hoc Staff Lounge Committee.

A student assistant, Ben Jordan, was hired in the Annex to help create space for new transfers.

Many attended the University Service Awards on Oct. 2 and 3 to honor our own Ibtisam Latif and Debbie Williams for 10 years of service, Ann Ercelawn, Laurie Power, and Monica Sanchez for 15 years, Karen Pillow and Norma Riddick for 25 years, and Peggy Earheart for 30 years.

Staff also attended the send off for Chuck Owens – we wish him well! Several attended the brown bag lunch on enrollment benefits. Donna Nicely’s brown bag on the Nashville public library renovations and opening of the new downtown library was very interesting. Sue Davis, Peg Earheart, and Susan Bell enjoyed the pizza lunch for the Technology Trainers and Support Coordinators. Denise Chavez and Mary Charles Lasater attended the Breast Cancer Health Forum. The month ended with the extremely entertaining Halloween Bash.

ANNEX HI-LIGHTS:

Clint Grantham participated in the CAG subgroup that helped develop the Faculty Delivery Request experiment and that is now working with other lending enhancement options. Clint and Peg Earheart (who developed Annex instructional guidelines) prepared for the November 1 implementation of the new Faculty Delivery Request service. We are pleased to be a part of this one-year experiment in the customized lending of books, scores, and treatises to the participating campus libraries.

Last month we reported on the transfer of the rare Sigaux materials to the Annex. The last volume was received in the Annex on October 3rd. We have already had a request for one of the rare Sigaux books to be "circulated" to the Baudelaire Center reading room. Also in October, Mr. Anthony Garnett spent a day at the Annex collecting Sigaux duplicates.

Linda Davis had an increase in the number of campus serial titles that were requested for withdrawal from VUL during the month of October. Primarily the requests were from the Science Library.

Clint Grantham continued to work on the Education Curriculum Lab withdrawal project surge.

Peg met with Ozburn-Hessey representative, Dail Jones, regarding the Chinese Dynastic Histories. A bid was sent to our contacts at University of Florida. Their administration has yet to decide if a second bid will be requested.

Items Retrieved:
891 items were requested by patrons this month. This is more than double last month's requests, and it is the highest total so far this fiscal year. 358 Web requests is the highest number in our history (compare this to 188 received last month) 103 volumes from campus libraries' Annex storage stacks were sent to various RS Catalogers. 53 RS Inventory books were requested. 16 new RS books were added into the Inventory. 213 Dewey decimal books for Central alone were pulled. Some of these were used by on-site researchers and not actually shipped to campus. 641 pages were photocopied from 56 Annex books for Inter-Library Loan patrons. (Compare this to 382 pages in Sept.)

Transfers:
70 linear feet of new transfers were received from Central, French Center, Government Information, Law, Management, Music, and Science. We also received new VColl, reclassed VColls, and new PColls for Special Collections, and added more filing cabinets for the Dewey Daane Collection.

Government Information staff will wait before sending the Paul Murphy Collection of patents to the Annex. This will allow time to make space.

Institutional Development and Planning (formerly called Alumni & Development) sent more materials for their storage room.

RS Maintenance:
1,769 Acorn records were edited. The project with Astronomy bar coding and call record creation by Leonor van Cotthem continues. Leonor continues to bar code our Annex periodicals that have been circulating too. Linda Davis worked with a number of serial holdings inconsistencies for a variety of campus libraries as well as Annex storage. Clint Grantham continued with the "Not on Acorn" project with Jean Wright, the bound with requests from Central Circulation, and the Education Annex brief record project.

Visitors:
57 scholars, tenants, vendors, and visitors were on site. These included Arts and Sciences faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates, Law faculty, University of Memphis Ph.D. candidates, Baudelaire Center, Belmont University, Central Business Group, ITS, MIS, Office of Student Accounts, Helguera Project staff, OUL, Preservation, Anthony Garnett Fine Books, University School of Nashville, Special Collections, and the VU Theatre Department.

Buildings and Equipment:
Even after the four days of multi-hour visits by our HVAC representatives, we just had yet another part break. This time it's the fan motor on our rooftop unit. Our elevator cargo doors required a service visit in late October.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES TEAM:

We had another busy and productive month with materials flowing heavily in some subjects. Don Jones, Norma Riddick and Zora Breeding claim that the French and German books were coming in heavier than usual. Norma Riddick completed cataloging the John Aden gift collection for Special Collections. Ann Ercelawn worked on the Pia serials and also cataloged e-journal titles from Project Muse, Catchword, and BioOne. Susan Bell and Becky Atack continue to process shipments of TN gift textbooks for the Curriculum Lab. Zora Breeding saw more Waldinger gifts and works of German women writers. Jeff Taylor, Norma Riddick, and Becky Atack cataloged more large shipments of Rush Music CD’s and scores. The Annex sent Mary Charles Lasater more Education reserve-record format materials for original cataloging. Mary Charles Lasater, Denise Chavez, Sue Richardson, Becky Atack and Jeff Taylor worked on the split headings report, in support of the goal to have it finished by the end of the year. Jeff Taylor additionally worked on some of the Sirsi-generated error reports, such as the flex key and broken links reports. The Music outsourcing project with Flourish was completed this month. Jeff Taylor is checking in the materials and reports that the cataloging looks good.

