Cataloging Department Monthly Report
January 2008

Subject: Monthly Report – January 2008
Date: February 2008
From: Magda El-Sherbini, Cataloging Department Head
To: Sally Rogers, Assistant Director for Technical Services

OVERVIEW OF THE MONTH

Magda continues to teaching cataloging class for Kent State University, School of Library ad Information Science. She also started teaching the OSU Freshman Seminar for Winter Quarter.

Barbara Dunham. The coordinator of this section accepted another position in the SER Department. Magda is taking responsibility to oversees and manage the activities of this section until the position is filled.

The Cataloging Departments is working on two new projects. The Arabic and the CJK NACO funnels. These two projects will increase our contribution to the PCC program Magda and Melanie are panning for the funnels and preparing the documentation and the training materials.

As the Department is moving toward e learning, Sherab created Lesson 5 on basic copy cataloging procedure.

Western Languages Section

[No Report Available]

Non-Roman Languages Section

News and Highlights

Hsiao-feng Tsai re-appointed as GAA. This position was created to take on works previous done by the TechPro contract catalogers.

Summary

This month the section cataloged 1,390 titles, and had 514 new receipts.

Sherab Chen (section coordinator)

Sherab was creating Lesson 5 of the e-learning courseware for cataloging series. He upgraded to a newer version of the software Captivate 2.0. In order to enhance the e-learning project, he investigated on the potential of integrating flash movies, and met with student technical assistants in library's Multimedia Production Space at SUL.

The section was preparing for joining in the effort of contributing cataloging records with Slavic scripts to WorldCat. Sherab emailed OCLC-NON-LATIN-SCRIPTS list, and consulted libraries outsides OSU who have Slavic collection on how to input Russian scripts in MARC record. He met Anna on 1/29, and encouraged her to work on this initiative. At the same meeting, he also reminded Non-Roman staffs to test the WorldCat Local Pilot and to submit comments.

Sherab was preparing to call a meeting with Cataloging coordinators on how to better present the department in next Tech Serv Meeting after he attended the Tech Serv meeting on 1/23.

Zaineb Bayahy (Arabic cataloging)

Zaineb was on the Search Committee for the Islamic Librarian position. She reviewed the resume of the candidate and attended committee meetings. She also reviewed Lisa's French cataloging works, and the Turkish GAA's works. A detailed statistics of her section follows. Zaineb continued working on Arabic NACO and created 1 NACO record.

Languages	Original	Copy	Enhanced	Volume	Total	PCC	NACO
Arabic books	93	69	75	15	237		1
Arabic DVD	2		8		10
Arabic CDs
Turkish Books	82	3	6		91
English books	1	25			26
Total	178	97	89		364		1

Anna Batchev (Slavic cataloging)

Anna expressed interests in learning how to input Slavic scripts in MARC records and expend her language experts in enhancing bibliographic records. She cataloged 166 new Slavic books (53 original, 93 copy cataloging), and 118Czech gift books (50 original, 68 copy cataloging).

GAAs cataloging performance

Chinese

Yang Yu (GAA) cataloged 58 new titles including 46 books and 12 DVDs, in totally 137 volumes (20 in original cataloging).

Mei Zhao (GAA) cataloged 107 new titles including 3 serials copy cataloging in total 136 volumes (22 in original cataloging).

Qing Cao (hourly) was double-checking cataloging records by other students.

Miao Liu (hourly) cataloged 99 titles (20 original).

Japanese

Fusako Yoneda (GAA) cataloged 142 new titles including 8 electronics and 4 maps in total 178 volumes (96 required original cataloging).

Natsumi Hirota (GAA) led the Japanese microfiche project and cataloged 188 titles (all in original cataloging).

Akina Ikudo (hourly) assisted the Japanese microfiche project and cataloged 81 titles (71 original)

Sakiko Endo (hourly) was irregular, and she cataloged 41 titles.

Korean

(currently, a Korean student at the Special Collection Cataloging is helping us -- statistics is not available manually, but can be viewed on Millennium boolean)

Turkish

(see under Zaineb)

Special GAA

Hsiao-feng Hsai assisted the Chinese cataloging workflow to remove backlogs. She processed 67 old books (23 in original cataloging) and fixed some short bib records on OSCAR.

Principal Cataloger and Special Projects

January 2008 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 worked on English language backlog titles.

Beverly McDonald spent her time this month training, answering questions and solving problems. Training was a full time occupation as she continued working with three people with three very different skill levels at the same time. The skill levels were: undergraduate degree in library science (the staff member), experience with serials cataloging (the GAA), and no library experience (the volunteer, who was just starting library science classes at Kent State University). Only the staff person worked 40 hours per week. The GAA worked 20 hours per week and the volunteer 10 hours. On the days when all three people were here at the same time, things got hectic. When training more than one person at a time, Beverly still had to train one by one because the people had different knowledge levels of cataloging. The basic cataloging manual that she had prepared was still used to train all three people. Staff member Lisa Chiong started to work with some Spanish books this month.

