Cataloging Department Monthly Report
November 2007
Subject: Monthly Report – November 2007
Date: December 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 Dunham continued her SRA. She performed her committee responsibilities to P&P on October 2. She is also serving as the P&P representative on the Strategic Planning Group for the libraries. She co-facilitated New Student Employee Orientation training on October 4 with Patti Dittoe and chaired the Training Advisory Council on October 31. Barbara is also a member of the Improving Off-Campus Access team chaired by Beth Black that met on October 25. Barbara interviewed final two candidates for the open staff position. A candidate was selected and the paperwork completed.
The section cataloged 922 titles for 1039 volumes. Theresa, in addition to her normal responsibilities, continued to work with our student, Caitlin, on the cataloging of the Spanish materials. Theresa also processed 39 rush requests. Jim continued to coordinate the materials received from the regional libraries and catalog the book materials, while Vickie cataloged the non-book materials. Jim received 106 titles from the regional libraries in October. Jim cataloged several free e-book requests received during the month. Vera completed three new records for NACO and replaced one record. The section enhanced 141 records.
Vickie attended the Sexual Harassment Workshop held during the month.
Non-Roman Languages Section
Summary
The section cataloged totally 1654 titles, and received 1365 new and gift titles.
Sang kyu Lee, GAA at Special Collection, helped us to catalog Korean books. The number of Korean books she cataloged is not reflected in the above mentioned monthly total figure.
Sherab Chen (section coordinator)
Sherab presented a paper about e-learning in cataloging training on ALAO annual conference (co-presenter, Tingting Lu). He was keep training newly hired student catalogers including 1 GAA and 3 hourly students.
Sherab wrote guideline and workflow, and was training 2 hourly students to work on the Authority Change and Problem Solving Project. The project started from 10/26.
Shereab also streamlined the JMSTC project cataloging procedure, in response to Inter-Library Loan Section’s noticing of increased usage of this collection by non-OSU library patrons.
Zaineb Bayahy (Arabic cataloging)
Zaineb was reviewing the new Turkish GAA’s cataloging records, training for Arabic NACO, and maintained the Middle East section workflow. Her team made the following report.
| Languages | Original | Copy | Enhanced | Total | Volumes | BIBCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arabic books | 55 | 91 | 66 | 212 | 10 | |
| Books in English | 7 | 23 | 1 | 31 | ||
| Books in Turkish | 26 | 14 | 4 | |||
| 287 | 9 |
Anna Batchev (Slavic cataloging)
Anna cataloged 444 new Slavic titles (62 original cataloging), 26 titles in the Serbian project (24 original cataloging), and 2 serial titles.
GAAs cataloging performance
ChineseYang Yu (GAA) cataloged 29 new titles (7 original), 38 video tapes/DVDs (11 original), 2 CD-ROMs, and solved 31 problematic books drawn by Circulation.
Mei Zhao (GAA) cataloged 62 new titles (1 original). She started creating records by herself, but still under training.
Miao Liu (hourly) cataloged 120 new and gift titles.
Qing Cao (hourly) was working on the Authority Change and Problem Solving Project.
Hsiao-feng Tsai (hourly) was also working on the Authority Change and Problem Solving Project.
JapaneseFusako Yoneda (GAA) cataloged 103 new and gift titles (53 original), 6 serial titles (5 original), 24 videos/DVDs all in original, and 3 CD-ROMs.
Natsumi Hiroda (GAA) was working on the JMSTC Japanese microfiche project and cataloged 288 titles.
Akina Ikudo (hourly) was assigned to the JMSTC team, and she cataloged 156 titles.
Sakiko Endo (hourly) was also assigned to the JMSTC team, and she cataloged 35 titles. She worked much less hours then other students.
KoreanCurrently, the Non-Roman Section has no Korean cataloger, and Sang kyo Lee at the Special Collection Cataloging is helping us to process Korean books.
Turkish(see under Zaineb)
Principal Cataloger and Special Projects
October 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 attended two meetings of the Diversity Committee (October 2 and 16, 2007; as secretary, she took the minutes). She interviewed four candidates for the GAA position in the section and made her selection. Hopefully, the successful candidate can start to work in November. Beverly attended the 33rd Annual Conference of the Academic Library Association of Ohio at the Greater Columbus Convention Center on October 25-26, 2007. On October 25, she gave a presentation entitled "Training Non-Traditional Groups of People to Do Cataloging. Beverly was introduced by Rocki Strader. Everyone in the Cataloging Department was affected by the heat this month. We also had a major power outage on main campus (October 19); the Zen server crashed and 2 of 5 hard drives were damaged beyond repair. The rest of the month was spent using work arounds so that we could do our jobs.
