RSIG Minutes 7/11/2001

Present: Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Peg Earheart, Mary Ellen Wilson and Roberta Winjum.

Agenda Items:

Fiscal Year End. The end of the fiscal year and re-start of the new was speedy. Much of the credit is due to the Acorn-PeopleSoft interface. Staff paid invoices, up to June 30th. Then they were able to start paying invoices for the new fiscal year on July 5th.

Early English Books Online. Approximately 125,000 Acorn records will need to be loaded. Approximately $52,000 is being paid for these bib. records from ProQuest. We plan to send the records for authority work by Marcive. Because the file is so huge, we do not yet know (as of 7/11/01) the mechanics of the loading. That information and its timetable will be announced later.

Pre-payments. Order Services is in process of processing the pre-payments to Ebsco, Swets-Blackwell, and Harrassowitz for the 2002 periodical renewals.

RS Inventory. Rich Murray has been asked to lead an investigation for a potential future project with the RS Inventory. Input from Collections Development is to be included; and the possibility of out-sourcing has been mentioned.

Music Cataloging. The Music materials to be cataloged by Fern Hieb have all been inventoried and mailed. She has the OCLC password and the Workflows client. A brief discussion of issues regarding her training followed. It was noted that specifics of this training would be further discussed by the Cataloging and Authorities team.

Biomedical storage. The Biomedical Library will not be seeking library shelving space in the Library Annex.

North American Title Count. Statistics are being gathered of our Collection by subject and by collection levels. A problematic area of mapping, which is our Dewey collection, is being addressed by Susanna Southard, a Divinity graduate student working with RS this Summer.

Printers. Roberta has asked that the Team Leaders send her, by Friday, a list of RS staff who wish to be considered for one of the new Hewlett Packard laser printers.

Annual Report. Roberta is compiling the annual RS report. All team leaders need to send her statistical reports by end of July. Roberta will glean much of the special projects from the monthly hi-light reports.

Leisure Reading Audio books. We began receiving these in mid-June. The procedural processes for handling these has now been fully accomplished.

Automatic Discharging in Acorn. Roberta and Sue attended a demonstration of automatic discharging. Preferences and implications for this feature are not in agreement in regards to Circulation and Resource Services. Thus, a work-around for segmented usage is under discussion and experimentation from LITS. Sue will ask to attend the July CAG meeting for further Information gathering.

Purchase Express. The University of Virginia's expedited 7-day or less order/cataloging/delivery service was introduced. Both Flo and John Haar have mentioned this service to Roberta. Roberta will send each RSIG member a photocopy of the College and Research Libraries' article describing this service. At our next RSIG, this topic will be one of the agenda items.

Education Library collection. A specialized collection located in the Education basement will be receiving collection-housing and preservation decisions. Approximately 1,000 very valuable, yet in poor physical condition volumes are under study. These materials originally were from Cumberland College and the University of Nashville, which later became the George Peabody College for Teachers.

Searches for Volumes. Whether searching for rush materials or missing materials, a great deal of time is spent looking for materials. Roberta would be interested in a count of the number of items each team searchs for each month. It was also mentioned that perhaps this category should be included on future Cost Studies.

Vacations: Roberta reminded RSIG members to continue to keep her informed with their Summer vacation leave plans.

Announcements:

Sue: Summer continues to be a busy time, student help invaluable.

Susan: The Curriculum Lab has received its 1st shipment of Social Studies textbooks for Phyllis Strieff's review. Ms. Strieff is one of the Commissioners of Education for the State of Tennessee. She will be donating all of her reviewed textbooks to the Education Library. Susan will email RSIG members further specifics about this special project.

Mary Ellen: Order Services got through the speedy fiscal year roll-over with a great deal of help from Dale and Nancy. All processing of new materials is going well now.

Nancy: On the Acorn Test server, Nancy ran a Headings Rebuild. Again, this was on Test, and it took 29 hours, but it fixed the blind and phantom references. Tentatively, we are hoping around August 12 to perform this in "live". Anticipated down time would be 36 hours.

Zora: Cataloging is seeing the surge in OS Fiscal Year end orders.

Peg: RS Maintenance is involved with 2 new projects: Central/Mngt. collections retentions; and a Pascal Pia "signatured" duplicates identification project.

The next meeting will be Wednesday, July 25th at the Baker Building.

Submitted by Peg Earheart