MONTHLY REPORT -- May-June, 2000
Highlights of May-June, 2000
Sindy Chan was hired for the 50% accounting position. Sindy will process serial invoices, work that was moved to TSAA from SER recently. We are fortunate to have Sindy with us. She has worked as a student for 3 years with Kathie Miller doing accounting functions and brings a lot of useful experience with her to the new position.
For the first 3 weeks of May, the CWA strike consumed attention from most of TSAA, in our role of supporting the other 4 depts. We arranged some trash collection and welcomed the volunteer help from MOD and SER staff. Lisa, Janie, me and our students scrambled to maintain the flows of monographs and serials from outside OSU to MOD and SER and the finished serials to dept libraries. We had cooperation from Ryan in scheduling twice weekly deliveries to dept libraries and some libraries came and picked up their serials and those for libraries close by.
Preparations for the end of the fiscal year geared up in May. Kathie, Jean, Sindy and Ellen all focussed on processing as many invoices as possible and getting them paid by the university before FY99/00 closes. We had the cooperation of MOD and SER staff in our efforts to resolve invoice/order problems so payment could be made. Additional prepay arrangements were completed and the procurement card statements for online monograph orders were brought up to date. At the collection managers forum, I explained the fiscal close elements of interest to the collection managers. In June, the push continued for the first two weeks of the month. More was accomplished in less time than the fiscal close experience of last year, TSAA's first year of existence. The credit goes to the wonderful work of our students Shaun Barcalow and Jackie Minadeo and our staff, Sindy Chan, Kathie Miller, Jean McMeans and especially their supervisor, Ellen Scherer. With the beginning of the fiscal year FY 01, Jean and Ellen created all the online ledgers needed. Ellen, Jean and I attended a number of ARMS General Ledger training sessions. We learned the new system will allow us to continue our current invoice payment workflow to OSUAccounts Payable.
In June we devised a new accounting tool for tracking invoices held up due to order problems. Information will be compiled on a monthly basis and shared with MOD, SER and Carol Diedrichs. The information should be useful in reviewing vendor statements and help the other depts track their problem solving work.
We got the remaining panels for room 040 rearrangements.
The trial 'I am a book' tour was conducted in May. Ellen was a presenter of monograph invoice information. Lisa was tour leader. She compiled participant comments into the process improvement group's final report to TS dept heads on their successful efforts to redesign the 'I am a book' tour. In June, Lisa scheduled 2 summer quarter tours based on the trial experience. She also began compiling a glossary of tech service terms that might help our visitors better understand what they learn during the tours.
Deb worked with OARDC staff on deleting Felix order records in May. She also got the telecommuting details started for Anne Magnussen to assist SER electronic product cataloging.
In June Deb began making plans for reghosting all the Tech Services PCs. She worked with IT staff on the elements of the planning, completing forms for all accounts, determining in what order the departments should be done, referring to Dept Heads a question about shared server space design that must be settled before the reghosting can begin. As part of the preparation, Deb's PC served as a test site for the NT-Thurber Millenia Tower image. Lisa's PC was reghosted to run NT on Thurber. Deb referred all quirks found during this testing to IT.
Among our web site responsibilities, Janie made great progress on the site index for the TS web pages. A web page for SER was created and linked to the TS site [to be announced publicly by Trisha Davis].
Lisa handled IT questions during Deb's May vacation, including getting 2 new staff, 2 GAAs and 3 student accounts set up. She provided basic Eudora, Felix and checkin training for these individuals as appropriate. The checkin training she provided was the first use of the procedures she created in cooperation with SER staff for long term use with new employees.
In June Lisa was asked to chair the Training Advisory Council for the next year. Her assignment leading the Labelling Task Force ended as did her term on Libraries Staff Council.