This document describes the current state of the Resource Services cataloging inventory, discusses possible ways of reducing the number of items in the inventory, and makes recommendations on the best ways to approach such a project. While some of the information is preliminary and will require further investigation, it is hoped that the scenarios presented here will give some insight into possible methods of inventory reduction and aid in the ultimate decision of how to process these materials.

As of September 2001, there are approximately 14,000 partially cataloged items in the inventory. The Divinity Library owns approximately 3,000 of these items, and the remaining 11,000 belong to libraries whose cataloging is traditionally done by RS. The vast majority of the items in the inventory are monographs, but there is also a small number of serial issues. Most of the items in the inventory date from the 1980s and 1990s, but there is a substantial collection of earlier materials, including some very old gifts. The language breakdown of the RS materials is estimated to be as follows:

• English: 5,000
• Spanish (with some Portuguese): 3,000
• Russian: 2,000
• French (with some Italian): 1,000
• German: 400
• Other languages (mostly Eastern European, Chinese, Japanese): 100

These items are partially cataloged. Some have varying degrees of OCLC copy – whatever was available at the time they were last searched. Many others have only provisional records consisting of a title and, sometimes, an author; Order Services staff created these provisional records if they were unable to find OCLC copy. The records currently on Acorn for the inventory items vary in quality and in the access they provide the user. Items which have MARC records from OCLC often have appropriate access points and some subject headings, but since these records have not been reviewed by Cataloging & Authorities staff, they cannot be considered to be of dependable quality. Items with provisional records are basically only accessible to patrons who know the exact title they are searching for; since there are no subject headings and very limited access points, they cannot be located by those doing general research in Acorn (e.g., a subject browse).

Vanderbilt’s holdings have been updated on OCLC for many of the inventory items that have MARC records, which means these items are available for ILL purposes; indeed, inventory items go out for ILL on a regular basis, and then are returned to the CAT team for full cataloging upon their return. However, not all items with MARC records have been updated on OCLC, and very few of the items with provisional records have been. Additionally, because the updating was done automatically, in some cases Vanderbilt’s symbol is not on the best (or even a correct) record.

The main incentive to reduce the inventory is that fully cataloging these items will make them much more accessible to users. As previously described, many of these items are more or less completely inaccessible because they have only provisional records. Even items with some OCLC record would be better represented if they were fully cataloged with the most current OCLC record. There seems to be no question that fully cataloged items are preferable to partially cataloged ones. Additionally, those items with no OCLC copy represent the library’s truly unique holdings, and it would be providing a major service to the scholarly community to catalog those items.

In the past, the inventory was regarded by catalogers as a staging area where materials would be sent temporarily before being called back for full cataloging. Unfortunately, over the years the CAT team has faced more and more responsibilities and, with increasing demands on their time, cataloging the inventory has been forced onto the back burner; this is why it stands at its current unwieldy size. Though the inventory has been reduced over the years, there has never been an opportunity to tackle it in an effort to clear it out. These items have never been forgotten, however, and the team agrees that steps should be taken to get these materials fully cataloged.

It should be noted that space considerations come into play here, as they do with nearly every situation facing the library at the present time. The Annex, where the inventory items are housed, is nearing capacity, making moving these items out an appealing idea. However, the stacks at Central and the other libraries are also reaching capacity. It simply is not possible to catalog these 14,000 items and move them to the libraries. The general consensus among the members of the CAT team is that, while this issue is one that should be kept in mind, ultimately it is not the team’s decision. The catalogers would certainly be willing to work with Collection Development, Circulation, and Annex staff to develop solutions on how the space issue should be addressed, but the fact that space is tight should not be a reason not to embark on this project.

Another caveat is that there is still some question as to how the Divinity materials fit into this project. As of the current date, it is still undecided as to whether RS will be responsible for the Divinity items, or whether Divinity is responsible, or whether there will be contributions from both parties. For the purposes of simplicity in this report, the Divinity items will be included in calculations unless otherwise noted. This assumption is not made as an endorsement either way as to how these materials should be treated; they are being included merely for simplicity’s sake and to cut down on the number of possible scenarios that will need to be presented. The reader should keep in mind, however, that the decision on how to handle Divinity materials will make a significant difference in cost, time, strategies, etc.

