This page has been accessed http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~ulcjh/bhmin0101.html

This compilation was prepared by Judith Hopkins, University at Buffalo


SOME OF THE FOLLOWING LIBRARIES DID *NOT* ISSUE A ROUND ROBIN REPORT.

LIST OF LIBRARIES

Columbia University
Cornell University
Duke University
Harvard University
Indiana University
Library of Congress
National Agricultural Library
National Library of Medicine
New York Public Library
New York University
Northwestern University
Ohio State University
Princeton University
Stanford University
University of California at Berkeley
University of California at Los Angeles
University of Chicago
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Michigan
University of Minnesota
University of Pennsylvania
University of Texas at Austin
University of Washington
University of Wisconsin at Madison
Yale University


UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY

From: Lee Leighton lleighto@library.berkeley.edu
Berkeley Round Robin Update, January 2001

  1. PERSONNEL MATTERS

    Our University Librarian, Jerry Lowell, resigned and left the library in August 2000. We have interviewed three candidates for the position this fall. Tom Leonard, a faculty member from the School of Journalism, is serving as our Interim University Librarian.

    I continue to serve as the Acting Head of the circulation department for the main and undergraduate libraries. We are currently interviewing for a permanent head of that department.

  2. SHELF-READY MATERIALS

    We will be working with Yankee Book Peddler over the next few months to begin receiving shelf-ready materials. We have been doing PromptCat with both YBP and the Academic Book Center, and we have been receiving shelf-ready science materials from Academic for several years. We will be identifying YBP profiles that send materials consistently to the same locations to minimize the need to change locations on the materials and in the catalog after the materials arrive in the library. We'll try to cope with profiles that send materials to more than one location later. Profiles that bring in materials that often have location changes may not ever be part of the shelf-ready program.

  3. MACHINE-READABLE CATALOG RECORDS FROM AFFILIATED LIBRARIES

    A committee is studying the issues surrounding getting machine-readable catalog records from our Affiliated Libraries into GLADIS, our locally developed catalog. Affiliated Libraries, such as the Boalt Law Library, are libraries that do not report to our University Librarian, and they catalog their own materials on OCLC or RLIN. All the Berkeley campus libraries are represented in MELVYL, the University of California union catalog, and this has led to a great deal of confusion among the students about the two catalogs.

  4. TEMPORARY EMPLOYEES

    The University of California system recently changed the rules for hiring temporary employees in many non-librarian positions. The new rules, which are the result of collective bargaining, allow temporary employees to become permanent staff after working 1,000 hours. Because of the new rules, newly advertised temporary positions are for periods less that 1,000 hours or about five months. As a result of this restriction, we have had very few applicants for any of our temporary positions.

  5. RECRUITMENT AND POSITION RECLASSIFICATIONS

    Alan Ritch, our Associate University Librarian for Collections, is recruiting for an assistant who will be responsible for managing the acquisition of electronic resources.

    Three high ranking library assistants in Technical Services have been reclassed to higher level positions in the University's analyst series. This was nearly impossible to do until recently, and it's now becoming a trend in other areas of the library as well.

    Lee Leighton
    Associate University Librarian
    And Director of Technical Services

Return to List of Libraries


COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

From: Robert A. Wolven wolven@columbia.edu
Subject: Columbia report

Columbia Round Robin Update, January 2001

  1. RECRUITMENT

    Elaine Sloan, our University Librarian and VP for Information Services, has announced her intention to retire in July 2001. A search committee has been formed to assist in finding a replacement.

    We are also recruiting for a Director of Library Information Technology (I'm filling that role on an acting basis), a Metadata Analyst, and a Networked Electronic Resources Librarian.

  2. NEW ILS

    We have begun the search for a new ILS to replace our NOTIS system. We hope to make the selection in 2001, implement in summer 2002 or summer 2003.

  3. RECON

    We are nearing the completion on monographic recon (done by OCLC) and contracting with OCLC for the remainder of our serials. Still left: Rare Books, microforms, serial analytics, some non-Roman. We have, however, completed CJK recon just in time for Pinyin conversion.

  4. AUTHORITY CONTROL

    We will be reprocessing our entire database for authority control in 2001, using LTI as the vendor. We timed this to coincide with Pinyin conversion, so that we can get the converted authority records and convert headings on non-Chinese titles. (We expect to get ca. 100,000 converted Chinese records from RLIN early in the year.)

  5. SHARED REMOTE STORAGE FACILITY

    Construction has begun on the ReCAP (Research Collections and Preservation) remote storage facility we will share with NYPL and Princeton. We're continuing to prepare materials for transfer, to begin next fall. Over the next 4 years, ReCAP will replace the three storage facilities we already have.

  6. RENOVATIONS

    Renovations continue in Butler Library, with the new Periodical/Microform Reading Room opening this week. Construction is about to begin on 10 subject-focused graduate reading rooms in the upper floors of the building. Renovations will also begin in 2001 on the Avery Art and Architecture Library, including restoration of the McKim reading room, addition of compact shelving, and construction of a new Drawings and Archives study center. Finally, we will also begin construction on a new "branch" library at Biosphere2 in Oracle, AZ.

  7. DIGITAL RESOURCES

    On the digital front, we are acquiring and loading sets of records for some large collections and aggregators, including netLibrary, ITKnowledge, and ProQuest. We are now proxying all remote-access resources through a "resolver" (effectively, a PURL server). We have converted and loaded into our Master Metadata File metadata records from all six institutions participating in the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) and will add records from the Jay Papers project (correspondance and documents) early in 2001.

Robert Wolven
Director of Bibliographic Control
Acting Director of Library Systems
Columbia University Libraries
Butler Library,
535 West 114th St.,
New York, NY 10027
voice: 212-854-5585
fax: 212-854-0089
email: wolven@columbia.edu

Return to List of Libraries


CORNELL COLLEGE LIBRARY

From: Karen Calhoun ksc10@cornell.edu
Subject: Cornell Update

Dear colleagues,

Here is an update on Cornell since the last ALA. --Karen

  1. LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

    In technical services, we've spent most of our time and energy over the past six months adjusting to life with our new LMS, Voyager. After launching the new system at the end of June 2000, and finishing the upgrade to Voyager 2000 on December 29, we are breathing a huge collective sigh of relief. It will be several more months before we' come close to restoring the pre-Voyager balance, in tech. services, between what comes in and what goes out. Nevertheless we've done reasonably well moving up a steep learning curve, assuring staff are trained and comfortable using the clients, writing and disseminating macros, adjusting and documenting procedures ... the list goes on. Our Voyager documentation, for those who have an interest, may be found at http://www.library.cornell.edu/voyager .

    Of potential interest to some Voyager sites may be our progress to date on what we call our "serials patterns project." At the time we launched Voyager, we migrated some 50,000+ open orders for serial titles to Voyager. In order to support predictive check-in and claiming, staff must create a serials check-in record for each title and link it to the appropriate serial publication pattern. In many many cases, given the scope of our serials collection, there is no existing publication pattern record to link to, so the pattern record must be created. As of the end of November, staff have worked their way through over 8,000 serial titles. We anticipate finishing this project by the end of calendar 2001. To pull together the necessary manpower--and not fall behind in other acquisitions work--we have detailed some catalogers to the serials patterns project. At project's end, we'll deal with the resulting cataloging arrearage.

    Our next step will be to more fully implement EDI for invoicing and ordering.

  2. PROGRAM FOR COOPERATIVE CATALOGING

    In spite of the production hit we took during the transition to Voyager, Cornell remained at the forefront of BIBCO contributors this year. During our FY99/00, which included several months of the Voyager transition period, we were able to complete about 12,000 BIBCO records.

    The Cornell library management and technical services staff are deeply committed to the values and promise of the PCC. It has concerned us that questions about the costs and benefits of BIBCO participation have persisted. Working with the advice of the PCC Policy Committee, David Banush (Technical Services Coordinator at the library serving Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations) will soon be carrying out a study, using in-depth interviews with front-line catalogers and cataloging managers, to investigate some of the reasons behind the relatively low use of the PCC core record. It is anticipated that the data gathered from the Cornell study will assist the PCC Policy Committee in its efforts to expand BIBCO participation as well as provide insight to the broader library community into cataloging professionals' attitudes toward the values promoted by the program.

  3. STAFFING CHANGES

    In August, we hired an Information Technology Librarian, Adam Chandler, to analyze, develop, customize and implement software applications to innovate and streamline technical services operations. His results so far include helping us make significant strides in using macros and building an automated system for gathering and reporting tech. services production statistics.

    In mid-summer, the head of our Technical Services Support Unit, Diane Hillmann, was detailed to work with Cornell's computer science department (specifically Bill Arms and Carl Lagoze) for a year. She is working on metadata aspects of an NSF grant entitled the "National Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education Digital Library" (NSDL). Cornell's role is to develop the underlying technology and basic services for the NSDL. The grant is for one year, to work on a prototype and plan for expansion. Potential NSDL users run the gamut from elementary schools to graduate programs.

  4. OTHER NEWS

    ENCompass: A small group of Cornell librarians has been working with Endeavor in an advisory capacity on the development of ENCompass, a digital collection management system. ENCompass is not a production system right now. Cornell's role was to help test load two sets of material into an ENCompass prototype: an EAD finding aid for Ezra Cornell's papers (with some associated digital images of letters, etc.) and the Louis A. Fuertes Bird Images (a collection of digital versions of photographs, sketches and paintings done by Fuertes). We then commented on some versions of staff and public interfaces for entering, searching and managing digital collections. We find ENCompass to be a promising product and we think Endeavor is on the right track.

    Alumni Access: Scott Wicks, Acquisitions Librarian in Central Technical Services, is chairing a new group, the Alumni Access Committee. Cornell alumni have expressed keen interest in library resources. The university librarian convened the Alumni Access Committee to investigate potential services and solicit feedback from alumni. Potential alumni services include access to licensed databases, document delivery, access to library professionals, and online training. Predictably, the committee is grappling with the issues of copyright and licensing, technical challenges (like authentication), and funding. The committee's proposed a number of models for cost recovery, including user fees and outside funding.

******************************
Karen Calhoun
Director, Central Technical Services
107-D Olin Library
Cornell University
Ithaca NY 14853

Voice: 607-255-9915
Fax: 607-255-6110
E-mail: ksc10@cornell.edu
******************************

Return to List of Libraries


HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY

From: Jeffrey Horrell horrell@fas.harvard.edu
Subject: [BIGHEADS:716] Harvard College Library Round Robin Report

Harvard College Library Round Robin Report

  1. LOCAL SYSTEM

    In November 2000, Harvard University signed a contract with Ex Libris to implement the ALEPH system in the summer of 2002. Over the next 18 months, a series of working groups will determine final specifications in a number of functional areas and plan th e overall "Day 1" strategy for implementation.

  2. WIDENER LIBRARY TECHNICAL SERVICES STAFF RELOCATED

    Beginning on December 4, 2000 the Technical Services staff and operations of Widener Library (the largest in the College Library) were relocated to leased space in Central Square, a mile from Harvard Yard. This move, after a year of planning, was based on pressure to reallocate space within Widener and to meet code regulations associated with the Widener Stacks Renovation project.

    The leased space for the library totals 25,000 square feet of a three-story building and was completely renovated to provide expanded and appropriate space for staff and workflow. Ordering and receiving, all of Cataloging Services, and part of End Processing operations were selected to move to keep acquisitions and receiving functions in one location (for workflow and ergonomic considerations).

    With relocation came the opportunity and the necessity for reorganization. The new unit, called Harvard College Library Technical Services, is led by Jane Ouderkirk (formerly Head of Cataloging Services) as Head of Technical Services. Lynda Kresge assumed the role of Associate Head of Technical Services, will continue to head Database Management, and add the management of Collection Development Support Services, Cataloging Support Services, and Serials Cataloging to her responsibilities. Division Leaders of the Technical Services Language Divisions are Daryl Boone, English; Kathleen Hunter Rutter, French/Italian; Nancy Hallock, Spanish/Portuguese; and Bruce Trumble, German/Scandinavian. We are in the process of recruiting for the German/Scandinavian Division Leader position. At the time an appointment is made, Bruce Tremble will become the Principal Cataloger for HCL Technical Services. Michelle Durocher will continue to serve as Team Leader for Materials Management and Physical Processing. Oliver Cutshaw will supervise End Processing operations and Barbara Halporn, Head of Collection Development in Widener Library, will continue coordinating the work of the bibliographers in Widener.

    A Workflow Design Implementation Team and the Language Divisions have been working throughout the spring and summer on a variety of issues surrounding workflow at the new facility. At the same time, four groups appointed by the Harvard College Library Joint Council have been studying safety and security, transportation, flexibility and flex-time, and workplace issues. These groups evolved respectively from the Workflow Design Task Force and the HCL Joint Council Technical Services Work Group. The HCL Standing Committee on Ergonomics Issues and Policies and the HCL Staff and Organizational Development Steering Committee also contributed to the planning for the new Technical Services unit.

