Cataloging Department Monthly Report
April 2008
Subject: Monthly Report – April 2008
Date: May 2008
From: Magda El-Sherbini, Cataloging Department Head
To: Sally Rogers, Assistant Director for Technical Services
OVERVIEW OF THE MONTH
Magda, Melanie, and Theresa were involved in the search Committee to hire the Western Language coordinator.
Magda amd Melanie attended the OCLC lecture on the Rochester eXtensible Catalog.
Magda created a new Freshman Seminar course which will be taught in Fall 2008. She was invited to run for the PCC Policy Committee (PoCo) as a BIBCO representative.
Two Kent State practicum students started their training this month.
As of April 1, 2008, Melanie McGurr 's appointment changed from "General Cataloger" to "Coordinator of Catalog Maintenance and Authority Control Section.
Magda and Melanie attended the Mohican Technical Services Retreat on the 1 and 2 and both gave presentations at this conference. As a member of the PPLI, Magda attended lunch with Chancellor Fingerhut on April 11th.
Magda and Margaret Maurer are discussing the possibility of creating NACO funnel to include libraries from Ohio.
Lisa Chiong started to catalog both Spanish and French books. Our Kent state student volunteer Moriana Garcia, who knows Spanish and Portuguese, is answering Lisa's questions about publications in these languages.
Western Languages Section
[No report is available]
Non-Roman Languages Section
Summary
This month the section received 942 new titles (in 1027 volume), 4 serials, and 7 titles in non-books format. The section cataloged 1163 titles. The section also helped the ACDM Section on the Short Bib Project. Two student workers investigated 340 short bib records and fixed 70 of them.
Sherab Chen (section coordinator)
Sherab is investigating Web 2.0 (lib 2.0) tools to enhance cataloging section management and workflow. He created a social bookmark account or Non-Roman Cataloging on Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/osul_nonroman_cat). He updated and maintained the Non-Roman Cataloging blog. For the CJK NACO review activities, he created a Flickr account to share sorrogates with the reviewer and uses Google Docs to keep the progress of creating and contributing new records. Sherab also opened a Wiki account for the Cataloging Department on the library's wiki site. He is coordinating with other cataloging coordinators to write section workflow and procedures. Part of this project is to prepare for a Department presentation on the library's Technical Services meeting in October.
At the same time, Sherab supervised the non-roman cataloging section's workflow and solved problems related to the cataloging database system. He asigned two students to help Melanie's section on the the Short bib project. He also attended two new timekeeping system workshops, Faculty Meeting, Cataloging Committee Meeting etc.
Zaineb Bayahy (Arabic cataloging)
Zaineb attended two Online Timekeeping workshops. She reviewed records done by a student in the Thesis retrocon project.
| Languages | Original | Copy | Enhanced | Total | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arabic books | 1 | 1 | |||
| DVD Arabic | |||||
| CMT Non-Western (English) | |||||
| Turkish CD-ROM | 1 | 1 | |||
| Turkish Books (Omer) | 26 | 22 | 13 | 61 | |
| French Books | 90 | 68 | 158 | ||
| English | |||||
| Thesis retrocon (Students) | 53 | 53 | |||
| Total | 274 |
Anna Batchev (Slavic cataloging)
Anna cataloged 184 new Slavic books (40 in original cataloging), 104 gift books (20 original) and created 8 serial records.
GAAs cataloging performance
ChineseYang Yu (GAA) helped the section supervisor to digitize some MARC record examples, which were to be used for e-learning project. She also cataloged 10 DVDs, and 2 CD-ROMs.
Mei Zhao (GAA) was asigned to help Melanie on the Short bib project. She investigated 150 short bibs and fixed 51 records. She also helped the section supervisor on collecting data of student wokring hours for a project.
Hsiao-feng Tsai (GAA replacing contract cat.) completed basic copy cataloging training, and she cataloged 117 new Chinese titles (57 original).
Qing Cao (hourly) assisted the section supervisor to create some e-learning courseware suppliements using Power Point. She also asisted the supervisor on the NACO CJK by checking authority files for books cataloged.
Miao Liu (hourly) was also assigned to help Melanie on the Short bib project (not statistics were recorded).