Mary Charles Lasater held more sessions of the NACO training for Yuh-Fen Benda, Becky Atack and MAT Trotter. Zora Breeding gave Yuh-Fen Benda the opportunity to put her training to use setting up several Hong- Kong Chinese names from a Rush video they collaborated in cataloging.

Ann Ercelawn attended a meeting of Science reference providers that resulted in some changes to cataloging procedures for CD- ROMs that accompany serials.

Of the total 3550 new titles cataloged by RS, CAT team members cataloged 2608.

ORDER SERVICES:

Incoming requests for orders have been very light this month; all of the requests in OS awaiting processing were received at the very end of October. Verifiers also continue to add gifts and approvals to Acorn.

During the month of October 1510 approvals and 259 gift titles were added to the collection, and 1869 orders were placed. In addition, 927 titles were speed cataloged within OS.

Serials and periodicals remain current; 4277 serials and periodicals were checked in in October.

Later in the month, Dale Poulter and Mary Ellen Wilson met with Ann Womack in Divinity to discuss the creation of additional item cat1's for the Divinity library to better enable them to track the subjects of their materials. This information will be relayed to OS at the point of order creation, and reflected in the item cat1 field when the item is later created/edited. Dale is creating reports to allow Divinity to gather information on this data.

Chris Waldrop met with John Haar this month to discuss the serial replacement procedure, and he also added records to Acorn for the payment of 5 databases for the Management library.

Also in October, Amazon.com contacted us. They have recently instituted a "corporate account" feature, which allows us to order online without using a credit card. Materials can now be sent to us with an invoice for payment on receipt.

We received an announcement from Otto Harrassowitz this month, which includes information about Europe's conversion to the Euro at the beginning of next year. As a result of this change, we should expect to see the Euro replace the DM on information we receive from Harrassowitz (and, no doubt, other European vendors as well).

Finally, Harrassowitz also reports that "for security reasons, shipments to the US from Germany, both parcels and post, are now placed in pressurized chambers for 24 hours before they are introduced into international shipping channels. We also understand that, upon arrival in the US, shipments are again placed in pressurized chambers for 24 hours before being introduced into US distribution systems."

PRESERVATION:

The Preservation team, still swamped with work, requested assistance to help them reduce backlogs. Monica Sanchez, Kathy Ma, Ibtisam Latif, Debbie Williams, and Yan-Xia Zhong from Order Services all devoted some time to helping Preservation during October, and their help is greatly appreciated.

To provide further assistance, the responsibility for stamping the 1000's of microfiche that come through Resource Services was transferred from Preservation to Library Annex, where Leonor van Cotthem will take charge of this work. In addition, responsibility for Acorn holdings edits for materials sent to the Bindery will temporarily move from Preservation back to RS Maintenance.

In addition to these remedies, although repairs continued to arrive at their regular pace, at the end of the month Charlotte Lew was temporarily assigned half time into binding/marking activities to help the team to stay afloat.

Now for the good news: The binding backlog is slowly shrinking. The Preservation team is current with receiving periodicals back from the bindery, almost current with serials, and within 1/2 shipment of being current with monographs. For those materials waiting to be processed for Heckman Bindery, we are current with all of the categories except the items needing rebarcoding. The oldest of these were sent to Machelle Keen in early October.

Sue Davis met with a Heckman Bindery representative on Oct. 23 and discussed some quality control issues with him. There has been significant recent management and plant employee turnover at the bindery, which in turn has affected some of the binding procedures and processes.

Sue Davis, Machelle Keen, and Roberta Winjum met with John Haar, Mary Beth Blalock, and Janet Thomason to discuss Central monograph binding policies. The group decided to continue following the current policy of selective binding prior to first use, and general binding following the first circulation.

Sue Davis, Charlotte Lew, and Daphne Walker (along with the Special Collections crew) are very happy to announce the completion of the University of Nashville sorting/cleaning project. All these materials which were stored in the Education Library basement have now been briefly visually inspected, vacuumed and surface cleaned, and boxed for shipment to the GLB. Some of the items in the worst physical condition were thrown away, but many gems remain, including a few dating as far back as the 1400s.

Sue Davis uploaded another round of PEM data from both Special Collections and the Annex, generated reports for Juanita Murray and Peggy Earheart, and sent the data to Rochester.

Binding:
2,036 volumes sent to Heckman Bindery including
1,293 monographs
532 periodicals
211 serials
Machelle Keen sorted 1,794 new/gift Central paperbacks (a record high for this calendar year) and selected 1,048 (58%) for immediate binding. Since she began to keep statistics in January 2001, she has sorted 12, 638 Central paperbacks and sent 6,767(53.5 %) to be bound before circulation.

A small backlog involves the outsourced Music materials sent back from the vendor for physical processing.

Please note that Heckman Bindery closes the week of Thanksgiving. There will be a 3-week gap between the pickup/delivery on Nov. 15 and the next pickup/delivery on Dec. 6.

Heckman Bindery began inserting security strips in all periodicals and serials with the October 18 shipment.

October Marking Statistics:
3,842 books
24 reels of microfilm
281 RUSH items
230 unbound serials
We are currently labeling items received in marking Oct. 26. The flow to the marking shelves continues to be heavy.

Repair:
212 volumes repaired with 310 treatments. The bulk of the work consisted of spine repairs and wrapper boxes, mostly for Central, Law, and Special Collections materials.