Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

September 2000

Yuh-Fen Benda started working for Cataloging at the beginning of the month. Norma Riddick returned to Cataloging following her summer away. In the Order Services Team, two verifiers and Mary Ellen out on medical leave, the departure of Yuh-Fen Benda, and the vacant serial receiver position all affected productivity. Order Services re-hired Debbie Williams for the serials receiver position after an absence of four months. Preservation welcomed back Daphne. The Annex hired a new student assistant, Marla Jasko, and said goodbye to Eugene Berger. Chuck Owens began his training in Library Technology as a Computer Systems Administrator. Anne Laws began her return to work by focusing on some special projects from home.

Division-Wide Activities

During the week of Sept. 18, all staff participated in another week-long Cost Study.

This month marked the final switchover from Infoview to Workflows. Many staff enjoyed the Sept. 18 Resource Services pizza party given to celebrate/mourn the occasion.

In early Sept., Dale Poulter, Nancy Korekach, Flo Wilson, Roberta Winjum, Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater, and Mary Ellen Wilson met to finalize procedures for changing how records are sent to Marcive for authorities processing and the addition of tables of contents. After some initial tweaking, the new method is working very well.

A meeting was held to discuss preliminary procedures for procurement card purchasing of library materials. Mary Ellen Wilson worked on procedures for the Division Libraries to use the procurement card.

Efforts are underway to receive Promptcat records for the Blackwell approval plan books with London imprints. Charlotte Lew will conduct a study of how well this Promptcat profile can meet our needs, as we suspect UKM records for London imprints in OCLC may negate the positive benefit of receiving records automatically. Becky Atack began to train Charlotte Lew in searching.

Various staff attended the Benefits Fair, Circulation Advisory Group, Network Technology, RSIG, RS Management Group, CAT, CAAG, Technology Training Coordinators and Vanderbilt Web Spiders group meetings. Open sessions to meet candidates for the Music Director and Special Collections vacancies were also attended by many staff. Suellen Stringer-Hye worked with others on the Community Giving Campaign.

Training, Development, and Service

Peg Earheart gave Roberta Winjum a tour of the Library Annex and a general overview of the RS Maintenance/Library Annex operations, and introduced her to the Annex staff. Several Cataloging and Authorities Team members met with Roberta
Winjum to help her learn cataloging processes:
Ann Ercelawn -- serials cataloging
Mary Charles Lasater -- authorities
Ann Barnette -- copy cataloging
Becky Atack -- searching issues and books returning
with problems
Jeff Taylor -- cataloging projects, theses processing,
and Keyboard Express software
Don Jones -- monographic cataloging
In Order Services, Mary Ellen Wilson, Chris Waldrop, and Monica
Sanchez have all started teaching Roberta some of the procedures ofOrder Services...much remains for her to learn. Sue Davis also met with Roberta for a Preservation Team overview, and Charlotte Lew gave her some training in Book Repair.

In addition, Roberta met with John Haar, Brent Mai, Bill Hook, Sherre Harrington, and Mary Beth Blalock to begin to familiarize herself with their needs from Technical Services. She toured the Management, Divinity, Science, and Education libraries and met staff in each.

Annex

The responsibility for the Acorn record editing for materials sent for Binding was transferred from RS Maintenance staff to the Preservation Team. As a result, Leonor van Cotthem will be able to devote more time to Inter-Library Loan requests and Annex Periodical activity; and Linda Davis will be absorbing more Annex serial maintenance that had been queued.

Forty-two 1180's for 1st quarter 2000/2001 square footage leasing
were sent to our University tenants. Square footage storage for the
Office of the Graduate School; and for the Office of the Owen School's Dean increased in September.

Annex statistics:

Circulation: 502 items
Patron Web requests: 184
ILL photocopies: 234 pages from 31 Annex books
Transfers: 129 linear feet of materials were transferred from Central, Divinity, Government Information, Law, Management, Science, and Special Collections. "In-transit": at the time of the writing of this report, we had the first of 170 Education Youth Dewey titles, which are transferring to the Central Library's Annex stacks. Helguera transfers, Pia serials, and new VU theses and dissertations arrived in September. GLB furniture and equipment, displaced by the 2nd and 6th floor renovations, were added to the Annex basement.

RS Maintenance:
2,136 Acorn records edited
414 withdrawals
2 reinstatements

Visitors: 36 scholars, tenants, and visitors

Cataloging and Authorities

Material receipts in several areas were quite heavy this month. Most team members have been helping to process LC copy books. Yuh-Fen Benda will also be processing many of the books ordered through Collection Manager during the staffing shortages in Order Services. Her training is coming along very well,.

