Cataloging Department Monthly Report
August 2007

Subject: Monthly Report – August 2007
Date: September 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

Barbara began her SRA the week of August 5, 2007; she is in one day a week with the day varying as to committee and staff needs. James Whitcomb is handling most of her mail and regional requests. Barbara facilitated Create Lists training with Brian Miller on August 9th. She also performed her committee responsibilities to P&P on August 14 and the Training Advisory Council on August 23. She interviewed four candidates on August 27 for the LA2 position; a final decision had not been made pending interviewing external candidates.

Zaineb is temporarily processing the French titles coming into Cataloging; she processed 75 in August (6 were original, 40 enhanced, and 29 copy). Currently the Spanish titles are being backlogged.

The section cataloged 1164 titles for 1337 volumes. Of these records, 101 were original. Approximately 133 records were enhanced. Vera contributed one records to NACO. Marion sent a gift collection, Theodore B. Myers Civil War Book Collection, for proper cataloging of the collection. There were 201 titles in the collection which were cataloged by Jim Whitcomb and are included in the count. During August, 339 titles (294 books, 45 non-books) were received from the regional libraries for cataloging. Theresa processed several rush books during the month primarily for the textbook project.

Non-Roman Languages Section

News and project highlights

Yanning Wei, Yu-wen Lin and Boon-ching Tee, three hourly students in Chinese cataloging, left the section. Two GAAs, Mesut and Zheng are preparing to graduate and this is the last month for them to work with us. A farewell party is planned.

Summary

This month the section cataloged 1,345 titles (including re-instates), and had about 566 titles in new receipt with the largest multi volume set of 259 volumes.

Sherab Chen (section coordinator)

On 8/28, Sherab discussed with the head on hiring a student to assist the cataloging quality control works. The Cataloging Quality Control Section regularly passes on updates and problem reports of Authority records involved with Non-Roman Bibliographic records (mostly CJK) to us, and there pile of these requests is going up. Sherab investigated on the possibility of having a student trained to help processing these files. He outlined the training procedure and prepared job description.

In this month, Sherab wrote 4 GAA evaluations, and attended the GAA Supervisor meeting on 8/22. He continued to train new students, and made some progress in developing the new e-learning courseware.

Zaineb Bayahy (Arabic cataloging)

Zaineb was training the new GAA on using Millennium and Connexion for Turkish cataloging, while maintained the workflow of the Middle East cataloging. She also attended the GAA supervisor meeting.

Zaineb also helped the Western Language Section in cataloging French books. See her activities under the Western Language Section report.

Languages	Original	Copy	Enhanced	Total	PCC
Arabic books	37	53	45	135	36
Arabic retrocon
Thesis
DVD
Recon books
Books in French	6	29	40	75	1
Books in English
Books in Turkish/French	30	25	6	61
	73	107	91	271	37

Anna Batchev (Slavic cataloging)

Anna cataloged 82 new Slavic books (31 in original), 158 Serbian gift books (95 in original), and 24 serial titles (5 in original). She also re-instated 4 records on OSCAR.

GAAs and students cataloging performance

Chinese

Zheng Wang (GAA) cataloged 51 new Chinese titles (10 in original), and added 58 duplicates of items. She helped the coordinator to process problematic book records sent form circulation via Cataloging Quality Control. She re-cataloged 26 titles (2 in original), and re-instated 51 record on OSCAR.

Yang Yu (GAA) cataloged 90 new Chinese titles (17 in original).

Boon ching Tee (hourly) cataloged 48 titles of Chinese and Korean books (40 Korean).

Yanning Wei (hourly) cataloged 172 new and gift Chinese titles, and 5 microform serial titles.

Japanese

Fusako Yoneda (GAA) cataloged 124 new Japanese titles, 1 CD-ROM, and 1 Atlas. She also helped the coordinator to fix 49 problematic records came from Circulation via Cataloging Quality Control.

Natsumi Hirota (GAA) was working on the JMSTC Japanese microfiche project and cataloged 216 microfiche titles - all in original cataloging.

Sakiko Endo (hourly) was on vacation.

Akina Ikudo (hourly) received training and started working on the JMSTC project. She cataloged 79 titles all in original cataloging.

Korean

(see under Chinese)

Turkish

(see under Zaineb)

Principal Cataloger and Special Projects

August 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 interviewed the second and third candidates for the Diversity Resident position (August 1 and 7) and then met in the afternoon on August 7 to recommend someone to Joe Branin and Sally Rogers. Beverly and section members attended the General Meeting (August 2). Beverly was in charge August 6-15 while Magda El-Sherbini was on vacation. Finally, Beverly attended the retirement reception for Eleanor Block (August 16) and the Staff Appreciation barbecue (August 13; staff members also went to the barbecue).

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.

Christina also attended workshops on HTML and XML this month.

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.

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 twenty-four hours of sick leave).

Catalog Quality Control and Enrichment

Melanie hired a GA (Amira Elhagmusa) for the unit, but Amira will continue working with the Law Project at Moritz. Melanie also reported 4 errors to the OhioLINK Errors list. Melanie also completed the paperwork for NACO authorizations for Sherab and Zaineb for their respective funnel work.

After discussing the variety of reports the unit receives, Magda and Melanie decided that students could do some of the less complicated fixes so that Andrea would have more time for the complicated problems that require experience and analysis. Melanie started Samantha on checking the older OCLC reports to see which duplicate problems have already been resolved. Andrea also started training Samantha on Name Change Reports. She spent time explaining the reports to Samantha and checking her work. Samantha will continue to assist Andrea with the backlog of the Name Changes when there is a lull in Law Project books.

Andrea deleted 200 duplicate authority records and completed 108 1xx changes. She also loaded 4,691 new records (including name changes and new names) and reviewed and updated the information on 3219 notifications from Backstage.

Lin continues to keep up with the problem books coming in from the large project Loretta is doing over the summer quarter and break. Many of these books are from the East Asian collection, so Lin is working with Sherab to solve these problems and create a workflow for problems that a CJK GA can handle. Lin is also learning about the GPO loads from Sherry so that she can back up Melanie after Sherry retires.

Sherry will retire at the end of the September, so she is finishing up any remaining work and working with Melanie to set up the new workflow after her retirement.

Melanie attended the General Library meeting on August 2 and the GA workshop on August 22.

	Andrea	Stephanie	Lin	Sherry	Melanie
Backlog/Requested	3		365
Completed	23	188
Remaining
Authority Update
Authority Delete
Authority Reviewed
Consultation	7	5			8
Boolean			8		5
BIBCO reviewed		42
BIBCO submitted		42
NACO reviewed	14				14
NACO submitted	14
OCLC update	7				595
Bib/Item changes			448		88
Books cataloged		1	51		74

Catalog Librarian

Rocki Strader attended the following meetings and events: Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society OSU chapter Executive Board meeting, Aug. 1; Libraries general staff meeting, Aug. 2; Collexis demo at OhioLINK, Aug. 8; helped lead PDF clinic for Ph.D. candidates submitting their ETD, Aug. 13; staff appreciation barbecue, also on Aug. 13; GAA supervisor workshop, Aug. 22.

Rocki took an extended vacation, Aug. 23-Sept. 12.

Before leaving for vacation, Rocki updated the spreadsheet with thesis codes, departments and locations. Henry Griffy replaced the previous spreadsheet linked in webpage on thesis cataloging ( http://library.osu.edu/staff/cataloging/thesiscat.php ).

She also addressed several miscellaneous bib record corrections as brought to her attention by Ruth Sesco at FAE.

Cataloging Department Monthly Statistics

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