TO: Susan Bell, Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Eileen Crawford, Sue Davis, Peg Earheart, Pete Wilson

FROM: Technical Services Workflow Task Force

RE: Charge to the Inventory Reduction Project Task Force

You are invited to serve on a new Inventory Reduction Project Task Force. Your charge is to follow through on using the bibliographic records and report returned from OCLC RetroCon Batch processing to find ways of reducing the size of the cataloging inventory stored at the Library Annex. Susan Bell has agreed to chair the revitalized Task Force.

The original Inventory Reduction Project Task Force saw to completion a project to extract and send to OCLC RetroCon Batch all of the Inventory records to match against their bibliographic database. OCLC returned three outputs: DLC records, member records and a report of non-matches.

The charge to the task force therefore, has three parts. I would like you to work on all three of these parts as you see fit. You can make recommendations about which bib records to use, but you will also, when possible, develop the procedures for processing the records and books.

The first part of your charge is to develop procedures to complete the processing of the books that have DLC records. Currently we have loaded 1,190 DLC records for inventory items into Acorn. The books remain at the Annex waiting to have their processing completed. Several processing steps remain, for example series double-checking, adding the Comments field, binding and/or marking the books, and integrating them into the cataloged collections. Where this will be done, by whom, and at what pace are among the things you should consider.

The second part of your charge is to consider the 8,779 member records, and determine what portion of them might be used to complete the cataloging now in Acorn. You may recommend, for instance, using records for certain languages, subjects, or material types. You might consider restricting records added to those created by certain member libraries. You could even choose to recommend that we add all or that we add none of these records to Acorn. Nancy has access to the file of these records. We would like you to analyze them thoroughly and recommend what you think is best. Pros and cons of several possibilities would be welcomed.

The third part of your charge involves the list of 2,068 records returned with no matching copy. I will deliver a printed list of these to Susan. It is our sense that some of these have records that were missed by OCLC, that some may never have any copy, and that some are no longer desirable additions to our collection. You may come up with a procedure for reviewing the items in this portion of the inventory, a recommendation to catalog all or a subset of items, a recommendation to continue to defer their processing, or some other recommendation.

We should be able to implement procedures for processing the DLC-record books as you come up with them. For the other two parts of the charge, we would like to have your recommendations by November 15, 2002. These can be submitted to members of the Technical Services Workflow Task Force (Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum). As the Workflow Task Force reviews and disseminates your recommendations and receives staff feedback, we will take responsibility for the recommendations as if they were our own, so that you can make recommendations that might be controversial and know that you have our support. When procedures involve staff not under the supervision of members of your task force, the Workflow Task Force will work with those staff and consider their workload. However, some of you may be asked to do the training.

You will probably need to communicate with various members of Technical Services teams as part of your investigation. You are also encouraged to consult with subject bibliographers, shelving staff and others as needed. Since several Task Force members are not part of Technical Services, we do not have authority to assign their responsibilities or direct projects. However we hope that each of them wants to participate in this project, as it affects their areas, and we need their help. We will rely on each of them for feedback when a recommendation runs counter to the priorities of their team or division.

We are available to attend task force meetings as needed. Your task force may also be asked to attend one or more meetings of the Technical Services Workflow Task Force to update us on your progress. In fact, we would like to invite you to our next meeting on Aug. 28 at 9:00 AM in the Baker Conference Room to clarify any questions you may have.

If you do not wish to serve on the task force please let me know. Otherwise, Susan will be in touch with you about scheduling your first meeting.