Upon being approached by Roberta Winjum to assess ways to reduce the inventory, I began by asking the Annex staff to send me a number of shelves of inventory materials so I could get an idea of the type of material involved as well as the type of OCLC copy currently available for these materials. I asked the Annex staff to select books "randomly," by which I meant a representative sample, i.e. not entire shelves of Divinity materials, entire shelves of old gifts, etc. I wanted a sample that would have a representative variety of subjects, languages, and imprint dates so that the data collected could reasonably be extrapolated to represent the inventory as a whole. When the books arrived, I began searching them on OCLC and, while I was at it, went ahead and fully cataloged them all because I saw no reason to search them and then send them back. (It should be noted that Susan Bell assisted by requesting, searching, and cataloging a number of books; I have included her findings in my statistics).

When searching, I divided the copy found into five categories:

• LC/PCC
• Usable member copy (has an LC call number and subject headings if needed)
• Member copy in need of work (lacks a call number or subject headings if needed)
• Vendor records (Puvill, Iberbook, Harrassowitz, etc.)
• No copy found

A total of 253 items were searched. For the purposes of these statistics, Divinity items were removed and not searched. (For informational purposes, a total of 15 Divinity books were sent over; this number is not included in the total of 253). Two of the 253 items were serial issues (less than 1% of the total); these two items were also excluded from the following figures.

The items fell in three general time periods: imprint date 1998-1999 (newest material); imprint date mid-‘90s; imprint date 1970-1990 (oldest material). One or two items were even older.

OCLC copy was found for these monographs as follows:

(Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding).

This table shows that a surprising amount of LC/PCC copy is available for the inventory materials. The "Usable Member Copy" category, in which items have a call number and subject headings (if needed), consists of materials that could, theoretically at least, be sent through INVD. The total of the LC/PCC and the Usable MC items is 68%; these are items that, again at least theoretically, do not need attention from the original catalogers. Only 32% of the items in the sample would definitely need to go through the original catalogers.

In summary, good OCLC copy was found for over two-thirds of the items in the sample. This figure bodes well for the project and alleviates any fears that the inventory is a morass of items with terrible copy that all need intense attention from the original catalogers.

Two approaches have been suggested for reducing the inventory: processing it in-house or having it processed by an outside agency. The CAT team has been told that there should be some additional funds available in the current fiscal year to tackle this project. The question is what the best method would be.

It seems evident that current CAT staff could not put a dent in the inventory given current workload. The team’s efforts during the Helguera project give an idea of the kind of extra work that can be "absorbed" into the team by putting all other special projects on hold. With three original catalogers and three other team members devoting large amounts of their time to the Helguera project (along with additional efforts by several other team members), about 3500 titles were processed in ten months, which averages out to about 350 titles per month. At that rate, it would take 40 months to catalog 14,000 titles. It is my belief that the team could not sustain three and a half years of the level of effort put into the Helguera project, even if it were possible to put all other projects on hold for that amount of time, which seems unlikely. (Granted, there was more original and complex copy cataloging required in the Helguera project than the inventory reduction project would involve, but I think we would still be talking about three years, especially given that the team is short one original cataloger for three months every summer).

It has been suggested that the possibility exists of hiring an additional staff member to work on this project. There is precedent for this sort of solution; Susan Schaeffer worked for the CAT team on inventory reduction from November 1998 to April 1999. During those six months, she searched inventory lists and cataloged 2657 titles, an average of 442 per month. Assuming that 23% of the inventory has LC copy (though I suspect the number is lower than that, since the older material has much less LC copy), that would mean that there are about 3220 books with LC copy in the inventory. A temporary employee working at the rate Susan Schaeffer did would be able to catalog those 3220 books in just over seven months. Some training time would have to be added into this figure. Such an effort would also still leave almost 11,000 books remaining in the inventory that would have to be "absorbed" by the rest of the team. Again, this solution does not seem to put the desired dent in the backlog. (At the Helguera project rate of 350 titles per month, that would still mean 30 months of the team’s time).