    Although this has been a complicated and at times difficult transition, the initial reactions to the new space have been generally positive. Workflow is no longer spread out through seven rooms on three floors and there are great improvements to the individual workspaces.

    Over a year ago, the "Report on Future Directions for Technical Services in the Harvard College Library" was completed and our HCL Collections Council has begun to systematically review the recommendations and following up with the various College Libraries regarding its implications. The move to Central Square for Widener required a considerable amount of collective effort and thus the "Future Directions" report became a slightly lower priority during the year.

Jeffrey Horrell
Associate Librarian of Harvard College for Collections

Return to List of Libraries


INDIANA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

From: "Hemmasi, Harriette A." hhemmasi@indiana.edu
Subject: IU Round Robin response

Indiana University Round Robin Update, January 2001
submitted by Harriette Hemmasi

  1. SIRSI UNICORN SYSTEM

    In mid-October, I joined the IU Libraries as Associate Dean and Director of Technical Services. At this time the Libraries were more than a year into the process of implementing the SIRSI Unicorn system, with plans to instate a cataloging moratorium on October 20 and production implementation scheduled for January 2. Due to the enormous dedication of library staff and the unfailing help received from SIRSI, these schedules have been maintained. And yes - we are up and cleaning up!

    The SIRSI Unicorn system was selected by all of the Indiana University Libraries and its affiliates, which includes a total of 47 libraries/collections located across Bloomington and the regional campuses. By all signing on to one system, implementation presented some exceptional challenges. Foremost were the migration from two systems (NOTIS and Horizon), merging some (not all) of the libraries' over 5 million bibliographic records, and merging three separate patron files. Check-in patterns from Horizon but not NOTIS migrated to the new system. To accommodate this loss, IU borrowed check-in patterns from Stanford, also a SIRSI site, and is testing the load and use of these patterns.

    Bloomington staff are still adjusting to a major reorganization of the Technical Services Division put in place less than two years ago. Implementing a new online system also has serious implications for workflow, communication, and organizational structure. Thus, we are learning anew how to live and work together.

  2. RECON

    Retrospective conversion is nearing its final stages, with the goal of converting all items in the Bloomington libraries, except for the Lilly Library and government publications, by early summer, 2001. Timely completion of recon is made more important as preparations are underway for moving materials to the offsite Auxiliary Library Facility, due to open in Spring 2002.

  3. ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

    Providing support for the acquisition and accessibility of electronic resources continues to be a top priority of the Libraries. We have added another .5 FTE in the Acquisitions Department for electronic resources, will be hiring a web manager, and look for additional staffing to meet these increasing demands. Likewise, we are engaged in providing metadata for the IU Digital Library projects and recognize the need to expand our expertise and service in this area both locally and nationally.

Return to List of Libraries


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

From: Beacher J E Wiggins bwig@loc.gov
Subject: LC update

Colleagues:

Attached and below is LC's long version of its ALA update. Again, headings allow you to read/skim/skip, as you desire.

beacher

____________________________
Part I

  1. CATALOGING DIRECTORATE

    1. Arrearage Reduction Efforts

      • Machine-Derived Authority Records (MDARs):
        The final load of MDAR records was accomplished in early August. The process required identifying all music records verified on or after Nov. 23, 1998; the file was sent to OCLC. OCLC then compared the biblio graphic records to the authority file followed by LC music catalogers making heading corrections. The file of corrected records was then sent again to OCLC for the creation of MDARs. Following several test loads of MDARs to assure the quality of records as well as the ability to flow through the NACO stream, early August realized the final loading of the 7,000 records.

      • Manuscript scores:
        Cataloging of an arrearage of manuscript and rare printed scores which have been housed in the Music and Sound Recordings Team I sound room became a priority this year. A Music Division specialist, Wilda Heiss, examined, evaluated, an d performed archival packaging of the scores that make up this special project. Manuscript score cataloging guidelines were devised by cataloger David Sommerfield. In the future, materials of this kind will be cataloged in the Music Division by a regularly visiting music cataloger.

      • OCLC Claimed Music Records Project:
        The project to load approximately 35,000 bibliographic records for sound recordings purchased from OCLC was an exercise in coordination and cooperation among SMCD, M/B/RS, APLO, CDS, CPSO, ITS, and the ILS Office. The process required: analysis of the file of records, extensive preprocessing specifications identified and written, bulk import requests and testing, refining of preprocessing specifications, import tests and CDS export tests. By the end of June the team had successfully loaded 28,855 music records. Cleanup projects have been identified which will cover areas that the preprocessing was unable to manage.

      • Sound recording arrearages:
        In the 78s Project, the Special Materials Cataloging Division in cooperation with the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division designed a project to catalog every 78rpm *set* held by the Library (approximat ely 5,000 titles). Employing core level cataloging as the standard, these records include matrix numbers appearing on popular music discs. Processing of the miscellaneous discs from the post-R&D collection, the Spotswood, Feinstein and the Fairleigh-Dickinson collections resulted in the clearing of 4,029 records. In fiscal 2000, 4,942 discs in the LP Arrearage Project (12", RU & RPL) were processed. The Music and Sound Recordings Team III also processed 19,302 items from the 45-rpm arrearage on inven tory records in fiscal 2000.

    2. Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT)

      The Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) was formed in December 1992 as a Cataloging Directorate program and was charged with the development and implementation of initiatives to improve the tools, content, and access to bibliographic informatio n. The membership represents the core cataloging divisions, CDS, acquisitions, and also has members from CIP and Public Service Collections, reflecting the Directorate's desire to provide benefits from its projects to as wide an audience as possible and t o incorporate within its program objectives the needs and interests of various constituencies beyond those of technical services. Accordingly, the Team aims to develop tools to aid catalogers, reference specialists, and searchers in creating and locating information, seeks to enrich the content of Library of Congress bibliographic records as well as improve access to the data the records contain, and conducts research and development in areas that can contribute to furthering these efforts. Additional questions about BEAT or its projects may also be directed to the BEAT Chair, John D. Byrum, Jr., Chief Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division, Library of Congress, and to any of the project chairs named in the summary reports below.

      • BECites+
        Begun in 1999, the BECites+ initiative pursues the goal of enhancing traditional printed library bibliographies not only by placing them on the Web in electronic form but also by including annotated citations, tables of contents, indexes, and back-of-boo k bibliographies cited therein. Furthermore, reciprocal links are made between all of these data elements and the online catalog record for each title in the bibliography selected for a BECites+ project as well as to the electronic *webliography* in which it is cited. This cross-linkage results in enhanced information retrieval, as each of the links connects a searcher to other related resources and to an electronic bibliography on the same or similar theme. Finally, links to pertinent online journal inde xes, other related web resources, and to applicable subject headings in the Library's OPAC are also included.

        The prototype selected for BECITES+ was Dick Sharp's "Guide to Business History Resources" (1999), a revision of Chapter 13 of his Finding Business Reference Sources at the Library of Congress." It has been followed in 2000 with work on two additional guides: Thomas Jefferson: An American Man for All Seasons: A Selected List of References prepared by Dr. Marilyn K. Parr, of the Humanities and Social Sciences Division, and two chapters (*The Ships* and *The Immigrant Experience,*) from Immigrant Arrivals: A Guide to Published Sources, originally compiled in 1997 by Virginia Steele Wood and revised for the BECites+ project by Barbara Walsh, reference specialists in the Local History and Genealogy Section of the Humanities and Social Sciences Division. Bo th guides have been enhanced by the addition of sections on related Internet resources making use of OCLC's CORC software. The Internet resources section of the Thomas Jefferson guide is available online at, while that for the Immigrant Arrivals guide may be viewed at . The revised Immigrant Arrivals guide also contains an extensive listing of subject headings on the topic, which link directly into the Z39.50 interface to the Library of Congress online catalog.

        For further information, visit the BECites+ web page: or contact Carolyn Larson at

      • BEOnline+
        The BEOnline project has moved from R&D into production and in 2001 will be expanded and incorporated into the regular workflow of processing. The expansion of BEOnline+ is now under the direction of Susan Vita, chief, Special Materials Cataloging Divis ion. It was decided that BEAT*s BEOnline+ Team would remain during the transition, as upscaling from a two-to-four person operation to a Directorate-wide enterprise will be a major undertaking; the transition will progress in phases.

        The first and easiest phase will entail changing the workflow of Computer Files referrals from paper to online. Currently, a descriptive cataloger makes a printout of the record with the descriptive cataloging completed, place the printout in a plastic colored sleeve, and forward it with a referral slip to a subject cataloger for the subject headings, classification, and additional subject analysis to be completed for the resource. Normally the subject cataloging is completed on the printout and returne d to the Computer Files team for the descriptive cataloger to input the subject information to the record into the Library*s ILS. Under the new workflow the subject cataloger will record the appropriate data on the record in the ILS.

        The second expansion phase will involve detailing monographic book catalogers to the Computer Files Team for one-on-one descriptive cataloging training of electronic resources, both tangible and intangible. Phases one and two focus on short term goals.

        For longer-term planning, the BEOnline+ team has will collaborate with staff from the Library*s Technical Processing Automation Instruction Office (TPAIO) in preparing for possible classroom and Web-based training for processing Internet resources.

        For further information contact Allene Hayes at

      • Digital Tables of Contents (D-TOC) and Reviews
        The Digital Tables of Contents project creates TOC data from surrogates of the actual TOC, and using scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) as well as original programming written by project staff, materials are subsequently HTML-encoded and pl aced on a server at the Library. In the process the underlying MARC records are also modified to include links to the TOC data. An additional project completed which modified and rewrote in the Visual Basic language, the original OS/2 VX-REXX program so that it was compatible with the Library's new Integrated System.

        This project originally concentrated on printed monographic publications in the fields of business and economics (particularly, the areas of small business and entrepreneurship) with the expectation that techniques developed by the project could be extended to other materials, resources permitting. In its production mode prior to the installation of the ILS, the scope of materials was expanded to include wider areas of Economics, Computer Science, Technology and other areas in which BEAT sponsored projects or conducted investigations previously.

        With the Library's installation of the ILS, the project was temporarily halted to redesign software for use within the Voyager context. During this redesign stage, other elements of the project are being simplified to reduce the costs of production. In the current phase of the project, the subject scope is being broadened even further to include all areas of study. Currently about 2,200 records have been enhanced by the project.

        Both the MARC records themselves and the linked TOC data may be viewed through a Web browser by accessing the Library's online catalog access options directly, available at . In addition, various Web indexing software also makes catalog and TOC records a vailable over the Web. The Z39.50 server and the browse search capability are recommended for direct searches and subsequent viewing.

        Those who have comments or questions about this project should contact Bruce Knarr, project manager at

      • Support for ECIP (Electronic Cataloging in Publication)
        During fiscal 2000, TOC data were included in the MARC records for approximately 21% of the titles processed as ECIPs, and the hope is that ultimately TOC data will be reflected in as many as 50% of ECIP titles.

      • New Projects for 2001: ONIX and E-Books
        BEAT has become interested in ONIX, an XML-based communication standard for meta data about published works. ONIX contains a set of data elements describing various aspects of a publication and appears as a highly granular markup that defines and represe nts significant detail about book (and publishing) product information in electronic form. The BEAT team has recently expanded to include appropriate experts from the Automation Planning and Liaison Office as well as MARC Standards and Network Developmen t Office to help it fashion possible ONIX-related projects. Two possibilities are to investigate ONIX files as a source of enhancements (TOC, summaries, blurbs, etc.) for existing records and to study ONIX for "outgoing" records possibly used with the Cataloging in Publications *New Books* experiment.

    3. Cataloging in Publication (CIP)

      The 30th anniversary of the CIP program will be celebrated at ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco.

      • New Books Program
        John Celli, Chief of the CIP Division, will demonstrate a model of a proposed program, known as the New Books program to a group of about 20 publishers and an equal number of librarians on January 12th, Friday at 2:00 p.m. at the Wyndham Washington Hotel (Ashlawn North room) in conjunction with the American Library Association Conference.

        The New Books program would build on the ECIP program and would enable publishers to post such information elements as the image of the book jacket, book jacket blurb, table of contents, sample text, URL of publisher*s homepage, URL where book can be pur chased, author information, author email address, etc. on the Library of Congress homepage while simultaneously requesting CIP data. This program would work in conjunction with another proposed program known as the Library of Congress Partnership program. This module would enable any reader anywhere (with an Internet connection and access to the LC homepage) to identify forthcoming titles of interest and immediately request his/her local library to purchase the book for his/her use immediately upon publication.

    4. Cataloging Policy

      • AACR2, 1998 Revision.
        LC implemented "Amendments 1999" to the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed., 1998 Revision on September 15. As a result, six LCRIs have been canceled and nine have been revised to remove provisions that have been included in "Amendments 1999." The LCRIs reflecting these changes will be included in "LCRI 2000, Update Number 3-4," scheduled for February publication, as well as in the LC Cataloger's Desktop.