JapaneseFusako Yoneda (GAA) cataloged 138 new Japanese titles, including 45 original cataloging of books and 3 serials.
Natsumi Hirota (GAA) cataloged 200 Japanese Meij Era publications in microfiche (the JMSTC project), all in original cataloging.
KoreanSan kyo Lee (GAA) from Rare Book Cataloging was helping us to catalog Korean books, but there was no statistics being kept, due to her own responsibilities.
Turkish(see under Zaineb)
Principal Cataloger and Special Projects
April 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 PromptCAT and 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 8 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 is now doing both Spanish and French books as part of her training. Volunteer Moriana Garcia, who knows Spanish and Portuguese, is answering Lisa's questions about publications in these languages.
Beverly McDonald attended a Catalog Committee meeting (April 10, 2008) and held a section meting (April 25). She and all section members attended training workshops on automated timekeeping (various dates in April). She attended a ReadAloud on Hispanic culture sponsored by the Diversity Committee and featuring Ted Riedinger of University Libraries (April 17) and attended the brown bag on the Thompson Library renovation given by Ryan Langhurst and Wes Boomgaarden (April 22).
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 gave the New Student Orientation Workshop (April 18) and submitted her self evaluation. Christina worked on series indexing and item record problems and the backlog of Greek books formerly done by Patrick Hancy. 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 also worked on OCLC duplicate bib records for Melanie McGurr. He continued to do the monthly statistics and helped with the student time sheets.
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 two days of sick leave).
Authority Control and Database Maintenance
Two of Sherab’s students continue to work on the short bibliographic records from ACK and are making good progress. While Beverly was on vacation, Moriana worked with Melanie on Authority Control reports from Backstage.
Lin continued to train her student Jourdan to help with incoming problems. Lin and Melanie also created a Google docs spreadsheet to record problem items that come into the department. Lin is interested in understanding how the problems can be tracked and traced. Because Lin and Melanie both receive requests from different people, this is the easiest way to record it. The Google doc is also available for Magda so that she can view the sort of problems coming into the department.
Stephanie continues to work with Rocki’s student, Bridget, and Melanie’s student, Indre, on the thesis retrocon. The students are both progressing well, but their records are still being reviewed by Stephanie.
Andrea has been working with Mary Harris to clean up the local save file for new authority records. The file had duplicates and some older records still saved, so Andrea began to clean it up and track down some of the older records (from 2006). Andrea has also been working with Melanie on the new documentation for the Backstage vendor loads (authority and subject headings). Backstage is continuing to have difficulties with distributing their loads, and Andrea and Melanie continue to have difficulty loading them into Millennium.
Melanie completed the yearly MESH switch (deleting the old subject headings and inserting the new list). She also sat with Joan Wells in SCCAT to go over a number of NACO questions because Joan was not completely through training with Noelle before Noelle retired. Melanie also worked with Beth Black to gather Knowledge Bank records to insert a 945 “openkb” note into.
The section met as a group on the 28th to discuss the beginning of the Automated Timekeeping system and any problems or questions everyone had. We will meet again after a few weeks to see how everyone is dealing with the change.
Melanie attended CAC, CIPS, and CMF in the month of April to promote the services of Authority Control and Database Maintenance. Melanie also attended search committee meetings for the Western Languages Coordinator including phone interviews.
Melanie attended Automated Timekeeping training on the 4th and the 24th, Faculty Meeting on the 8th, Cataloging Committee on the 10th, the Kent SLIS Video Conference on the 21st, and the OCLC lecture on the Rochester eXtensible Catalog, and Melanie attended Mohican Technical Services Retreat on the 1st and 2nd.
Catalog Librarian
Rocki Strader was on Special Research Assignment and came in once a week. She was able to attend the following meetings and events: faculty meeting and timekeeping training, April 8; CFBPR meeting, April 16; ALAO Executive Board, April 18.
misc.:
Continued working on retrocon of thesis half-cards. Student assistant Bridget Fierst began pulling full-sized shelf-list cards according to the boolean list that Melanie McGurr and Rocki generated for the project.
Cataloging Department Monthly Statistics