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.
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. This month he started to catalog books for the Byrd Polar Research Library and spoke to Lynn Lay about the processing of these books. Ed continued to do the monthly statistics. He also helped with the student time sheets and updated the student list.
Student Jennifer Middleton worked with the books from MOD, adding the item records and distributing the Western language books to the catalogers.
Finally, all members of the section took leave time this month (Beverly, for example, took six days of vacation leave).
Catalog Quality Control and Enrichment
Melanie completed a special request from Magda to sample a Boolean of items that have Bcode3 status z. A sample was taken from the Ackerman stacks and STX (200 in all) to evaluate the problems (if any with the books) that would necessitate a status of z. Next month Melanie will be updating the status to -. Melanie also deleted the holdings on over 3000 records as the cleanup for a project done last year by another department.
Melanie receives a number of e-mail requests each month, and each e-mail may be one request or a number of requests together. This month she received 49 e-mails and solved all the problems reported. Melanie, Lin, and Samantha also worked on the backlog of problems left by Sherry. Samantha helped by suppressing 108 bibs and recording the OCLC number so Melanie could delete holdings. This project will continue into next month as Sherry left over 200 e-mails for FAES for withdrawn material that needs to be processed, plus a large number of paper requests.
Melanie also has been following the Persname listserv (a new listserv on name authorities) in order to keep up with any changes to our database that may not come through Backstage. Melanie also met with Rebakah Kilzer in order to streamline some of the Booleans and record loads she is responsible for on a monthly basis. Rebekah is assisting Melanie to translate some of the instructions from Felix based instructions to Millennium.
Melanie attended the ALAO Annual Conference in Columbus on the 25th-26th (she is on the Conference Planning Committee) where she was the coordinator of the Business Meeting and helped to recruit authors for the Author/Vendor Social.
525 books were processed for the Law project last month. Melanie fixed problems for 150 books (including constructing call numbers and subject headings). Andrea and Melanie continued to work on the NACO refresher training for November, including completing a list of information that needs to be covered.
Lin received a spot bonus this month for her work to help with the Ackerman stacks project over the summer. Lin is also completing many of the requests left when Sherry retired. Andrea continued to work and train Samantha on simple 1xx changes. Andrea has been working on 1xx updated/changes and blind references this month. She updated 1702 1xx fields and 1848 blind references.
| Andrea | Stephanie | Lin | Melanie | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backlog/Requested | 157 | |||
| Completed/Referred | 20 | |||
| Remaining |
| Andrea | Stephanie | Lin | Melanie | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Authority Update | ||||
| Authority Delete | 55 | |||
| Authority Reviewed | ||||
| Consultation | 7 | 3 | ||
| Boolean | 8 | 6 | ||
| BIBCO reviewed | ||||
| BIBCO submitted | ||||
| NACO reviewed | ||||
| NACO submitted | ||||
| OCLC update | 4 | 401 | 3484 | |
| Bib/Item changes | 678 | 178 + 108 Samantha | ||
| Books cataloged | 47 | 42 |
Catalog Librarian
Rocki Strader attended the following meetings and events: Executive Board of OSU Chapter of Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society, Oct. 3 and Oct. 24; Renovation Committee, Oct. 3; “virtually” attended President Gee’s address to the faculty on Oct. 4; Oct. 25-26, ALAO conference; Electronic Resources Librarian candidate open presentation, Oct. 30 and Oct. 31.
Oct. 8 – 15, Rocki was out sick, although she managed to get to the Ohio Library Council Convention and Expo on Oct. 10 to be part of a panel presentation on OPAC interfaces.
There were very few extra issues to deal with this month. FAE and GEO asked for two title corrections and to add a print copy (gift of author) to bib records for corresponding ETDs.
136 Summer Quarter masters theses arrived in October. No new ETDs were released at OhioLINK, but Rocki received notification of 21 older titles that are to receive "ETD retrocon" treatment.
Cataloging Department Monthly Statistics