      • African Americans in Subject Headings.
        On Subject Heading Weekly List 00-47 for November 29, 2000, the subject heading Afro-Americans and subject headings that included the adjectival qualifier Afro-American were changed to African Americans and African American.... Effective December 1, 2000, LC catalogers are assigning only the new forms African Americans and African American... as subject headings in current bibliographic records. CPSO has begun the process to update bibliographic records with the old forms of headings. Subject headings in individual bibliographic records may be changed on a case-by-case basis as the records are updated for any reason.

      • Art cataloging changes.
        On February 1, 2001, the location of geographic subdivisions in art subject headings will be changed to conform to the standard order used for most other topics with geographic subdivisions preceding chronological subdivisions. Headings such as Drawing--20th century--France will be reformulated as Drawing, French--20th century. A new instruction sheet will be added to the Subject Cataloging Manual to provide for free-floating subdivisions under art headings. Cataloging of art materials will thus more closely resemble cataloging in other disciplines.

      • IFLA News.
        Dr. Barbara Tillett chairs the Standing Committee on Cataloguing of IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. At the August meeting in Jerusalem, there was consensus on a new view of Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) to recognize the importance of user needs regarding language, script, and cultural context for headings used in bibliographic records. That is, the old UBC view, that everyone in the world could use the same form established by each national bibliographic agency for authors in their own country, is not practical, and instead, we appreciate the value of controlled forms of headings in bibliographic records for precision and recall in retrieving records, yet allow each country to establish the headings following their own cataloging rules for scripts, language, structure, and form. The concept of a virtual international authority file is gaining momentum within several of the IFLA working groups to link the various national and regional authority records for the same entity. The related European project LEAF and other proposals to forward this concept will be tracked with great interest. (Barbara Tillett presented a paper on this concept at the LC Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium in November 2000.) Further information on the IFLA Section on Cataloguing activities can be found in the joint report from Barbara Tillett and Glenn Patton (the two ALA representatives to IFLA) at the ALCTS web site at . Reports of other IFLA section activities may be found at .

      • LC Classification.
        The 2000 edition of E-F (History: America), KBR (History of Canon Law), KBU (Law of the Roman Catholic Church. The Holy See), and KK-KKC (Law of Germany), were sent for publication. In addition, the 2001 edition of PL-PM (Languages of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania; Hyperborean, Indian, and Artificial Languages) was sent for publication. Changes were made in the DS and PL subclasses to reflect the change to the pinyin romanization of Chinese.

      • LCCN Restructuring to Four-Digit Year.
        On January 2, 2001, LC began the use of a restructured LCCN for both authority and bibliographic records. The restructured LCCN now contains a four-digit year (e.g., n#2001123456 (name authority record); sh2001123 456 (subject authority record); ##2001123456 (bibliographic record)), and there is no longer a "trailing blank" at the end of the number. Note that LCCNs in the old structure (two-digit year; trailing blank) are not being changed and will exist simultaneously with numbers reflecting the new structure.

      • MARC Language Code List.
        The new 2000 edition of the MARC language code list was issued with substantial revisions to make it compatible with the ISO language code standard. Approximately 25 language codes were changed, and additional language codes were included.

      • New MARC 21 Characters.
        The Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS) has previously announced (see http://www.loc.gov/cds/mds-ils.html ) plans to distribute records containing the full MARC character set. This includes the 13 characters that were authorized as of 1994 but have been filtered or substituted in distribution by CDS. On January 1, 2001, CDS removed the character substitution step and could distribute records with these characters although some of the values will not be actively supplied by LC cataloging staff. For a detailed listing of the LC usage of these characters see the LC Cataloging Policy and Support Office homepage .

    5. Cooperative Cataloging Initiatives - see Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) Activities

    6. CORC

      OCLC Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) is a Web-based, metadata creation system optimized for creating bibliographic records and pathfinders (subject bibliographies) for electronic resources, both local and Web-based. The databases and tools tha t comprise the CORC system are designed to assist in providing users with well-guided access to Web resources. CORC went into full production in July with LC as a founding member. CORC was featured at an LC Cataloging Forum and cybercast on "Using OCLC's CORC at the Library of Congress. LC's representative to the international OCLC CORC Users Group is Allene Hayes.

    7. Decimal Classification (Dewey)

      Decimal Classification Division classifiers at the Library of Congress assigned Dewey Decimal Classification numbers to 52,669 bibliographic records during the last six months of calendar year 2000. Newly approved area numbers for Colombia and historical period numbers for Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela were implemented during the period.

      The editors will be present at the Dewey breakfast/update sponsored by OCLC Forest Press on Saturday, January 13, 7:00-8:30 a.m., at the Renaissance Washington Hotel, Rooms 12-14. In addition to an update on the DDC, presentations will be made by Karen M. Drabenstott (University of Michigan) on her Dewey online tutorial; and by Dawn Lawson (OCLC Forest Press), who will demonstrate the latest releases of WebDewey in CORC and Dewey for Windows.

      The editors will be available for consultation at the OCLC Forest Press booth (Booth 1850) throughout ALA Midwinter. Interested parties may also sign up at Booth 1850 for in-depth sessions on WebDewey in CORC to be held in the OCLC Suite on Saturday, Ja nuary 13, 2:00-3:30 p.m., and on Monday, January 15, 11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.

    8. IBC (Initial Bibliographic Control)

      In October, MSR1 produced its first IBCs (Initial Bibliographic Control records) for scores and soundrecordings. The Special Materials Cataloging Division currently receives approximately 400-450 scores a month from the Music Division requiring IBC creation. All scores except the brief cataloging scores must have IBCs in Voyager. Likewise, book receipts lacking IBC records are also created on the MSR teams. The MSR teams initiated the process of creating IBCs for sound recordings as part of a new work flow for compact discs.

      Production-level cataloging (PLC) of music was discontinued in favor of core-level cataloging, which is supported by authority work. Guidelines have also been developed for brief cataloging of printed music. This level of cataloging does not include note fields, subject headings, or added entries, and requires only limited authority work. The Music Division has begun to designate the cataloging levels for items it selects and will likely select band arrangements, sheet music for popular songs, and other ephemeral music of limited research value.

      The issue of contents notes for multiple-disc or multi-volume sound recordings surfaced several times during the course of the year as it affected specific projects. The revised Music Cataloging Decision 6.7B18 was issued in June 2000 and it will be reissued to provide for dividing a long contents note among multiple 505 fields (a decision prompted by the 78s project).

    9. NUCMC (National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections)

      NUCMC staff produced 2,832 RLIN bibliographic records describing collections held by 75 repositories. Cataloging production in FY00 represented an increase of 17.61% over FY99 (2,408 records).

      In addition to local, regional, and state historical societies, NUCMC Team members also produced cataloging for a variety of special focus repositories. Special topics included African Americans (Dorothy Porter Wesley Research Center), fine arts (Georg e Walker Vincent Smith Art Museum and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), folklife and oral history (Maine Folklife Center), Hispanic Americans (Henry B. Gonzalez Archives), Japanese Americans (Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii), maritime history (Mystic Seaport Museum and Nantucket Historical Association), medicine (Armed Forces Institute of Pathology), military history (Battle of Lexington Historical Site and Fifth Maine Regiment Center), municipal archives (Manchester, N.H., Municipal Archives and Reco rds Center and Seattle Municipal Archives), national parks (Gettysburg National Military Park, Lowell National Historical Park, Saratoga National Historical Park, and Shenandoah National Park), Native Americans (Pawnee Nation Archives), performing arts (Boston University Dept. of Special Collections), religious archives (Congregational, Episcopal, Jewish, and Lutheran), state archives (Montana, North Carolina, and Wyoming), and U.S. presidents (Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center).

      In the Montana Union List Project (MULP), accessions were received from Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, Montana Historical Society, Montana State University*Bozeman, and the University of Montana*Missoula. By the end of the year, 2,610 preliminary and full level records describing Montana collections had been input into RLIN. In addition, almost 100 of these records had links to Web-based finding aids. During the new fiscal year we hope to expand coverage to some of the state*s smaller archival and manuscript repositories.

      The NUCMC Web site continued to earn high marks from the public and the archival and manuscript community. The Web counter recorded 63,735 "hits" by the end of the fiscal year. NUCMC continued to receive praise for its provision of the gateway provid ing free searches in the RLIN-AMC file. Searches on the gateway during the fiscal year totaled 182,821.

      At the end of the year, OCLC had given approval in principle to the idea of a similar pilot gateway to its manuscript materials. Once approval has been finalized, NUCMC hopes to have the gateway up fairly quickly.

    10. Pinyin Romanization

      The Library coordinated conversion activities with RLG and OCLC throughout the year. Conference calls were held with the utilities at least monthly to discuss and agree on policy issues, and to work out aspects of the conversion and transfer of records. The Library received input on the project from many libraries and librarians, both in this country and abroad.

      The year of intensive planning culminated in the conversion to pinyin of 158,368 name and series authority records by OCLC. Converted authority records have been loaded into the LC database and distributed to CDS subscribers. By the time of the confere nce, RLG will have converted 142,555 LC Chinese bibliographic records containing vernacular script, and some 30,000 in roman script only. OCLC is currently testing its bib record conversion program, and hopes to begin converting bib records in WorldCat in early 2001. CPSO staff have converted hundreds of subject authority records, and made necessary changes to the classification schedule. Classification schemes for Chinese literary authors and Chinese local history have been revised, based on pinyin romanization.

      A moratorium on creating and changing Chinese authority records was observed during August and September while OCLC performed its conversion. Similarly, a moratorium on the updating of Chinese bibliographic records created before August 1 has been obser ved during the RLG conversion of LC records. Since October 1, six catalogers, along with CPSO specialists, have been manually reviewing converted authorities and making corrections where necessary. In addition, 14 catalogers at 11 NACO libraries are re viewing and updating converted non-unique personal name authority records.

      The Library's pinyin home page (http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin) has made available a coordinated timeline, romanization guidelines, explanations of various aspects of the conversion project, answers to frequently asked questions, and links to other related sources of information.

      Part II

    11. Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) Activities

      The 42 PCC institutions in FY2000 contributed 62,423 bibliographic records, of which 21,156 were core-level records. This contribution represents a 6% increase over last year, along with a growing production of core records, which made up 35% . Further gains are expected as a result of expanding the BIBCO program (creation of bibliographic records) to include the University of Oregon and Texas A&M University. Recurring issues discussed at both the BIBCO-at-large meeting at ALA Annual (Chicago) and at the Policy Committee meeting in November 2000 revolve around the question of the quality of BIBCO records and if a survey on record quality should be conducted; dealing with the impending changes to AACR Chapter 12 for integrating and aggregator databases and linkages between serial and monographic records; and language in the BIBCO parameters statement encouraging BIBCO members to perform file maintenance work. In other developments related to the BIBCO program, a study to i! nvestigate related issues is in the planning stages by David Banush (Cornell University). LC and the National Library of Medicine have implemented pick-up of NLM's daily FTP files of bibliographic records and new name authority records, and bulk import them into the LC database.

      • CONSER (Cooperative Online Serials).
        CONSER welcomed four new members in the past six months: the National Library of Wales, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of Oregon, and R.R. Bowker. Bowker will work as an affiliate member in close conjunction with the National Serials Data Program, the U.S. ISSN center, at the Library of Congress.

        A group of electronic serials specialists within CONSER was established following the May 2000 CONSER Operations Committee meeting. During the ensuing months the group actively identified, discussed, and recommended approaches to a variety of issues re lating to remote serials that will be reflected in an upcoming revision to Module 31 (Remote Electronic Serials) of the CONSER Cataloging Manual.

        Nineteen institutions are currently participating in the CONSER Publication Patterns initiative, adding publication patterns to new and existing records on OCLC. A Workflow Analysis Task Group has also been charged to evaluate potential models in large and small libraries that could take advantage of the data. Work also progressed with the loading of pattern data from Harvard into 25,000-30,000 CONSER records with the load expected for January 2001 just prior to ALA.

        The Serial Cataloging Cooperative Training Program (SCCTP) continues to thrive. By close of year, 54 sessions of the Basic Serials Cataloging Workshop will have been given with several more scheduled in 2001. In January, 29 trainers will attend a train -the-trainer session for the Serials Holdings Workshop, and sessions are already being scheduled. Two further courses are in the early stages of development: Advanced Serials Cataloging and Electronic Serials.

        Hirons and Regina Reynolds (National Serials Data Program, LC) also attended a *Meeting of Experts,* held at the Library in November, which combined experts on AACR, ISBD(S), and ISSN. Important agreements were reached that will make the ISSN a more eff ective tool for serials control and that will allow more international sharing of cataloging data. The CONSER AACR Review Task Force, which worked actively since 1995, completed its work in November.

        Further information is available at the CONSER web site: .

      • NACO (name authority component of the PCC).
        NACO libraries contributed 128,074 new name authority records with 36,426 revisions to existing authority records and 8,914 new series authority records in FY2000. Several new members were trained in late summ er/early fall: at the St. Louis Law Library as part of a NACO law funnel; Oregon State University; Washington State Library; and Hoover Institute. In addition, a group of institutions joined the OLAC-AV funnel. Catalogers from the University of Michigan, the Donohue Group, and the law libraries of American University, Catholic University, Georgetown Law Center and the Maryland State Law Library received training. Other training included a Series Institute at University of California, Los Angeles and an authority workshop for PALINET libraries in Philadelphia.

