Cataloging Department Monthly Report
July 2007
Subject: Monthly Report – July 2007
Date: August 2007
From: Magda El-Sherbini, Cataloging Department Head
To: Sally Rogers, Assistant Director for Technical Services
OVERVIEW OF THE MONTH
[No Report]
Western Languages Section
[No Report]
Non-Roman Languages Section
News and project highlights
Akina Ikudo joined us as an hourly student for the JMSTC Japanese microfiche project. Mesut, Turkish GAA, graduated and is leaving us this month. Omer Acar joined us as a GAA for Turkish cataloging, to fill Mesut's position. See news on our Non-Roman Cataloging blog - and yes, our blog is now officially on the osul domain.
Summary
The section cataloged 1368 titles (1813 volumes) this month and received 685 new titles and gift items.
Sherab Chen (section coordinator)
Sherab presented a paper titled “Usability Assessment of E-learning Courseware for Basic Cataloging Training”, on The 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Beijing, July 26, Thursday. He also chaired the panel of “Usability Cases Studies” consisted of seven speakers including himself. This month, Sherab wrote job description, interviewed and hired one new hourly student for the JMSTC Japanese microfiche project. From 7/23 to 7/27, he was on a business trip attending the HCI conference; and from 7/30 to 8/17 he was on vacation.
Zaineb Bayahy (Arabic cataloging)
aineb wrote job description, interviewed and hired a new GAA student for Turkish cataloging. Her team cataloged 150 Arabic titles and 109 French titles. Details follow.
| Languages | Original | Copy | Enhanced | PCC Volume | Total | |
| Arabic books | 39 | 46 | 45 | 130 | ||
| Turkish Books (Mesut) | ||||||
| French Books | 40 | 36 | 33 | 109 | ||
| Arabic retrocon | 20 | 20 | ||||
| 54 | 259 |
The new GAA will replace Mesut who graduated.
Anna Batchev (Slavic cataloging)
Cataloged 63 new Slavic books (11 original), 178 Serbian gift books (138 original). She reinstated 5 books. She also cataloged 41 serial titles (1 original).
GAAs cataloging performance
ChineseZheng Wang (GAA) cataloged 100 Chinese titles in which 13 are originals.
Yang Yu (GAA) cataloged 102 titles (15 originals) and fixed 5 books that has problems on their bib records.
Yanning Wei (hourly) cataloged 150 titles (35 original) of books in 439 volumes.
Boon ching Tee (hourly) cataloged 114 Chinese books (23 were original); she also cataloged 24 Korean books.
JapaneseFusako Yoneda (GAA) cataloged 100 Japanese titles, 1 serial, 20 added volumes, 1 CD-ROMs, 19 microfiche titles (15 original).
Natsumi Hirota (GAA) cataloged 192 Japanese microfiche titles. She also assisted Sherab in giving the new Japanese student Akina an orientation and basic cataloging, while Sherab is out.
KoreanBoo ching Tee cataloged 24 Korean books all of which are copy cataloging.
Turkish(See under Zaineb)
Principal Cataloger and Special Projects
July 2007 was a busy month for the section as we continued to add item records for monographs received from MOD as well as doing our regular tasks. This month section members continued to work on new analytics and analytic retrocon and continued to work on auction catalogs for the Fine Arts Library.
Beverly McDonald spent her time this month training, answering questions and solving problems. She was able to work on her backlog of problems, solve some current complicated problems and also worked with Ed Plunkett to answer his cataloging questions. Beverly and all other members of the Libraries' Diversity Committee are on the Search Committee for the Mary P. Key Diversity Residency position. The Search Committee met to discuss all of the applicants and decide who should have a telephone interview (July 11), met and decided who should have an on campus interview (July 17), and interviewed the first candidate (July 31). Beverly and section members attended the Cataloging Department meeting (July 31). She attended the Technical Services Committee meeting (July 19), the Workshop on Online Forms (July 24), and the Complete Travel Information Workshop (July 25). Finally, Beverly attended the reception for library faculty members who had received promotion and tenure (July 18).
Christina Moore worked on Connexion questions and problems and continued to focus on analytics, the difficult ones in the analytic retroconversion project as well as the new analytics. She continued to work on series indexing and item record problems. As a member of the Training Advisory Council (TAC) and Risk Assessment Committee (RAC), she attended meetings and worked on projects. For TAC, she is working on item record training and, for RAC, she is working on a fire safety workshop.
Ed Plunkett now does all of the PromptCAT books and continued to work on a large collection of auction catalogs for the Fine Arts Library. Two special cataloging projects done by the former Library Associate 1 (i.e., maps for the Geology Library and books for the Byrd Polar Research Library) remained on hold. Ed continued to do the monthly statistics.
After much thought, Yuan Zhou resigned her GAA position this month because the internship in Chattanooga, Tennessee that she had been working on as part of her PhD program was extended until mid-September. Although Yuan was eligible for Fourth Quarter Fee Authorization, she had to register for a minimum of seven hours for Summer Quarter and that caused a problem for her. She felt that she had learned a lot in her internship and was applying what she had learned from her OSU classes, so she decided to remain in Chattanooga for the summer. Yuan enjoyed the challenge of doing analytic retrocon, was very good at it and will be missed. Student Jennifer Middleton worked with the books from MOD, adding the item records and distributing the Western language books to the catalogers.