It has also been suggested that perhaps a temporary employee could be hired to work on current LC copy cataloging so that Yuh-Fen Benda could devote her time to inventory work. With some additional training, Yuh-Fen could do some of the member copy in addition to the LC copy in the inventory, which would leave less inventory material to be dispersed among the rest of the team. It is difficult to estimate how this approach would work in terms of numbers, but it does seem that perhaps this would be a better solution than hiring someone to work only on the LC inventory books.

The other major approach to reducing the inventory would be to outsource the cataloging. I have discussed the project extensively with Doug Potts, Senior Library Services Consultant at OCLC. Initially RS staff thought that perhaps this project was one OCLC’s TechPro division might be able to handle, since TechPro specializes in this sort of cataloging project (as opposed to ongoing, current cataloging). However, conversation with Mr. Potts made it clear that this project would be more complicated than that. The main issue is that the inventory is partially cataloged. TechPro does project cataloging in cases where materials are not cataloged at all; they start from scratch. Mr. Potts suggested that this project might be better handled, at least initially, by OCLC’s RetroCon division, which provides records when something already exists. In a document he sent me, he writes:

My understanding is that the list of inventory items could be sent to OCLC, who would do an initial pass-through with the RetroCon Batch service. After that point, TechPro could come into action. Again, quoting from Mr. Potts:

Even if we assume, for simplicity’s sake, that OCLC could catalog all of the items through some combination of the RetroCon and TechPro divisions, there are still many practical logistics that would have to be worked out. Would the fully cataloged items be called over from the Annex, labeled and, if appropriate, bound? How would this work? Would everything be sent to someone who would scan in the barcodes and print spine labels from the records provided by OCLC? Or would the items be left at the Annex as is with the knowledge that at least they would now have full cataloging records and therefore be as accessible as any other fully cataloged items housed at the Annex? These are questions that would need to be addressed in conjunction with Preservation, Annex, Circulation, and Collection Development staff.

Doug Potts at OCLC seemed confident that they could handle a project of this nature, and had answers to all of the questions that team members asked me to pose to him. (Examples: yes, they could follow our local practice in matters such as series treatment, call number cuttering, etc.; no, Pinyin would not be a problem and we would not have a bunch of Wade-Giles records dumped into Acorn). He did say that local series practice would be "no problem" for TechPro, but that it "might be a problem" for RetroCon Batch since that is done by machine. There would certainly be some amount of cleanup needed at the end of any OCLC project, though it is difficult to speculate on exactly how much. As far as how the OCLC approach would work physically, Vanderbilt would send a file that could be sent through the RetroCon Batch process; then the unresolved items could mostly be cataloged by TechPro without sending the physical pieces themselves, although in the case of problematic or questionable items, Vanderbilt would need to ship them the actual books. (He assured me that OCLC takes responsibility for items in their possession).

There is some question as to the timeline of events if OCLC were to handle this project. My assumption is that the RetroCon Batch service could do the initial pass-through more or less immediately since it is done automatically, though he gave me no idea how long that might take. At the TechPro end, he gave me different dates for different materials because different catalogers handle pieces according to language expertise. As examples, he estimated that they could begin working on the English items "within the next couple of months" and the Russian items "in early 2002." He did not know about the Romance languages and said he would get back to me with dates because the people he needed to talk to were on vacation, and I have not heard back about this yet. In none of the cases did he give me an idea of how long the entire process would take.

An issue involving OCLC that must be considered is Vanderbilt’s negative experiences with their contract cataloging in the past. Several years ago the Sigaux collection was sent to TechPro and there was a great deal of dissatisfaction with the work they did. Many considered the cataloging to be substandard and much cleanup was necessary afterwards. It could be expected that there would be a great deal of resistance to the idea of "sending the inventory to OCLC." Doug Potts did say that we could specify exactly what OCLC would do and what they would not do. For example, we could say that OCLC would only do LC copy cataloging, or accept any full-level member copy. We could specify that they would not do any original cataloging. At the beginning of the project, we would establish a profile of exactly what we did and did not want, and that could be tweaked as the project went along. After especially bad experiences with TechPro’s Sigaux original cataloging, the team asked them to stop doing original cataloging and did the remainder in-house.