        With LC's implementation of Voyager, conversion to the Pinyin romanization system from Wade-Gilles for Chinese has become possible. Catalogers from 11 PCC-NACO institutions are helping with resolving problems related to non-unique authority records for personal names that remain to be resolved.

        In conjunction with the ALA Midwinter Meeting, a Training-the-NACO-Trainer session will be conducted for volunteers by Cooperative Team members on January 12, 2001, from 8:30 am-4:30 p. m. in the Library of Congress, Madison Building, West Dining Room (L M 621)

      • SACO (subject authority component of the PCC).
        As a positive result of the implementation of the new LC ILS, the Cooperative Team and LC staff have developed an online form for the submission of subject heading proposals to LCSH which delivers the prop osed record to the LC ILS database with a minimum of processing, eliminating the need for re-keying. BIBCO libraries and the British Library, using this form, have reduced by an average of two weeks the approval time for SACO proposals. SACO contributio ns of 122 libraries totaled 2,681 new subject headings, with 621 revisions to existing headings. There were also 979 LC classification numbers produced, and 55 changes to classification numbers.

      • International Cooperative Programs.
        Ongoing contacts with international institutions resulted training for several institutions in South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, and New Zealand. The NACO training in South Africa included 16 institutions in two different week-long sessions, one in Pretoria and one in Cape Town. The Universidad de San Andres, Argentina, received, and the Colegio de Mexico will receive, NACO training. The National Library of New Zealand was trained by Bill Garrison (University of Colorado, Boulder) in September. CONSER membership was augmented with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the National Library of Wales.

        Statistically, in fiscal 2000, international PCC members produced 18,047 new name authority records (14.3% of PCC-NACO production); revised 7,425 existing NARs (10.1%); established 937 new subject authority records (33.6%); and revised 65 SARs (10.5%).

        For further information regarding cooperative cataloging projects, activities, and developments, visit the Program for Cooperative Cataloging's Web site at

        Cataloging (Books and Serials) Production
        
        			                             	FY00					FY99			
        		             	                 			
        		LC Full/Core-Level Cataloging    		159,091	           				148,628			
        		Copy  Cataloging                               	  22,477					  25,662		
        		Minimal-Level  Cataloging	 	  16,080 				  	  19,256
        Collection-Level Cataloging   		    3,009  				     2,756
        		TOTAL records created                     	200,657			  	 	  196,302             		
        		TOTAL volumes cataloged          	   	224,544    				  205,893
        
        		Authority Records			 
        		Names  		          	       		86,992				   	80,176
        Series					  6,772			   	     	  7,272
        Subjects					  7,494    				  5,895             
        TOTAL              		       		101,258				   	 93,343
        

      • Cataloging Distribution Service

        Pilot Test of World Wide Web Access to Library of Congress Classification. From January 8 - March 30, 2001, the Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS) is conducting a pilot test of World Wide Web access to LC Classification schedules. Libraries of all s izes and types are encouraged to try Classification Web during the 90-day test period. The Web address for the pilot is < >Information about the pilot test is also available on the CDS home page at < > Additionally, CDS will feature demonstrations of Classification Web at the LC exhibit booth. Should the pilot prove technically and economically feasible, CDS may offer Classification Web on a subscription basis.

  2. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS BICENTENNIAL SYMPOSIA

    The Library continued the celebration of its Bicentennial year with three international scholarly symposia. On October 23-26, Associate Librarian for Library Services Winston Tabb and Center for the Book Director John Cole, with current Librarian of Cong ress James H. Billington and Librarian Emeritus Daniel J. Boorstin, welcomed participants from more than seventy countries to an international symposium, "National Libraries of the World: Interpreting the Past, Shaping the Future." The first two days of this symposium were devoted to the history of libraries and their place in society and culture; the final two days considered the future of libraries and featured presentations on Library of Congress initiatives to archive the open-access World Wide Web. The symposium was also designated Library History Seminar Ten.

    The Preservation Directorate, Public Service Collections Directorate, and Office of Security planned the Library's Bicentennial symposium entitled *To Preserve and Protect: The Strategic Stewardship of Cultural Resources,* in affiliation with the Association of Research Libraries and the Federal Library and Information Center Committee. The symposium, held at the Library October 30-31, 2000, brought together directors and administrators responsible for preservation and security programs in libraries, museums, and archives. Participants engaged in a dialogue on key issues in preserving and securing collections and explored concerns that overlap and lend themselves to complementary solutions. The Library has posted materials from the symposium on its Website. On November 15-17, the Cataloging Directorate was host to the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium, which attracted 136 leaders in cataloging, publishing, and library system design to address the challenges of bibliogra phic control in the burgeoning Internet environment. A Web cast of the Conference is available on the Conference Web site, URL and the Conference Proceedings will be published in late spring.

  3. CONGRESSIONAL RELATIONS

    1. Financial Management Legislation.

      Legislation to create a Library of Congress revolving fund, amend the archaic statute authorizing Cataloging Distribution Service, and provide more continuity to the Trust Fund Board passed the Congress and was signed in to law as P.L. 106-481. Long sought by the Library, the Library of Congress Fiscal Operations Improvement Act of 2000 creates revolving funds for the following fee-based activities at the Library: audio and video duplication and delivery services associa ted with the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center at Culpeper, Va.; gift shop and other sales operations; Dewey Decimal classification development; Photoduplication Services; FEDLINK; and the Federal Research Division. The Library had requested Congressional approval of revolving funds ever since the General Accounting Office raised concerns, in reviews dating back to the 1980s, regarding the Library's lack of proper authority to operate various fee-based services, particularly Photoduplication Service. Enactment of this legislation was the Library's highest priority in the 106th Congress.

    2. Preservation of Sound Recordings.

      Legislation to establish a sound recording preservation program and foundation was introduced, in the Senate by Sen. Breaux and in the House by Rep. Hoyer. The Library worked closely with the sponsors on drafting the legislation. The legislation, enacted on November 9 as P.L. 106-474, authorizes a sound recording preservation Board and Foundation for a period of seven years, and includes a directive for a comprehensive national recording preservation study and action p lan, such as the ones produced in the 1990's under Congressional directive, which laid the framework for national film preservation and national television and video preservation programs. This study will serve as the basis for a national preservation pl an, including setting standards for future private and public preservation efforts, and will be conducted in conjunction with the state-of-the-art National Audio-Visual Conservation Center the Library is developing in Culpepper, Virginia.

    3. Federal Government Information & National Technical Information Service.

      On August 12, 1999, the Department of Commerce announced plans to close down the National Technical Information Service and transfer its collections and functions to the Library of Congress. Library management and staff met with the Department of Commerce and, at the Congress' request, the Librarian submitted written testimony on the issue for House and Senate hearings. The Librarian stated that Commerce's proposal reflected the same urgent and important new challenges in information collection, dissemination, and archiving that face the federal government as a whole, and, while the collections aspects are consistent with Library activities, the dissemination functions of NTIS are outside the Library's current congressionally mandated mission. No Congressional action was taken during the remainder of the 106th Congress.

      Two major issues pending before the 107th Congress are NTIS and the future of the Superintendent of Documents/GPO. The National Commission on Libraries and Information Sciences has released a draft report and draft legislation, the Public Information Re sources Reform Act of 2001, in response to these issues. The Commission recommends the creation of an executive branch agency, the Public Information Resources Administration, whose primary mission wold be to manage the information services currently und er the Superintendent of Documents and the NTIS. The Federal Depository Library system would be retained (though renamed) and government information available through this system would be greatly expanded. The final report is due to Congress on January 11, 2001. Meanwhile, in a separate study, GAO is exploring the feasibility of transferring the Superintendent of Documents to the Library of Congress, as part of a request contained in the conference report of the fiscal year 2001 appropriations act for the legislative branch.

    4. Veterans' Oral History Project.

      H.R. 5212 [P.L. 106-380] directs the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to develop and coordinate a program to collect and preserve at the Library the audio and video recorded oral histories and documentary materials such as diaries and letters of America's war veterans. The Library will work closely with interested groups, such as veterans organizations, to coordinate the project and make the collections available to the public, including online presenta tions. A planning meeting for the major stakeholders is scheduled at the Library for January 29.

  4. DIGITAL FUTURE

    The Library will begin to acquire its first complete set of electronic journal archives this month through an agreement signed by Associate Librarian for Library Services Winston Tabb and the American Physical Society. APS will send the Library the com plete archives of eight of its premier physics journals in electronic form. The electronic archives will be updated continuously, creating a permanent repository at the Library of both historic articles and the latest research in physics.

    At a forum in the Mumford Room on Saturday, January 13, 3:00-5:00 p.m., the Library's Digital Futures Group will share with the library community its 5-year Digital Futures Plan, including plans for development of content, infrastructure and outreach ser vices. Comments and suggestions from the library community will be actively solicited at this forum.

    1. Web Preservation Project (WPP).

      (URL ): William Y. Arms, professor of computer science at Cornell University, worked with LC staff Roger Adkins, Cassy Ammen, Allene Hayes, Melissa Levine, Diane Kresh, Jane Mandelbaum, and Barbara Tillett on the Web Preservation Project, a new study group organized to investigate the feasibility of capturing, saving and preserving collections from select Websites for use by future generations of researchers. Three sites were chosen by selec tion officers and used for the project: www.whitehouse.gov, www.algore2000.com, and www.georgewbush.com. The three sites were downloaded using an HTTrack mirroring program which creates a snapshot that is archived. Snapshots of the sites were inspected for errors and catalog records were created from the copies using OCLC's CORC software. The records were later loaded into the ILS. Finally, a trial Web site of the snapshots was developed to evaluate user access. A number of Websites have been created using this method of archiving collections, including the Internet Archive, the Pandora Archive from the National Library of Australia, and the Kulturarw Archive developed by the National Library of Sweden. The Copyright Offic e has begun to look into the legal questions surrounding archiving materials from the Internet. The crucial factor is the economic impact on copyright owners, but other matters are also being examined such as the right of institutions to work in partnersh ip to download and edit open access materials for preservation.

      In addition, through an agreement with the Internet Archive, the Library has collected a fairly comprehensive collection of Websites related in various ways to the 2000 Presidential election.

      The trial Web site under construction by the project is MINERVA (Mapping the Internet Electronic Resources Virtual Archive). MINERVA has browsing capability and contains dates snapshots of the Web pages were archived and links to an equivalent Dublin Cor e record available through the LC Online Catalog. This Web site is for internal use only until all copyright issues have been resolved.

  5. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS INTEGRATED LIBRARY SYSTEM

    The Library of Congress completed the implementation of the Integrated Library System (LC ILS) on October 1, 1999. Since then, Library staff have conducted their acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, serials check-in, and reference service tasks on the system. On August 21, 2000, the Library officially accepted the LC ILS system after extensive testing and forty consecutive days of acceptable response times.

    The LC ILS primary database resides on a Sun E10000 server and includes 12 million bibliographic records, approximately 12 million holdings records, over 12 million item records, approximately 5 million authority records, plus over 26,000 patron records, data for circulation and acquisitions transactions, over 30,000 vendor records, ledgers, funds, tables, and keyword and other searchable indexes.

    In May 2000, the Library installed the "Record Validator" software. This software checks for legal MARC 21 values in catalog records by identifying data errors and inconsistencies in records as the records are added to the database, so they may be immed iately corrected by the cataloger, thus reducing the cost of quality control activities and improving the timeliness of data corrections. The Library added interfaces to the Electronic Cataloging In Publication (ECIP) to receive digitized publisher data and to the Federal Financial System (FFS) interface to automatically load LC ILS data to the Library's automated financial system. A new capability for Geospatial searching, a welcome enhancement for accessing cartographic materials, was loaded on the te st server at the end of the fiscal year, and is expected to be available on the production system by summer 2001.

    The Library is working with Endeavor Information Systems, Inc. to prepare for implementation of the Voyager Release 2000 software targeted for May 2001. In preparation, the Library loaded the beta versions of Voyager Release 2000 on its test server. Staff began testing the software and reported bugs to Endeavor for correction before its final software release. Library staff are also creating new training courses and updating operations procedure documentation, especially for the new features and capabilities in the acquisitions, serials check-in, and public catalog modules. Release 2000 also includes the capability to display Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Hebrew vernacular characters in the Web OPAC (from data stored in the 880 fields of MARC bibliographic records).

    Staff are setting up and load-testing databases for the migration of Congressional Research Service (CRS) and National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS/BPH) files to the LC ILS after the implementation of Voyager Release 2000.