Receipts were heavy in Spanish/Portuguese, German, and anthropology. Curriculum Lab materials also saw an increase. Science has ordered a large set of country maps which began arriving in Don Jones' area. Ann Ercelawn is making progress in cataloging the Pia serials and Pete Wilson made a concerted push to catalog the remaining Vanderbilt periodicals in Special Collections. Norma spent the month catching up with all the material that had piled up over the summer and the mass of new materials in her areas that arrived during the month. Denise Chavez cleaned up the authorities needs for over 600 withdrawals, which caught us up with the backlog. We began to investigate the possibility of outsourcing the current backlog of Music materials (scores, cds, dvds). Current music receipts are being processed as they arrive.

The Pinyin committee, Pete (chair), Mary Charles, Susan, and Yuh-Fen, continued investigating the implications of this conversion on Acorn and sent out an advisory on a situation that resulted from the piecemeal approach that national conversion efforts are taking. Mary Charles reports that the converted authority records have begun to arrive and she expects to have quite a bit more checking to do for the next several months.

Our annual report to BIBCO was due at the end of the month and all team members made an effort to boost the number of Program for Cooperative Cataloging contributions in order to meet our stated goal for the year.

Order Services

We have made incredible progress on Blackwell approvals and are hoping to have them up to date by the end of October.

Ibtisam Latif, Rita Breen, Linda Hand, and Roberta Winjum participated in cross-training, learning some new skills to help with processing books. In Mary Ellen's absence, Monica, Chris, and Roberta have begun interviews to fill the vacant verifier's position.

A large number of cancellations for the Central Library were rushed through to EBSCO Subscription Services in the middle of September to avoid their cancellation cutoff date.

We have begun working with EBSCO and Dale Poulter to be able to load the EBSCO invoices electronically into ACORN.

Preservation

The team took on new responsibilities which quickly filled up any free time resulting from decreased binding activity. Ann Ercelawn and Machelle trained Karen P., Karen C., and Sheranda to update holdings in Acorn. Ann also showed Machelle how to create item records for a 95-volume Observatory title.

Statistics for Binding Sent: 369 new monographs, 65 rebinds, 192 periodicals, 104 serials. Binding statistics indicated a typical September slow down after the summer rush. Steve Sonafrank, Heckman's representative, paid a visit to discuss concerns about turnaround time.

Records Updated:
341 Central and Science/Engineering Acorn periodicals
23 Observatory and Music periodicals
34 Gov't Info and Management serial records.

Book Repair:
331 volumes were treated with 396 treatments during the month.

Marking:
3,223 regular items,
209 RUSH,
185 unbound serials
The team also stamped 171 microfiche envelopes.

The team continued working out the kinks on the manual labeling process developed by Anne Laws. A new manual process became necessary with the disappearance of InfoView.

Other: Sue met with Bob Howard to help get the Divinity SOLINET microfilming project off and running. The first shipment to SOLINET is due shortly.

The Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester (NY) Institute of Technology has accepted our application to participate in an 18-month field trial of a new preservation monitoring instrument. We will be among 180 cultural institutions from around the country involved in this research project. The instrument (called PEM) is an enhanced datalogger with built-in software which analyzes data. Each site will receive 2 PEMs to test.

Library Technology

Over 287 problems were resolved. For a detailed monthly report see http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/libtech/reports/2000Sep-MR.html

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

Moved Heard Public Web pages to new web-server platform.
Responded to three interruption of service emergencies.
Completed preparations for beta-testing Unicorn 2000.
Replaced 27 Public Workstations in Central Library, 10 staff workstations in Central and Divinity Libraries.
Installed networked color laser printer and network print queues in Walker Management Library.
Participated in LMC discussion of Technology Coordinating Committee.
Developed Communications Model to be used with broader campus community.
Updated policy descriptions, completed adding User Profile descriptions to Acorn.
Installed 6 new cdrom-based database products.
Upgraded 13 existing cdrom-based products.
Prepared "index image" for Central and Management libraries public workstations (for use in cloning).
Started listserv list for Z39.50 Resource information.
Hosted Technology Support Coordinators' meeting.
Developed configuration for IBM Notebook computers for use in Walker Management Library.
Created an unusually large number of Acorn user records and modified others.
Researched options for replacing existing web-search engine.
Completed work to allow sending of records to Marcive for TOC enhancement.