One of the primary considerations is the cost effectiveness of each approach. I asked Flo Wilson to share some figures gathered from the ongoing cost study to give me an idea of how much in-house cataloging costs. The annual data for 2000/2001 shows that the unit cost of CA05.1 (monographic copy cataloging) is $5.30 per item. Flo noted that this figure only includes actual CA05.1 time, and that overhead (both within the cataloging process, such as CA02 and CA04, as well as external overhead) would make the true cost of copy cataloging higher; she estimated it would be more like $8-$10 per item. The unit cost of CA06.1 (monographic original cataloging) during the same period was $12.53 per title, and the caveat about overhead again applies.

Doug Potts from OCLC gave me the following information about pricing:

This project is immensely complicated, and there are no easy or quick solutions. It should be remembered that it took many years for the inventory to reach its present size, so we cannot expect it to go away overnight. There are still many questions to be answered and logistics to be worked out whichever approach we take. Therefore, I will present merely my suggestions for approaches I feel we should strongly investigate.

Although there is likely to be much philosophical and personal resistance to utilizing OCLC for this project, I really do not believe it can all be handled in-house in a way that will not utterly disrupt normal operations of the Cataloging & Authorities Team. At the same time, I would be very hesitant to turn the entire project over wholesale to OCLC.

I believe we should utilize the OCLC RetroCon Batch service as a first step. There would certainly be many logistical issues to be considered, and I feel that LITS staff would have to be major participants in this discussion. Figuring out the technical interaction between Acorn and OCLC would be a major issue, and would require a substantial amount of time on the part of LITS. However, I believe that the RetroCon Batch service could take care of a large portion of the inventory in the first round. If OCLC can provide records at $.42 each that it would cost us $8-$10 each to do in-house, that would reflect a tremendous savings. If we go back to the earlier estimate that approximately 68% of the inventory has full-level copy (LC, PCC, or usable member copy), that would be about 9520 items. 9520 items at $.42 each works out to approximately $4000. 9520 items at $8 each works out to over $76,000. I recognize that this is taking a somewhat simplistic approach to the math, and I seriously doubt that RetroCon Batch could really take care of 9520 items without human intervention. The cost comparison is striking nevertheless. If the cost of improving an Acorn record via RetroCon Batch is 1/19 that of doing it in-house, the savings would be astronomical no matter how many titles could be done. Even if only 3000 records could be replaced using RetroCon Batch, the savings over doing them all in-house would be over $22,000. If only 1000 could be done by RetroCon Batch, the savings would still be over $7500.

After RetroCon batch, we would need to reassess the situation; it is impossible to definitely say "we should then do X," because we do not know what we would be left with after this process. As I previously stated, Doug Potts said he could not give me a price estimate on the post-RetroCon Batch costs of using TechPro because we would not know what was involved until after the fact. (I wonder if perhaps we could pin him down a little bit if we push him). The catch-22 is that it is difficult to make a decision without knowing exactly what is involved, but we cannot know exactly what is involved until after we have made a decision.

If we ran the inventory through RetroCon Batch, we could then look at what we had left and make a decision on how to go from there. We might decide we want to send some items to TechPro. We might decide we want to do the remainder in-house. We might do a combination of the two. At some point we might also ask the bibliographers to review the inventory to determine if all items should be retained.

It is frustrating to not be able to make more concrete recommendations. However, the issues are so complex and hazy that I do not feel I can definitively say at this point "We should do A, then B, then finally C, and it will cost us this much money." Therefore, I feel the only recommendation I can make at this point is to begin by using the RetroCon Batch solution for a first pass-through of the inventory. Again, this will require substantial participation by CAT and LITS staff, including working out the specific technical details of the Acorn/OCLC interface. Even if we do send the database through RetroCon Batch, there will still be many items that need further work, and I cannot believe the CAT team would recommend sending it all off to OCLC. There is going to be much in-house work needed no matter which approach we take. Therefore, if there is any possibility of additional staffing during this project, either by hiring temporary staff or by reassigning RS staff, I think we should begin this process. Perhaps a good start would be to form a task force on the inventory reduction project that would include staff from throughout RS, and possibly from Collection Development, Circulation, or other involved parties.

Again, there are no easy answers to this complex question. I hope this report has provided enough information to at least get the ball rolling. This project will be a challenging one, but the benefits to the library’s users will make it worth the effort.