    On October 1, 2000, the American library community, including LC, OCLC, and RLG, began using pinyin as the standard romanization scheme for Chinese characters in bibliographic and authority records. OCLC and RLIN through a cooperative partnership supplied Wade-Giles romanized authority records with their pinyin updates for load into the LC ILS and distribution through the MARC Distribution Service by the start date. These converted authority records will be available in the LC Online Catalog and via Z39.50 in May 2001. RLG began to convert LC's bibliographic records on November 20, 2000. OCLC will convert CONSER records after January 1, 2001, according to the same specifications. LC expects to load approximately 180,000 converted bibliographic records into the LC Database by the end of February 2001. The first 30,000 converted bibliographic records will be included in the MDS-CJK distribution for December 2000 (volume 14, issue 11). LC's converted bibliographic records will be available in the LC Online Catalog and via Z39.50 as soon as they are loaded into the LC Database. A full description of the Pinyin Conversion Project, including background documents, time line, and FAQ, is available on the Pinyin Homepage.

    The Library continues with the holdings conversion of its largest remaining manual files: the 12 million card shelflist and the 900,000-title serials check-in file. Retrospective holdings and location information from these files is expected to contribu te to the Library*s inventory control and materials security initiatives. Staff concluded a series of pilots to test the most effective approach to converting the card shelflist holdings and then prepared an RFP for the card shelflist conversion for distribution early in 2001.

    By the end of September approximately 11,000 active serials records with holdings data were converted from the Serial Record Division (SRD) visible file to the LC ILS. Work under a second contract to convert of inactive serials holdings to the LC ILS will begin after the implementation of Voyager 2000.

    Additional information can be found on the public ILS home page, URL: < http://lcweb.loc.gov/ils/>.

  6. ACQUISITIONS DIRECTORATE

    1. German Digital Project

      The Library has initiated a "German Digital Project" to advance its Digital Library agenda in regard to German publications. Under the leadership of the Director for Acquisitions, Nancy Davenport, and the Director for Area Studies, Carolyn Brown, LC staff have begun work on a project intended to achieve two immediate objectives: to increase the Library's access to German electronic journals; and to begin using electronic data interchange (EDI) to conduct acquisitions transactions. The ultimate goals of the project are to establish new policies and procedures for "acquiring" and accessing foreign electronic publications, and to develop and implement the capability to use EDI to conduct electronic commerce with all vendors capable of conducting business in that way. In developing the German Digital pilot project, the Library is working very closely with its German approval plan dealer, the firm of Otto Harrassowitz of Wiesbaden, Germany. So far, we have added access to electronic journals from the Springer and de Gruyter publishers to our electronic journal "collections," with more anticipated in the near future.

  7. PUBLIC SERVICE COLLECTIONS DIRECTORATE

    1. Collaborative Digital Reference Service

      Pilot phases and planning continue for the Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS), which will provide library-quality reference service to all users any time anywhere, through an international digital network of libraries and similar services and organizations. Three pilot phases were planned, and by the end of the fiscal year, pilot two had been completed and steps for implementing pilot three were well underway. The incremental pilots added features and member institutions, in order to test b oth the functions and the scale for the planned service in an orderly fashion. With pilot phase two, through summer 2000, sixteen member institutions exchanged real questions and answers, in order to experiment with the fields used in a member profile da tabase and the algorithm for assigning incoming questions. The computer software (Remedy) matched tagged questions to profile data about participating libraries to route questions to libraries best able to answer them. Several papers were prepared, including a concept plan, business options, CDRS architecture, and a think-piece on an end-to-end user service with CDRS at its center. For the administrative elements of the service, several workgroups focused on service level agreements, membership guidelines, legal issues, etc. In addition, discussions began to develop working relationships with outside parties that could provide infrastructure and technology support. At year's end, discussions were ongoing with OCLC. The third pilot, which will involve a minimum of 60 members, began in November with the Main and Microform Reading Rooms and the Local History and Genealogy Reading Room answering CDRS reference questions.

      The Library and OCLC will host a symposium, *Building the Virtual Reference Desk in a 24/7 World,* January 12, 1:30-5:30 p.m., in the Coolidge Auditorium (ground floor, Thomas Jefferson Building). Experts in the field of digital reference service will discuss the growing trend of remote access to library resources and the need to re-examine methods of delivering those resources to support a 24/7 online reference service. Light refreshments will be served during the symposium break. Admission is free. Register at www.loc.gov/ala/.

    2. Loan Division

      Digital Delivery.
      The Library of Congress is now filling interlibrary loan requests for small, fragile items that would otherwise be noncirculating by scanning the material and making the images available over the Internet. The requesting library is alerted that the item will be available at a specific time as a digital image in PDF format suitable for downloading and printing. Nearly 50 items have been scanned since the pilot began in September and more are added weekly. While the focus has been rare book items, any small item requested by an ILL patron that is in the public domain and can be captured in a relatively small digital file is a candidate for scanning and digital delivery.

      ILL on the Web.
      On October 1st the Loan Division mounted an electronic interlibrary loan order form on its website and announced it would no longer accept paper loan requests, either traditional ALA forms, faxes, or even free-form emails. The order form is on the LC website and does not require the sender to have email, only web access. Responses for non-filled items are returned as email or paper. Although we were concerned that the abandonment of paper communications would cause problems for some sm all libraries, so far we have received only praise from our clients.

      RLG's ILL Manager.
      The web order form is the first step in a much broader plan to automate the entire request process. On January 3rd the Loan Division began performance testing the RLG ILL Manager software, using requests from the web form and from RL IN. We hope to begin testing interoperability with the OCLC ILL System before the end of January. Our first goal is to route all incoming requests through the same ILL management tool, forwarding them around the Library and replying to clients without c oncern about the source of the request. More ambitiously, we hope eventually to link the ILL management tool to our Voyager catalog so the receipt of a request will launch a stack paging request and connect that transaction to a circulation checkout.

Return to List of Libraries


NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE

From: Duane Arenales arenaled@mail.nlm.nih.gov
Subject: NLM's midwinter update

  1. ILS PROGRESS.

    NLM is testing Voyager Release 2000.1.2 installed on the Library's test server. We hope to go live in mid-February.

  2. E-CIP IMPLEMENTATION.

    On September 15, 2000, NLM catalogers produced their first electronic cataloging in publication (E-CIP) records. Library management is actively encouraging biomedical publishers to participate in the LC program.

  3. NLM CLASSIFICATION.

    The NLM Classification, 5th edition, revised 1999, was published in September 2000 and is available through the Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office (GPO). The edition incorporates changes made to the schedules from 1995 through 1999.

    In addition, thej index was augmented by several hundred MeSH concepts published from 1994 through 1999 in the NLM Annotated Alphabetic List.

    A web-based test version of the classification is available internally, and the Cataloging Section and NLM's systems staff are working towards making a public version available during the second half of 2001.

  4. DERIVED FILES PRODUCT.

    Monographic and chapter records from five special NLM databases (HSTAR, HISTLINE, SPACELINE, BIOETHICSLINE and POPLINE) have been successfully loaded into NLM's opac, LOCATORplus. Cataloging expects to convert and load the chapter records from BACK75 of MEDLINE into Voyager early in April 2001 to complete this aspect of the MEDLINE reinvention effect.

  5. METADATA INITIATIVES AT NLM.

    NLM has finalized the report of its Task Group on Metadata and Methods of Recording Permanence Levels and will be sharing its ideas and recommendation in the appropriate forums. As a result of this report, NLM plans to create metadata for all publicly available electronic resources produced by NLM. Initial metadata creation will be the responsibility of the resource creator or the person responsible for promoting the resource to the Web. In the coming year, NLM plans to actively test the initial standardized set of metadata elements designed by this group.

    An integral part of this initiative is NLM's desire to communicate its level of commitment to the permanent availability of its electronic publications. Of particular concern is the ability to inform users whether an electronic resource cited today will be available in the future, retrievable from the same address, and unchanged in content.

  6. CONTRACTING ACTIVITIES.

    The Serial Records Section awarded a purchase order in August for Serials Processing Support. Tasks include mail handling, labeling, duplicates processing, claims processing, and ad-hoc data entry projects to maintain Voyager data. The contractors working onsite sort all of the incoming journal shipments, individual issues and first class mail into various categories for processing by NLM staff. NLM receives between 600-1000 items per day and the contractor is required to sort material up to twice daily , depending on mail delivery. This contract has freed up NLM serials staff to handle checkin and other higher-level tasks.

    We will begin planning for the re-competition of subscription contracts for European, U.S., U.K., and Japanese journals in the spring. The library's current contracts expire in September 2002.

    In FY 2000 contract cataloging accounted for 35% of the Cataloging Section's production. Projects included recompetition of an AV cataloging contract and the award of two purchase orders for the cataloging of monographs in Japanese, Swedish, Norwegian and miscellaneous other languages. In addition, after a hiatus of several years, a purchase order for the cataloging of serials in major Western European languages was awarded. Cataloging also contracted for an expert consultant to assist in the conversion of the bibliographic and authority records in Wade-Giles to the pinyin romanization scheme.

  7. LICENSING.

    NLM has developed a policy on acquiring copyrighted material in electronic format and a checklist of license provisions to be used in evaluating licensed materials. NLM, as a part of NIH, is working with the NIH Library regarding NIH-wide licensing arrang ements for electronic materials and their suitability to meet NLM's needs as a basis for deciding the future direction for NLM licensing efforts.

  8. PERSONNEL.

    Beth Weston was hired as the Head, Acquisitions Unit, and Serial Records Section at the end of July 2000. She previously worked as the Serials Librarian at the Gelman Library at George Washington University and as the Coordinator of Serials Acquisitions at the University of Delaware. The position description under which she was hired had been rewritten to include responsibility for licensing of serials. The Cataloging Section has recently hired two new catalogers and is actively recruiting for a third with Slavic language expertise.

Duane Arenales
Chief Technical Services Division
National Library of Medicine
Voice: 301 496-6133
Fax: 301 402-1211
arenales@nlm.nih.gov

Return to List of Libraries


NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

From: cclark cclark@nypl.org
Subject: New York Public Library Update

NYPL Update for Big Heads for Midwinter 2000

  1. RETROSPECTIVE CONVERSION:

    This month we will complete our monograph recon project with over 2 million roman language titles converted. We began a 3 year serials recon project in October and are using OCLC's services. A small Korean conversion project is completed and Chinese and Japanese projects are due to be completed by June. A Hebrew project is underway.

  2. INTEGRATED LIBRARY SYSTEM:

    We purchased III's Millennium products and other new features that we will implement over the next 12-18 months. The Millennium products will replace the character-based modules already in use. A planning team is working to implement the serials checkin product in March.

    A team is being assembled to assist in planning for implementation of an online circulation system by the end of the calendar year. Since the vast majority of our collections are non-circulating the circulation system will manage and track in-house use of collections. We've contracted with III to write a program that will allow patrons to request and page items that they wish to use in the context of an opac search. We will begin barcoding and creating item records for materials as they are acquired this year.

    We're also actively working on adding the ability to search and display vernacular Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and Korean in the opac.

  3. REMOTE STORAGE:

    As noted in the report from Columbia, NYPL, Columbia, and Princeton have entered an agreement to jointly build a collection storage facility on the Princeton campus. NYPL expects to send 1.75 million items in the initial phase, including all our microfilm master negatives. Since we've never circulated collections online and all items sent to storage must have records and barcodes, we have big projects ahead of us. Contract staff will barcode all of the items targeted for remote storage starting this month. A combination of contract and NYPL staff will create item records for the materials going into storage. We started a cleaning project last year to prepare materials for barcoding and we'll place some fragile and disbound materials in protective enclosures before shipment to the storage facility.

  4. PRESERVATION:

    Late in December, the Mellon Foundation approved funding for NYPL to be used to create a collections care program targeting the general non-rare collections. The funding will be added to our preservation endowment and the additional income generated will be used to add 3 new positions to the Preservation Division.

  5. DEACCESSIONING:

    In response to problems that occurred when a few high value withdrawn books were sold to dealers for much less than their worth, a policy was written severely limiting when items could be deaccessioned from the collections. We are currently developing procedures and a review and approval system for each of the 4 Centers and Technical Services to follow. Correspondingly, our policy for accepting gifts is under review.

  6. SPACE AND ORGANIZATIONAL PLANNING:

    The Acquisitions and Cataloging Divisions, and Technical Services administrative offices are scheduled to move at the end of the calendar year into a building addition under construction and into existing space that will be renovated. We're looking at how best to place staff in the new space available. We're also looking to make organizational changes that will help us deal with cataloging backlogs, electronic resources, and implementation of authority control using the III authority control module.

Return to List of Libraries


NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

From: ARNO KASTNER kastnera@elmer4.bobst.nyu.edu
Subject: NYU Round Robin report

New York University Round Robin Update--January 2001

  1. PERSONNEL.

    Peter Brantley joined the library senior management team on November 1 as Director of Information Technology Services. Some of the things he will tackle in the next few months are a major desktop hardware upgrade and review of office dessktop support services. Michael Stoller joins us as Director of Collections and Research Services on January 8. Among many other things, Michael will help us evaluate a range of services offered by vendors, review our gift processing routines, and establish more effective ways of acquiring and providing access to electronic resources.

  2. LOCAL SYSTEM.

    We have enjoyed a year of relative peace after the trauma of implementing USMARC holdings in our Geac ADVANCE system last Summer. We have eliminated our backlog of serials check-in, established publication patterns for most of our current subscriptions and are now beginning a systematic clean-up of our online check-in records.

