TECHNICAL SERVICES DIVISION
HIGHLIGHTS - MARCH 2000 MONTHLY REPORT
Staffing
I am pleased to report that the Cataloging Dept. will increase its staffing by one position on a permanent basis. The position previously held by Effie Spillman was first designed for replacement by a professional librarian. Since that time, Magda has identified a pressing need for staff resources to focus on the analytics projects within retrocon as well as the long list of new requests from public services. As a result, this position will be split into two LMTA2 positions increasing the FTE count in Cataloging by 1 FTE.
The Technical Services Division has also received some temporary staffing allocations to allow us to focus on some specific projects:
1. Anne Rasmussen (former staff member in SER) has been hired on a 6 month contract to continue work on the serials retrocon project as well as electronic resources acquisition.
2. Two graduate assistants will be hired for Special Collections Cataloging for one year to work on the problems created by the outsourced retrocon which improperly overlaid a number of the special collections records in the Main Library.
3. Two graduate assistants will be hired for the Serials/Electronic Resources Dept. for one year to focus on the completion of the serials retrocon, the cataloging of electronic resources, the Lib Has projects.
Each of these projects was selected because of the specific impact these projects are having on public services. For example, the 8,000+ serials retrocon records having holdings on OCLC which lead ILL borrowers to believe that we have pieces of titles which we do not own. Jennifer Kuehn and her staff in ILL are receiving daily requests for these titles which we do not own. Cleaning up the records quickly will reduce the number of undeliverable requests we receive.
Finally, the .5 FTE position vacated by Anne in SER has been transferred to the TSAA Dept. along with the function of processing serials invoices for payment. The position vacated by Michael Grimes on his promotion will be redirected to the acquisition and cataloging of electronic resources. Electronic resources is the single largest growth area in technical services -- 100s of titles are acquired by OhioLINK on our behalf and must be made accessible. Daily maintenance activities to keep those titles accessible absorbs considerable time and energy and new resources must be directed to that activity. TSAA will be taking on the serials processing with the .5 FTE position -- this will be challenge for us but I appreciate the willingness of TSAA to work together with SER to achieve these goals.
The annual increase in the material budget results in increases in the volume of monographic material ordered and received thus placing pressure on the both the Monographs Dept. and Cataloging Dept. As we all know, there are never enough staff resources to accomplish all that needs to be done. I will continue to work to identify creative ways to acquire additional staff resources on both a temporary and permanent basis.