Finally, members of the section took leave time this month (Beverly, for example, took sixteen hours of sick leave) and we all had one holiday.
Catalog Quality Control and Enrichment
Melanie met with the Head of Special Collections to discuss a training session for 6 staff people in her area in September. This training session may be opened up to more people in Cataloging. A new workflow was discussed for NACO records coming from Special Collections that will be implemented after the training. Andrea and Melanie began to gather information for the training.
The LAW project continues to go well with 865 books completed this month. Melanie also had Samantha begin to go through the duplicate OCLC number reports that are backlogged. Samantha is checking to see which numbers have already been de-duped and making notes for Melanie to investigate more complicated duplicate OCLC problems. For the time being, Melanie will keep up with the current duplicate OCLC reports.
Lin continues to be busy with collecting and deleting item records and bibs. Melanie and Lin worked with Deb Cameron to investigate the presence of order records on some of the bibs marked for deletion. These order records kept the bibs from being deleted and kept showing up in the Boolean every month. Lin also has a large number of problems arriving because circulation is working on the missing item Boolean (that Melanie ran for them in June). This Boolean contains over 20,000 items, and from discussions with the staff in charge of the project, Lin estimates at least 2000 problems will arrive in Cataloging for work.
| Andrea | Stephanie | Lin | Sherry | Melanie | |
| Backlog/Requested | 607 | 212 | 722 | ||
| Completed | 110 | ||||
| Remaining | 10 |
| Andrea | Stephanie | Lin | Sherry | Melanie | |
| Authority Update | 5972 | ||||
| Authority Delete | 54 | ||||
| Authority Reviewed | 1447 | ||||
| Consultation | 3 | 7 | 15 | ||
| Boolean | 8 | 5 | |||
| BIBCO reviewed | 73 (1 of her own) | ||||
| BIBCO submitted | 73 | ||||
| NACO reviewed | 13 | 13 | |||
| NACO submitted | 13 | ||||
| OCLC update | 1 | 5 | 1038 | ||
| Bib/Item changes | 5 | 200 | 384 | 43 | |
| Books cataloged | 1 | 17 | 100 | 23 |
Andrea loaded 3484 new names, 7 changed names, 559 new LC subjects, and 22 changed LC subjects. Andrea was notified that 29 records needed to be changed (and they were updated). She continued to work on 1xx changes and 16 were corrected. Andrea also worked on the Duplicate AR and LC AR Duplicate report and 734 records were deleted.
Melanie and Sherry worked with the osupfw Boolean, which had not been run for a few months. Over 1000 holdings were updated in OCLC. Melanie showed Sherry how to save the Boolean in Millennium and the process will be completed once a month (at the beginning of the month when the other monthly Booleans are run). Melanie also suggested that Sherry use the Batch Loading process in Connexion instead of sending a file to OCLC via ftp. This will be done in the future.
Melanie also continues to work with Jen from the ARC library on the short bibliographic record project. A few short bibs (ten) have already been overlaid, but there much of the material is original, so a workflow will need to be created for this. The section sent 4 messages to the OhioLINK errors list (Stephanie provided them for Melanie to send). Melanie and Stephanie have also been working on a list of merged OCLC numbers given to the section by ILL. Records in Hebrew or Arabic have been referred to other people.
Melanie hired a GA this month to start in the fall. Melanie attended the Cataloging Department meeting on the 31st, the Technical Services Committee meeting on the 19th, and the Travel Workshop on the 10th. Melanie also participated in a conference call concerning the OCLC WorldCAT pilot on the 27th.
Catalog Librarian
Rocki Strader attended the following meetings and events: travel reimbursements workshop, July 10; annual meeting with Sally, July 11; Renovation Committee meeting, July 18; AP&T reception, July 18; Technical Services Committee meeting, July 19; forms and procedures workshop, July 24; untenured library faculty brownbag, July 24; travel policies workshop, July 25; lunch with mentor, Nancy O’Hanlon, July 25; CAT’s farewell potluck for Patrick Hancy, July 27; CAT dept meeting, July 31.
Early in July, Mary Scott reported a damaged file in the ETD. She was using Firefox, but Rocki could not reproduce the problem in Internet Explorer or Netscape. Rocki reported the problem to OhioLINK. Thomas Dowling confirmed the Firefox problem but also said that there was no known fix at this time.
On July 11, OhioLINK’s servers went down. ETD access was affected first, but then the entire site was affected.
July 12: Rocki contacted John Mitchell at LC re: status of SACO proposal for “Suramin.” It is in the queue, but John could not say when it would be reviewed.
July 20: In response to a large number of ETD “retrocon” questions that Rafah Asadi directed to Rocki—Rocki introduced Rafah to the University Archives and the documentation that is available for determining advisor and dept. names.
Cataloging Department Monthly Statistics