  3. STAFFING.

    In recognition of the amount of serials clean-up work that needs to be done, we have been looking very carefully at staffing allocation within technical services. A vacant Assistant Head of Acquisitions position has been converted to a staff position assigned to record maintenance. For several months ordering staff have been assisting with serials check-in because of the lower volume of firm orders being placed. The latter is only partly due to increased use of approval plans and using materials funds for higher-priced electronic items.

    The department directors are looking at staffing allocation on a library-wide scale. Technical services has eliminated a supervisory position that administered our inventory project, and a vacant junior copy cataloging position is frozen for the time being.

  4. RECON.

    With the help of some grant funding, we contracted with MarcLink to convert about 14,000 Arabic, Hebrew and Persian titles. I would like to think is our last pocket of unconverted material, but our 5-year monographic inventory project continues to turn up hundreds of unconverted titles a month as staff sweep through the stacks.

  5. ACCESS TO ELECTRONIC RESOURCES.

    Not much substantive progress here since my last report, but our Electronic Access Policy Committee submitted a list of recommendations to the Library Cabinet in December. One of the recommendations is to accept the multiple-record approach for serials issued in different formats, the rationale being easier management of records as they become available from vendors.

Arno Kastner
Director of Technical Services
Bobst Library
New York University
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
voice:212-998-2477
email:arno.kastner@nyu.edu

Return to List of Libraries


PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

From: Katharine Farrell kfarrell@Princeton.edu
Subject: Princeton Update

The following was prepared by Rick Schulz, AUL for Tech Services. It's brevity is an indication of how busy we are and how streamlined we are trying to become.

Princeton Update

Princeton Technical Services staff, like our colleagues at Cornell, for the past six months have been totally engrossed in adjusting and adapting to the new Voyager system. The migration was highly successful and we have managed by dint of tremendous staff effort and flexibility to stay reasonably current in most areas of processing, the main exception being non-priority cataloging. The area of greatest impact was undoubtedly invoicing and fiscal control. Here we experienced a large increase in workload, but an even greater increase in service, as the majority of the paper stream between the library and university accounts payable has been replaced by electronic data transfers between Voyager and PeopleSoft. Invoices which used to take 2-3 months to get paid, if it all, are by and large now paid within a day of forwarding with a very high degree of reliability. Current book fund status information, for long an impossible dream, is now a reality for our selectors. Over the past two months we have achieved successful serial invoice loads via EDI from our major vendors. We have begun pilot programs in distributed order generation and periodical receipt check-in allowing designated selectors and branch library staff respectively to directly perform some functions hitherto possible only by central technical services staff. We consolidated the workflow for our major English and European language approval plans combining operations for receipt and invoice preparation with cataloging, emphasizing the goal of accomplishing processing closure in one handling; three new support staff positions, called "Approvals Specialists", were created from existing lines and classified at the highest rank to support the re-structured workflow.

Return to List of Libraries


STANFORD UNIVERSITY

From: Catherine M. Tierney ctierney@stanford.edu
Subject: Stanford update

Here is the Stanford update.

January 9, 2001

  1. FAST TRACK INITIATIVES.

    We are moving toward adding a 4th fast track vendor (Aux Amateurs de Livres) for EDI monographs. The significance is that our original redesign plans had included only US, UK, Germany, and Italy; with those working relatively smoothly, we decided to give France a try for >4,000 titles per year. Also for Fast Track, we have begun placing orders directly in YPB's GOBI; order date elements are transmitted back to us for automatic loading into Unicorn. Practical considerations outweighed our original, more ambitious model for Fast Track ordering, at least for the near term.

  2. DIGITAL ASSETS MANAGEMENT.

    We are nearly there with first deliverables out of Artesia's TEAMS: management of e-journals for User Access options and status reporting and for in-house subscription and data management. Our Metadata Librarian, strategically based within Catalog Department, is intensely working on element sets for all material types. Additionally, she is in close partnership with Academic Computing for metadata requirements for Courseware delivery and integration with e-reserves.

  3. STAFFING.

    Head of Cataloging position http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/humres/77.html) is posted and available for bright, innovative person intrigued by applying cataloging foundations to the bigger questions of discovery and access. Philip Schreur, previous incumbent, was lured to HighWire Press to work on semantic searching, after he put in place the redesigned Catalog Department http://library.depts/catdept/midyear00.htm). Many other good jobs in SUL/AIR (http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/humres/job.html) are available, including Social Science and PLAC Cataloger; Head of Media Preservation.

  4. E-JOURNAL PACKAGES.

    SUL/AIR has taken strong position on vendor e-journal packages for reasons of principle, as well as for obvious economics. The all-or-nothing model of aggregated content denies us our responsibility to assess content based on quality, scope, and degree of relevance to our collections. Many of these vendor models give vendors/publishers a frightening degree of control over our collection's future. As a result, negotiations have been intense, and we have rejected a number of such packages. We continue to cancel some paper titles in order to afford electronic access to them or to other titles of greater importance to Stanford.

=+=+=+=+=+=+
Assoc. University Librarian for Technical Services
Stanford University Libraries
Stanford, CA 94305-6004
650.723-2015 (voice)
650.723.9325 (fax)

Return to List of Libraries


UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARY

From: Judith Nadler judi@uchicago.edu
Subject: Re: Chicago Update January 2001

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO UPDATE, JANUARY 2001

  1. ORGANIZATION

    The Information Resources Management Division, encompassing Integrated Library Systems, Acquisitions, Cataloging, Serials, Preservation, and the Digital Library Development Center, is now fully consolidated. As part of this reorganization, the previously separate departments of Acquisitions, Cataloging and Serials, were merged into two format-blind operations: Acquisitions and Cataloging. Jobs were newly defined or rewritten for the new structure. We were able to fill most of the positions and a common space was secured and furnished to reflect the new functionality. We are very pleased with the conceptual and physical lay-out of the acquisitions and cataloging operations.

    The Digital Library Development Center (DLDC), now fully operational, is preparing to move into its new space previously occupied by Serials. Staff from NSIT (Instructional Technology, Networking Services) will join the Digital Library Development Center in this new location. We are working with a space planner to configure space to best affect our goals and to facilitate synergies that can occur between the two staffs. We plan to effect the physical move within this calendar year.

    The Digital Library Development Center provides coordinating, management, and technical functions in support of the University of Chicago Library's distributed digital library activities. It engages in development activities as well as providing production services. Under its leadership, intra-divisional groups were created to support digital library activities. Using the group structure, the DLDC will further the Library^Òs goals for creation, maintenance and publication of digital information.

    Persisting naming, archiving for electronic information, applicability for metadata standards, and authorization/authentication, are among high-priority goals for the DLDC. The DLDC is expected to provide coordination and support for investigating, implementing, and evaluating a variety of digital solutions, e.g. unified searching front-end, real-time web-based reference.

    We are a member of the Digital Library Federation (DLF) and have co-hosted a very successful DLF Forum in November. The Chicago location has facilitated broad staff participation in the Forum. Retrospective Conversion The last of the OCLC converted records (a grand total of 1,351,835!) arrived from OCLC last week. With this, all but our CJK records are represented in our online catalog as well as in OCLC and RLIN. The initial effort to convert the 156,000 East Asia titles began in January. Each month for the next year, approximately 3,000 card records for CJK will be converted by OCLC and added to the online catalog and to OCLC and RLIN. Our local system cannot display vernacular fields at this time, but we expect to have this capability in the near future. It is only then that the value of the CJK recon project will be fully realized.

  2. COOPERATIVE CATALOGING

    We continue to acquire and load sets of records for large collections as they become available. We have initiated the acquisition of the records from netLibrary and will test issues of linking and record identification as we load the set.

    We rely on YBP records for all purchases via this vendor and are exploring cataloging options with our other vendors. We have begun to outsource the cataloging of Armenian materials to OCLC Techpro.

    We continue our participation in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging and, between October 1, 1999 and September 30, 2000, have contributed 2,427 name authorities, 685 series authorities, and 4, 010 bibliographic records. With this, we are the 4th largest contributor for bibs and names and the 3rd largest contributor for series.

    We continue to participate in CORC and are contemplating joining the CONSER program. Our Library follows the CONSER guidelines for cataloging and the new organizational structure puts us in a better position to assume this responsibility, but the advantages and investment in this membership is still being investigated.

  3. HORIZON INTEGRATED LIBRARY SYSTEM

    All parts of the system implemented so far are very stable and have good functionality. Major retrospective conversion and the capabilities of the system enable patrons to find comprehensive bibliographic information and detailed holdings information for the entire collections.

    Epixtech, the vendor for our system, has created a new and much improved search interface for the catalog. We are gearing up for a usability test for students of the iPAC screen displays and are planning meetings with faculty to see a demonstration and to comment on the features of the new catalog so that we can provide constructive guidance to the vendor as they improve the new searching interface.

    We are working on a program for electronic book plating for donor recognition, a long-standing desideratum for our development staff, and expect to have this going soon.

Return to List of Libraries


UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN LIBRARY

From: Barbara Henigman henigman@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Subject: UIUC Round Robin

Bigheads Round Robin, January 2001
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1. PERSONNEL

    The UIUC Library welcomed its Director of Human Resources in July. The creation of this position has allowed our Library to move forward with filling a number of vacant faculty positions. Included in this group are an Associate University Librarian for Services and a Head of Preservation. The primary focus of Library wide activity this fall has been on staff development, management training, and assessing service goals.

  2. ORIGINAL CATALOGING

    Within Technical Services several new initiatives have emerged. In July the Original Cataloging process was recentralized under the umbrella of the Original Cataloging Team. We are in the process of filling three new faculty cataloger positions to help build this initiative.

  3. BACKLOG

    We have also completed a comprehensive backlog study and have implemented a program to eliminate the Library backlog in 2-3 years. Interested parties can see the report results under "What's new" on the UIUC Technical Services Web Page at http://www.library.uiuc.edu/techserv/ .

  4. ACQUISITIONS

    We is also excited to be moving to a vendor supported system for Acquisitions. We've been using III as a stand alone serials checkin system for 4 years. We're expanding our III project this year coming up on Millennium Serials for central serials checkin March 1, Acquisitions July 1, and then phasing it in for the departmental libraries that check in serials directly in their units. We have been using a homegrown accounting system since the early 1980's so this is a very exciting change for us and is allowing us to examine and revamp workflows between Acquisitions and Cataloging and Acquisitions and the Business Office to lead to better efficiencies and service.

  5. SERIALS

    We are sad to announce that our Serials Team Leader will be moving on to another positions. Sometime in the Spring we will be replacing this position. Serials retrospective conversion is at the top of our agenda and possible CONSER participation.

  6. ILSCO

    At the Consortial Level, the UIUC Library has been participating in the RFP process for a new LIS. This system will serve our library as well as the 44 other libraries that are members of the Illinois Library Computer Systems Organization (ILSCO). Responses to the RFP will be under evaluation in February and March.

Return to List of Libraries


UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIBRARIES

From: Leighann Ayers layers@umich.edu
Subject: Michigan Round Robin update

University of Michigan Round Robin update January 2001:

  1. LMS --

    We are starting an evaluation of library management system software in order to assess our systems in light of current vendor market and evolving technology trends. The process will use a Request for Information/Proposal process to communicate our needs to vendors and to review the responses from vendors.

  2. STAFFING --

    Three new selector positions have been added in the following areas: Korean Studies, Latin American Studies, and African/Sub-Saharan Africa Studies.

  3. CONFERENCES --

    We plan to present three invitational conferences during the year in the following areas: ILL (joint conference with ARL, November, 2001), preservation (TBA) and e-book issues (joint conference with Blackwell, May 10-11, 2001).

  4. TECHNOLOGY TRAINING --

    In response to staff concerns about keeping current with technology, the Library is increasing training opportunities for all staff through a more dynamic staff development program.

  5. ENDOWMENTS --

    Plans are underway to double our book endowment funding over a five year period.

  6. GEOSPATIAL DATA SERVICE CENTER --

    A Geospatial Data Service Center is being created which will be headed by a new position titled Numeric Data Specialist.

  7. ILL SOFTWARE --

    Anne Beaubien, Head of Cooperative Access Services, is chairing the CIC Delivery of Non-Returnables Task Force. Their charge is to review the marketplace for ILL software, evaluate the most effective way to deliver non-returnables to the desk top of the patron, and evaluate the issues surrounding sending articles directly to patrons at other institutions.

  8. ILL --

    This fall we increased use of the British Library as a source for article borrowing requests. Average turnaround time for these articles is .88 days (from the time we receive the request from the patron until we deliver the article). This reduced overall turnaround time for copies to four days. We are exploring whether this funding model can be sustained.