Beverly and section members attended the Technical Services Division meeting (January 23, 2008). Beverly attended Gerry Greenberg's professorial lecture entitled "Public libraries/public health : 2 case studies" (January 22) and attended a program at the Frank Hale Black Cultural Center on Japanese American Internment; the program featured a film on Toyo Kawakami, former head of the Social Work Library at Ohio State University (January 30).

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. Christina presented the New Student Orientation Workshop (January 11, 2008). 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 is doing all of the PromptCAT books and is working on English language backlog titles. He continued to do the monthly statistics and helped with the student time sheets.

Student Jennifer Middleton worked with the books from MOD, adding the item records and distributing the Western language books to the catalogers. GAA Eunice Min spent her time doing analytic retrocon.

Finally, members of the section took some leave time (Beverly, for example, took 1 vacation day and 3 sick leave days) and we all had one holiday.

Authority Control and Database Maintenance

Melanie created training materials for the OCLC Duplicates project, but the student who was completing the project left. Melanie hired another student who will be helping her on this project and helping Rocki with the Thesis Retrocon project. Melanie attended the first meeting for the Western Languages Coordinator Search Committee on the 8th and a World Cat Local Pilot meeting on the 18th .

Melanie planned to attend ALA Mid-Winter in Philadelphia, but could not make the trip due to a medical emergency and a death in the family. Melanie was also out a week due to illness.

Andrea worked closely with Sherab and Zaineb to create and contribute their first NACO records (Zaineb in Arabic, Sherab in English). Andrea also completed a small project for Steve Rogers who needed 2653 records globally updated. Andrea also loaded 8101 new Authority Records (names and subjects) and reviewed (and changed when necessary) 2699 Authority Record notifications.

	Andrea	Stephanie	Lin	Melanie
Backlog/Requested			211
Completed/Referred	13
Remaining

	Andrea	Stephanie	Lin	Melanie
Authority Update	6371
Authority Delete	59
Authority Reviewed
Consultation	8			4
Boolean			6	6
BIBCO reviewed
BIBCO submitted
NACO reviewed	26			26
Bib/Item Deletes			4067	259
NACO submitted	28
OCLC update	3		52	18
Bib/Item changes			440	20
Books cataloged			12	6

Melanie received and responded to 42 e-mails requesting maintenance or authority help. Samantha continued to help Melanie with some last copy withdrawal and suppressions. She also marked 37 reserve records for deletion and continued to assist Andrea with the Authority Name Change report. Amira will be joining the section in Ackerman next month where she will work on the Law Project and other projects as needed.

Catalog Librarian

Rocki Strader attended the following meetings and events: OSU Chapter Executive Board of Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society, Jan. 9; ALA Midwinter Meeting Philadelphia, Jan. 10-15 (followed by two days of vacation); Technical Services Division Meeting, Jan. 23; Cataloging Dept. potluck and “farewell” luncheon for Barb Dunham, also on Jan. 23.

Misc.:

Penny Pearson forwarded a message from a 2002 Ph.D. graduate who found typo in title of dissertation record in OSCAR and requested correction. Rocki made correction and responded to the author.

After a brief hiatus, Patti Dittoe has resumed work on cataloging GEO senior theses: 10 titles from 1968 were newly cataloged. Patti added two titles to the Knowledge Bank and Rocki upgraded their bib records. Eventually all of GEO’s senior theses will be added to the Knowledge Bank.

Steve Rogers inquired about thesis and dissertation fiche that have not arrived from as far back as 2003. This is a known problem with the Graduate School. Rocki collected a list of 120 titles that are affected. The Graduate School is aware of Ph.D. fiche that have not arrived or have not been accounted for (i.e., paid) in their system, and Rocki has been working with them to see if her list of missing materials matches theirs. The Graduate School is in contact with UMI/ProQuest and is working to get the missing titles.

At end of month, Rocki compiled a list of almost 80 Human Ecology titles from 1968-1978 in response to a problem that Jennifer Kuehn discovered two years ago (and which had been put on back burner in order to catch up on current ETDs and then prepare for the move for the renovation). Titles in question were originally cataloged in Dec. 1996 - Jan. 1997. Error that Jennifer found was that the dates in bibs all said 1996. Rocki spot-checked five of them and all had errors besides the date (e.g., typos, missing leader coding, missing paginations, unnecessary 590 notes, etc., probably from wrongly applied constant data). Worked with Donna Degeorge at STX to send all of the problem items to Rocki for recataloging. Project should take 2-4 afternoons to complete.

Cataloging Department Monthly Statistics

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