Leighann Ayers
Head, Acquisitions/Serials Division
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1205

Return to List of Libraries


UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA LIBRARY

From: Barbara A. Stelmasik b-stel@maroon.tc.umn.edu
Subject: Round Robin from Minnesota

Highlights for Bigheads, January, 2001

  1. NEW ILS.

    Contract negotiation is underway with Ex Libris with the intent that the Ex Libris Aleph system will replace the NOTIS, Sirsi and Geac systems at the Univerisity of Minnesota Twin Cities and Coordinate campuses and the PALS system and other systems at other Minnesota public and private libraries. We hope negotiations will conclude successfully early in 2001 with the possibility of complete implementation at the Twin Cities campuses in June 2002 and on the coordinate campuses 6 months later.

  2. STAFFING CHANGES.

    Charlene Mason, Deputy University Librarian, has announced her intention to retire effective March of 2001. Charlene's contributions to the University Libraries have been countless, and her enthusiasm and energy will be greatly missed. She has been in charge of almost every segment of the libraries, and some of you will recall that she once represented us at the Bigheads table. Kay Kane has accepted the position of Team Leader for Reference and Consultative Services, replacing Chris Loring. Another round of 5-6 retirements is expected during the coming year creating the challenge of rethinking and retooling more areas.

    We are very pleased to have hired 3 new original catalogers (music, serials, and special collections) in technical services, as well as a new map cataloger and a new cataloger for our James Ford Bell Collection.

  3. BUILDINGS.

    The storage caverns in Minnesota Library Access Center are accepting materials from more locations and refining procedures for moving materials and bibliographic records. Renovation of Walter library continues more or less on schedule with work to be completed December 2001.

  4. CATALOGING PROJECTS.

    We acquired and loaded 10,715 records for Minnesota state documents. We have made progress loading CIS records for Congressional Hearings. We have begun a project to outsource the cataloging of a backlog of Arabic and Hebrew materials to Techpro. We completed an NEH grant to catalog original illustrations, manuscripts and related published materials in our Children's Literature Research Collection, and in the process of doing this created our first set of EAD records. We have established a policy and process for cataloging NetLibrary titles, and have cataloged approximately 1200 such titles. We find all of these projects slow going because of staffing issues, but very rewarding when persistence finally pays off.

  5. DIGITAL PROJECTS.

    We have developed a common descriptive standard for all digitized visual resources and are promoting the standard as a campus wide standard. We started planning discussions to participate with the DLF as a testing institution for the Open Archives Initiative.

  6. RECORD MAINTENANCE.

    We continue to rely heavily on Visual Basic Macro programming to allow us to quickly update large numbers of records. E.g. we will reclassify large portions of the Science and Engineering collection, change locations on thousands of titles moved to storage, and complete large heading changes (African American) in days rather than weeks or months.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Barbara A. Stelmasik, Team Leader
Materials Acquisition and Control
University of Minnesota Libraries
160 Wilson Library
309-19th Ave. So.
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Mailto:b-stel@tc.umn.edu
Phone: 612-625-8074
Fax: 612-625-3428
http://staff.lib.umn.edu/

Return to List of Libraries


OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

From: Carol Diedrichs diedrichs.1@osu.edu
Subject: Ohio State Round Robin Report

The Ohio State University Libraries
HIGHLIGHTS FOR BIGHEADS
January, 2001

  1. ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR COLLECTIONS:

     With the departure of Gay Dannelly to Notre Dame on September 1, 2000, Carol Diedrichs was appointed Acting Assistant Director for Collection Management (in addition to her responsibilities as AD for Technical Services).  This change is part of a larger administrative reorganization which is expected to become permanent after 1 year.  

  2.  RENOVATION OF MAIN LIBRARY

    Full scale renovation of the Main Library is currently in the academic and architectural feasibility stages.  Much discussion has occurred and will continue to occur on campus about what the library of the future should be.  In addition, the hiring of a team of architects is expected in January 2001 to begin the architectural feasibility stage -- to determine what options and possibilities there are for renovating the building.  A fund raising campaign is also being planned.

  3.  CORC

    We anticipate building on our project participation in CORC in early winter to use the system for cataloging free Internet resources.  In particular, we will train collection managers to select and enter brief records in CORC with the intent of capturing their intellectual thinking about appropriate description for the site, in particular subject access needs.  Completion of the records will be handling by Serials/Electronic Resources staff.

  4. ARABIC CATALOGING PILOT PROJECT

    We are actively engaged with OCLC to convert our Arabic and Hebrew records from an internal ALEPH system so that the vernacular will display in our III OPAC.  The transliterated records already display in III but not the vernacular.  Once the conversion of our records is complete, we will be able to participate in the OCLC Arabic Cataloging Pilot.  The addition of our vernacular data into the OCLC record should also enrich those records for wider use.

  5. COLLECTION MANAGEMENT TEAM

    Two new positions have been funded as a result of recommendations from an internal committee focusing on improving the stacks in the Main Library.  These positions will reside in Technical Services and Preservation.  They will focus on facilitating the review and movement of material from the stacks to the storage facility so that more seating can be provided in the stacks.  This team is one of the outcomes of our need to identify short-term ways to make the Main Library more inviting and appealing to our patrons.  We will also be adding a coffee bar as well as other major improvements in the fiscal facility such as enhanced cleaning, cleaning of the actual books, and redesign of the foyer/entrance.  All of these improvements are designed to provide a bridge to the major renovation.

*****************************************
Carol Pitts Diedrichs
Assistant Director for Technical Services and Acting Assistant Director for Collection Management
Editor, Library Collections, Acquisitions and Technical Services
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Avenue Mall
Columbus, OH, 43210-1286
tel: 614-292-4738
fax: 614-292-7859
Internet: diedrichs.1@osu.edu
*****************************************

Return to List of Libraries


UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES LIBRARY

From: CYNTHIA SHELTON cshelton@library.ucla.edu
Subject: UCLA report

UCLA report, Big Heads, ALA Midwinter, 2001

  1. TECHNICAL SERVICES APPOINTMENTS

    Head of Cataloging: John Riemer became the new head of the Young Research Library Cataloging Department in December. John, formerly of the University of Georgia Libraries and the Digital Library of Georgia, took over a department of over 40 fte serving over a half dozen client units.

    Digital Manuscripts Librarian: A new position has been created in the YRL Department of Special Collections. Genie Geurard has been appointed to this position to lead the departments program in the creation of online finding aids for the Online Archive of California and the digitization and description of manuscript materials.

    Coordinator for Digital Acquisitions: Our Licensing Coordinator, which was a half time position, was given expanded responsibilities to coordinate acquisition of licensed networked resources. Sharon Farb is leading the development of a unified database to track and control licensed digital resources.

  2. SHARED CATALOGING PROGRAM:

    This fall, UCLA incorporated over 3200 MARC records of electronic journals into our own system that were created at UCSD as part of the UC Shared Cataloging Program. Many (appr. 2300) of the CDL records matched an existing record in our catalog. In that case, the existing Orion2 record was modified by: note fields (530, 590), genre heading (655 7 Online resources), and link field (856). We batch loaded the new records for which we did not have existing paper records. The Shared Cataloging Program is a cooperative program to share cataloging records for electronic resources that are licensed by the California Digital Library. Policies for cataloging monographs in the program are now being examined.

  3. ACQUISITION OF E-BOOKS:

    We have licensed access to 575 electronic books from netLibrary and will consider year 2001 as a pilot year to test the receptivity to and use of different categories of e-books. Pilot starts mid-January.

  4. GRANTS:

    UCLA will be participating in two processing related, UC-wide grant projects, each with a two year duration. We will be part of a Mellon funded Collection Management Initiative that will test use patterns and copy-of-record processing and shared storage for print journals with electronic equivalents. We will also be participating in a Library of Congress funded $600,000 digital library project called California Cultures to digitize 16,000 images and create 30,000 pages of electronic text of primary materials for the study of ethnic groups in California.

  5. ILS:

    Migration to DRA TAOS has focused on OPAC functionality and performance. While circulation and cataloging modules are functional, we are far from having an integrated system given the lack of a serials and acquisitions module. Testing on the serials module will begin this Spring. Cleanup of the database and processing of backlogs from the fall out of the migration continues.

  6. BACKLOG PROCESSING:

    The Library committed $670K of one time money in FY 2000/01 to eliminate processing and cataloging backlogs. We have filled temporary positions in the areas of records management, cataloging, manuscript processing, and processing for the remote library facility.

Cynthia Shelton
AUL, Collections and Technical Services
UCLA Library
11334 Young Research Library
Box 951575
L.A. CA 90095-1575

phone: (310) 825-1201, 825-1202
fax: (310) 206-4109
email: cshelton@library.ucla.edu

Return to List of Libraries


UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LIBRARY

From: Carton Rogers rogers@pobox.upenn.edu
Subject: Penn Round Robin Report

  1. PERSONNEL:

    We continue our search for a new Director of Public Services to replace Patricia Renfro who is now at Columbia. From my selfish point of view, I hope that we can attract someone who will work as cooperatively and collaboratively with my folks as Patricia did! We have filled the long-vacant Head of Original Cataloging position. Louise Rees, our long time serials cataloger, who had been doing an excellent job as Acting Head finally decided to throw her hat in the ring and was selected for the permanent position. Her promotion leaves a major hole on the serials side of our cataloging operation. Obviously, we'll be posting that vacancy shortly. Finally, we are in the process of recruiting a second electronic resources acquisitions librarian to more effectively manage this area of intense growth.

  2. PRESERVATION:

    Penn was chosen by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to be one of six libraries to receieve a one-year planning grant. We will be looking at ways to archive and preserve digital journal content.

  3. RECON:

    We continue to hack away at our unconverted collections. All of the Dewey classes are now done (not including serials and materials in Special Collections) except for the 800s. The first batch of converted 800 records was loaded into our OPAC over the holidays. We hope to finish this portion of our recon project by the end of the fiscal year but find ourselves in the unenviable position of having to "flesh" out brief shelflist cards in order to improve the record match rate. This represents an enormous amount of work (we have 55 full drawers of brief shelflist cards in the 800s) which must be done. In addition to the 800s, our vendor (MarcLink) has most of our Dewey serials records in hand as well as the shelflistsof a couple of small special collections. We hope to identify funding sources to help us complete conversion of our rare book collections.

  4. DIGITAL INITIATIVES:

    Beyond the Mellon grant proposal and the addition of the second electronic acquisitions position there has been a lot of activity in this area. We are collaborating with our Web Manager on a number of Franklin (our OPAC)-to-Web and Web-to-Franklin projects including new acquisitions lists built on the fly to the specification of the user, a reorganization of our e-journal lists using Franklin bib records as the source data, and bulk importing (and bulk creating) bib data for large sets of e-resources. We have also set up a Son of Franklin database containing migrated bib data originally created for our slide collection using Minaret. Ongoing slide cataloging will be done on this Voyager-based system but we are using an XML converter to extract the bib information and the images for public access through DLXS.

  5. MULTIPLE VERSIONS:

    Sorry I didn't jump into the multiple version discussion sooner. We have always created and maintained separate records for different versions. In light of some of our digital initiatives that decision seems, in retrospect, one of our better ones.

Return to List of Libraries


UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS LIBRARY

From: Robin Fradenburgh r.fradenburgh@mail.utexas.edu

Subject: UT Austin update

UT Austin Update

  1. HEAD OF PRESERVATION FILLED.

    Finally filled our vacancy for the Head of Preservation that has been open since Feb. 28 with a local candidate. We are finding that we are not as competitive as we should be to recruit top candidates to Austin. The cost of living in Austin has escalated and our salaries have not kept up.

  2. NETLIBRARY RECORDS.

    Continue to look for the most efficient and inexpensive method to acquire and provide MARC records for netLibrary books to UT Austin and its consortial components. We were acquiring records via OCLC PrompCat but are in the process of setting up an OCLC collection set for UT System.

  3. SWITCHED FROM FAXON TO EBSCO.

    Switched serial vendors this summer. It is hoped that we can use EBSCO Online to better manage our access to electronic journals.

  4. TRYING TO GET A BETTER HANDLE ON OUR ONLINE SUBSCRIPTIONS.

    Last year, the serials duplicate review taskforce seriously studied serial titles received in both print and electronic forms. As a result, starting this month (January), over 600 journals that used to be available in print, will only have current issues available online. Over the course of the Fall, members of Collection Development and Acquisitions met to discuss better procedures for handling (and getting better control of) electronic serial subscriptions and e-journal collections through Innopac. Whether to check in individual issues is still being discussed and is currently being tested in one of the branches.

  5. CORC.

    Still have not seriously embraced CORC. We have a locally developed metadata template that allows more flexibility in accommodating additional element qualifiers than are supported by CORC. It is hoped that we will eventually be able to enter these metadata records into CORC.

  6. MAJOR COLLECTIONS ADDED.

    We have a very active gift program and recently have received some large (large in terms of volume count) and valuable (in terms of appraised value) gift donations as well as purchased some major collections. Staging these materials for review and processing has been interesting, e.g., one of the large gifts was a library comprised of 125,000 volumes. For two of the architectural collections, we are actually sending a cataloger to the location where the materials will be housed. In one situation, the collection is mostly oversized materials; in the other, the collection is housed in a museum setting. It should be noted here that although we have an active gift program, we have seriously reduced the number of gift materials added to the collection in recent years. Gifts are added based on condition, expected use and value.

Robin Fradenburgh
Head Librarian
Technical Services Operations Division
University of Texas at Austin

Return to List of Libraries


UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIBRARY

From: Joyce Ogburn jlogburn@u.washington.edu
Subject: Washington round robin report

University of Washington Report for ALA Midwinter Meeting 2001
ALCTS Technical Services Directors of Large Research Libraries Discussion Group

  1. PERSONNEL:

    The biggest news is the hiring of our new director: Betsy Wilson. Betsy was The UW Libraries' Associate Director for Reference and Instructional Services. She started on January 1. Gordon Aamot will be filling in as acting AD for now. Jackie Coats, formerly of Chicago and YBP, joined the UW as Monographic Acquisitions Librarian in the fall. She brings a wealth of experience from the library and vendor perspective and we are very pleased to have her here with us. With Linda Gould's retirement as Scholarly Communication Librarian, Jon Blake has taken over this role. He formerly led the development of our two branch campus libraries at Bothell and Tacoma. We have also hired four temporary librarians: Serials Cataloger, International Studies Computer Services Librarian, Electronic Resources Acquisitions Librarian, and Special Projects Librarian.

  2. E-BOOKS:

    We took the plunge into e-books this fall with a collective purchase for NetLibrary books, with a focus on the Choice best books, reference materials, and those with a focus on the Pacific Northwest. We should have the cataloging records soon.

  3. LIBRARIES TRANSFORMATION:

    I reported earlier about a budget proposal to the Provost to transform our collections and services to digital formats. We also wrote a major proposal to receive funding from the University to form a Digital Cooperative on campus to work with faculty in creating databases of research material that can be disseminated widely and for the benefit of many, including the K-12 arena. Another component is to work diligently on resource discovery and searching tools. If the proposal is received favorably, we will write a more extensive proposal for the final round of review. If awarded, the funding would begin in July of 2001. We see this as a complement to transforming our purchased/licensed materials to digital and also as part of our efforts to change the system of scholarly communication.

  4. DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND METADATA DEVELOPMENT:

    Geri Bunker Ingram, Coordinator of Digital Initiatives moved on to UC-San Diego this fall and we hired Kody Janney to fill in. She most recently worked for Microsoft and it was a nice change to raid from them for once! We are forming an advisory group for planning and oversight of the program. The Metadata Implementation Group still reports to the Associate Director for Resources and Collection Management Services and consists of staff from many areas of the Libraries. This group embodies the spirit of collaboration and learning that allows new initiatives and services to flourish. If we receive the funding from the University to expand this program, we will be able to add many more staff to develop collections and enhance the metadata applications.

  5. PINYIN:

    Unlike many other libraries, the UW faces many challenges with Pinyin conversion, stemming from the large size of the collection, serials unclassified and shelved alphabetically, collections split over five locations, and lack of control at the item level. We are allocating more resources to conversion for the next two to three years.

  6. CATALOGING AND AUTHORITY CONTROL:

    We have just issued an RFQ for authority control and will chose a vendor this spring. The Cataloging Policy Committee has completed the compilation of all of the outstanding and ongoing cataloging projects. The grand total was over 125 and the process now is addressing setting priorities. After this is accomplished we will look at the resources needed to successfully deal with the highest priority projects.

  7. TEMPORARY RELOCATION OF TECHNICAL SERVICES:

    Plans for moving units from Serials Services and Monographic Services are rapidly gearing up for a move in April. The complexity of designing a new but temporary space has been interesting to say the least, and the issues for the staff have been large. Some vital lessons have been to start planning early, assign someone to take charge of the planning, and communicate early and often with all the parties involved. And don't assume anything!

  8. PRESERVATION:

    The UW hosted the School for Scanning in the fall, which was a huge success. We took advantage of it being here on campus and sent 30 staff. It was an eye opener for many and we hope attendance by such a large number of our staff will help us prepare for and achieve our goals on understanding and moving more rapidly into the digital world.

  9. OTHER:

    The School of Library and Information Science is officially becoming the Information School this summer. The school has achieved an incredible renaissance, attracting funding and outstanding teachers and scholars. The Libraries staff continues to contribute as well by teaching classes and guest lecturing. The program now has an undergraduate informatics program and added a doctoral program in Information Science. They have truly been a case study for revival with the right vision and leadership.

Joyce L. Ogburn
Associate Director of the Libraries
Resources and Collection Management Services
University of Washington
Box 352900
Seattle WA 98195-2900
phone: 206-685-2889;
fax: 206-685-8727
jlogburn@u.washington.edu

Return to List of Libraries


UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN LIBRARY

From: Richard Reeb rreeb@library.wisc.edu
Subject: Univ. of Wisconsin report

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Big Heads, ALA Midwinter 2001

  1. REORGANIZATION OF TECHNICAL SERVICES

    The most significant highlight during this reporting period has been the reorganization of the Central Technical Services Division. Since 1989 the division had been organized into four subject-based departments (Area Studies, Humanities, Science, and Social Science) which were responsible for the acquisitions, cataloging and maintenance functions for materials sorted into these four broad subject areas. The structure had been introduced shortly after Wisconsin had implemented NOTIS in 1987 and drew some of its inspiration from the integrated nature of that ILS. The subject organized division also reflected organizational goals predating the advent of electronic resources and the purchase of Endeavor's Voyager system.

    These two factors caused us to reexamine our organization because we could no longer meet many of the needs of the departments we were serving directly. In a two month period (October-November) we designed a new structure, met with each member of the division giving them an opportunity to express their preferences of placement in the new organization, and announced the final assignments before Thanksgiving.

    The functionally reorganized technical services division, which became effective on Dec. 1, now consists of two large departments: Acquisitions and Serials Department, managed by Karl Debus, and the Cataloging Department under the supervision of Irene Zimmerman. Within the former there are three units: Checkin, Fiscal/Receiving, and Order. The Cataloging Dept. contains four units: Copy Cataloging, Original Cataloging, Catalog Maintenance, and Retrospective Conversion. The majority of the staff have responded positively to the reorganization; for some it has meant a change of duties which have also been positively received. Although the new reporting lines are in place, we have not yet reorganized our physical space. For this phase of the reorganization we have hired a consultant to advise us on shifting staff to align them with their new units/departments. We are hopeful this final phase of the project will be completed in March or April.

  2. LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

    In our second year of life under Voyager, we will complete the approval of the standing order records migrated from NOTIS in June 1999. There are 9,600 orders still in pending status that we intend to have approved by the end of February. The final piece of the implementation project still in progress is the creation of checkin records, the basis for predictive checkin and claiming. Optimistically we think the major part of this work can be finished by the end of this calendar year. Among our successes in the last six months, which we have completed, is the loading of invoices using EDI from our major vendors: Ebsco, Harrassowitz, Nijhoff, and SwetsBlackwell. This is one of the few areas in the acquisitions module where we have realized some savings in staff time.

  3. RETROSPECTIVE CONVERSION

    This has become a perennial item in my semiannual report. We are making steady progress in the project now in its tenth year. As earlier reported, we expect to complete by July the LC classified materials except for titles in the non-roman alphabets. Our unconverted collections also include 214,000 titles assigned call numbers in the Cutter classification system; 35,000 Wisconsin Masters and Ph.D. theses, and 19,000 serial records. If we continue to receive the current level of funding for this project, it will probably take us at least three more years before our collections are fully online.

  4. SHELFREADY PROCESSING

    As a result of the success of a pilot project for shelfready books firm ordered from Yankee Book Peddler in two subject areas, a committee consisting of technical services and collection development staff has just completed its work on the profile with YBP that will allow us to expand shelfready receipts to all firm orders sent to the vendor. We expect to begin receiving materials processed by Yankee in the next few weeks. Later this fiscal year we will be expanding shelfready to our approval plan receipts.

  5. ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

    In November we appointed Aimee Glassel, who had been employed in the Internet Scout project, as our new Electronic Resources Librarian. The full-time position is a split appontment, reporting to the heads in the new CTS departments. Half of her time is spent assisting the Head of Acquisitions and Serials in reviewing licenses and handling complex problems related to the acquisition and ongoing access to electronic resources, while for the other half she is engaged in cataloging-related responsibilities such as helping us puzzle out how to enter bibliographic and holdings data for electronic resources into our catalog and then how to extract the data into a separate database.

Richard Reeb

Return to List of Libraries


YALE UNIVERSITY

From: Joan Swanekamp joan.swanekamp@yale.edu
Subject: Yale Round Robin Report

ALA Midwinter Meeting 2001
ALCTS Technical Services Directors of Large Research Libraries Group
Report of Recent Activities at Yale University

  1. PERSONNEL:

      University Librarian Scott Bennett will retire in summer 2001, and a search for his replacement is underway.  As of November 1st, 2000, Marcia Romanansky assumed the position of Chief Acquisitions Librarian and Head of the Acquisitions Department, and Jim Shelter was appointed as Assistant Head of the Acquisitions Department.  Marcia brings to the Yale Library a great deal of relevant and exciting experience as a senior manager at both Blackwell's and Baker & Taylor.  The Library Management Council are reviewing the adequacy and appropriate mix of funds budgeted for student and casual workers and hope to address these in the budget request for FY2001/02.

  2. LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.

      The Library is moving forward with plans to implement a new LMS by summer of 2002.  Two finalist vendors (Endeavor and ExLibris) have been invited to provide week-long demonstrations in the second half of January, with the Migration Management Group making a decision within the first quarter of 2001.  The LMS web site is located at:  http://www.library.yale.edu/orbis2/public/orbis2.htm

  3. TECHNICAL SERVICES PROCESS IMPROVEMENT.

      The technical services departments, particularly in the Sterling (main) Library, are engaged in significant review of processes that can be improved without waiting for the adoption of a new LMS.  Areas of focus were identified by library-wide focus groups last spring and these include:  selection through acquisitions; monograph receiving and cataloging; serials processing with relation to the Periodical Reading Room; technical services for the Cross Campus (intensive use) library; and binding.  Paul Conway, Head of Preservation, serves as the Manager of this project, whose first phase will end by June 30th, 2001. 

  4. LIBRARY SHELVING FACILITY (OFF-SITE).

      Processing is being expanded to include serials and multi-volume works, maps, and microforms.  The 2.5 volume capacity first module, opened in November of 1999, is expected to be mostly full next fiscal year, and the Library has requested funding to build a second module in the coming FY.

  5. CATALOGING.

      The Library continues to address its growing original cataloging backlog.  Two support positions have been converted to professional cataloging positions, one of which will devote 50% of his time to map cataloging, with a second map cataloger to be recruited shortly.  The department is recruiting for two catalog librarians with Hebrew and German expertise.  Automated searching using OCLC's FullMARC service continues to provide an efficient and economic means to address the cataloging backlog, and significant process has been made in the number of backlog/frontlog titles handled.   We successfully converted from Wade-Giles to Pinyin romanization for Chinese language materials.

  6. ACQUISITIONS.

      Under Marcia Romanasky's leadership, the Library is reviewing the effectiveness of its domestic approval and firm order suppliers and procedures.  A Replacements Working Group has developed a pilot project for automatic replacement of missing English-language books.  The pilot is being launched this month.

  7. PRESERVATION.

      The big news is that Yale Library is one of about a half dozen that has received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation one-year planning grant to develop approaches to archiving and preservation of substantial digital content.  Yale's project involves a partnership with a large-scale publisher, Elsevier Science, and focuses on their journals program.  Project Manager is Paul Conway, and PIs are Scott Bennett and Ann Okerson.

  8. RETROSPECTIVE CONVERSION.

      This key activity continues, largely on target and on time (with slight delays in the non-Roman records).  The projects to convert the Official Catalog and the Serials Catalog should be completed early in 2002.  Yale's 150,000 CJK records should be completed by summer of 2003.  Arabic conversion is underway in-house, and the Library is negotiating a contract for Hebrew conversion.

  9. AUTHORITY CONTROL.

      Yale is in the midst of converting from the now defunct OCLC Authority Control Service to the OCLC/WLN MARS service.  Records from the old system are currently being converted and ongoing processing is just beginning.  We will have more to report this summer.     

  10. DIGITAL RESOURCES. 

    The Library's e-journal offerings now comprise about 8,500 titles, exclusive of large general aggregations such as Lexis-Nexis and Academic Universe.  A second electronic resources collections position was added last summer, to more effectively manage this rapidly growing area, including licensing, uptake, and user statistics.  In the fall semester, we benefited from the services of a library school intern in this area and hope to have a Fullbright librarian working with us in a few months' time.  These staff work closely with the Catalog department, which continues to develop and experiment with new models for cataloging digital resources of all kinds.  The Yale Library generally creates separate records for electronic versions of most types of materials and has developed some sophisticated macros for modifying copy for print titles to use for the digital versions.

Ann Okerson, Associate University Librarian
Joan Swanekamp, Chief Catalog Librarian and Head of the Catalog Department
 

Return to List of Libraries