Cataloging Department Monthly Report
June 2008
Subject: Monthly Report – June 2008
Date: July 2008
From: Magda El-Sherbini, Cataloging Department Head
To: Sally Rogers, Assistant Director for Technical Services
OVERVIEW OF THE MONTH
David Lockard collection on the history of science education that will need to be sent to cataloging this summer. I estimate that this should be in the neighborhood of 15-20 boxes of books. These will be items not held by any library on WorldCat Gerry Greenberg.
One more practicum student joined the cataloging department, Jenny Levenstein. Jenny will be working in cataloging as well as Special Collection.
Austin Pevler ,One of the practicum students, worked with Beth Black on a knowledge bank project for 50 hours.
Magda, Barbara Strauss (CSU) and Margaret Maurer (KENU) worked on summarizing all the OhioLink task Forces reports and summarized all the points that related to technical services. This document will be discussed with the DMSC for action plan.
The western Language Coordinator position is closed and was eliminated.
Magda won the election and is the LC BIBCO representative to the LC PoCo.
Joe Branin, Sally Rogers, Chip Nilges and Karen Calhoun meet on June 10th to discuss the possibility of OSU to do cataloging to OCLC.
The Cataloging Department volunteered to participate in cataloging the Springers titles for OhioLink. Jim Whitcomb will be working with Jeffrey Trimble form Youngstown University.
Western Languages Section
[No report is available]
Non-Roman Languages Section
Summary
This month, the section processed 1,606 titles, and received 724 new titles in 761 volumes.
1 GAA student (Mei) for Chinese cataloging quitted her job this month. The section has opened 1 GAA position and seeking someone who posses required language skills and knowledge. Chris Kern joined the section as an hourly student for the JMSTC Japanese microfiche project.
From this month, our New Receipts Form went online with Google Docs. The file is being co-maintained by staff and student workers in the section.
Sherab Chen (section coordinator)
Sherab wrote 5 GAA evaluations. This month he hired one more student (hourly) for the Japanese microfiche project, and was training the 2 new students (one hired in last month). He interviewed candidates and made job offering for 1 GAA position (but the candidate finally declined the offer due to his getting another TA job).
Sherab attended the ALA Annual Conferences at Anaheim. He also participated the ALAO Annual Conference Planning Committee's monthly meeting, and accepted the responsibility of creating this year's conference evaluation forms.
This month Sherab contributed 5 Chinese NACO authority files.
Zaineb Bayahy (Arabic cataloging)
Zaineb continues her PCC cataloging participation, which she started from last summer. The following is a detailed record of Middle East cataloging activities in this month.
| Languages | Original | Copy | Enhanced | PCC | Total | Vol | PCC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arabic books | 1 | 19 | 89 | 109 | 2 | ||
| DVD Arabic | |||||||
| CMT Non-Western (English) | |||||||
| Autio Books | |||||||
| Turkish Books (Mesut) | |||||||
| French Books | 2 | 56 | 77 | 135 | |||
| English | |||||||
| Arabic cards retrocon | 150 | 150 | |||||
| Thesis retrocon | |||||||
| Thesis retrocon (Amira) | |||||||
| Musiccd (Turkish) | |||||||
| Analytics | |||||||
| Total | 394 | 2 |
Anna Batchev (Slavic cataloging)
Anna cataloged 186 new Slavic titles (91 in original), 166 gift books, and 9 serial titles.
GAAs cataloging performance
ChineseYang Yu (GAA) processed 81 new Chinese titles (25 original cataloging) in total of 91 volumes. She also fixed author name problems in 20 bib records.
Hsiao-feng Tsai (GAA) processed 53 new Chinese titles (13 original cataloging).
Qing Cao (hourly) processed 118 Chinese titles (16 original).
Miao Liu (hourly) processed 88 Chinese titles (3 in original).
JapaneseFusako Yoneda (GAA) processed many multi volume sets this month. She cataloged 114 new Japanese titles (58 in original) in 234 volumes. Among 114 titles, 4 are serials. She also added 45 CD-ROMs items.
Natsumi Hirota (GAA) cataloged 384 Japanese microfiche titles (all original) and added 121 duplicate items. She totally processed 505 volumes.
Korean(no activities)
Turkish(see under Zaineb)
Principal Cataloger and Special Projects
June 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. Most of the time was spent working with four practicum students from the Kent State University School of Library and Information Science who were working under the direction of Magda El-Sherbini. These students were Austin Pevler, Quinton Kiser, Jenny Levenstein and Jarel Deaton. Beverly was responsible for training them for 30 hours each in copy and original cataloging. After she finished her training, the practicum students spent time in other areas of Cataloging, Technical Services and Information Technology.
Jenny Levenstein started working on June 3 and Jarel Deaton started on June 9. Jarel was trained 30 hours straight, from noon on Monday, June 9 through 6 p.m. on Thursday, June 12. On Tuesday, June 3, Beverly had Jenny and Quinton at the same time and on Tuesday, June 10 and Thursday, June 12, she worked with Quinton and Jarel at the same time. She tried to train both students at one time when she could but still trained mainly one on one because the students were at different stages of their training. The basic cataloging manual that she had prepared was used to train all of the practicum students. Training was definitely a full time occupation this month as she continued to work with Lisa Chiong (staff), Moriana Garcia (volunteer) and Eunice Min (GAA) when not working with the practicum students. Lisa is now doing both Spanish and French books and Moriana, who knows Spanish and Portuguese, is answering Lisa's questions about publications in these languages.
Beverly McDonald attended a Catalog Committee meeting (June 12, 2008; practicum students Austin Pevler, Quinton Kiser and Jarel Deaton also attended this meeting). She also marched at Spring Quarter 2008 graduation (June 8).
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. Christina worked on series indexing and item record problems and the backlog of Greek books. 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 a new version of the New Student Orientation. She also presented a New Student Orientation Workshop on June 27 using the already existing format.
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.
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, however, did not take any leave time).
Authority Control and Database Maintenance
Melanie and Andrea spent time working with practicum students this month. Melanie worked with Austin, Quentin, and Jeral throughout the month, and Andrea spent time with Austin and Quentin discussing and demonstrating load procedures. All three students worked with Melanie to create Authority Records and worked on some database quality issues. Melanie and Andrea also held the NACO Refresher training for Special Collections on the 16th. Melanie also finished completing the HRAF for Jan in Microfilm.
The end of the quarter meant a lot of reserve bibs to delete, so Melanie and Lin worked on these to get them done as soon as possible. Section students Indre and Jourdan and GA Amira left for summer opportunities at the UN, but will hopefully be back in September.
Melanie attended the Faculty Meeting on the 10th and the Cataloging Committee meeting on the 12th. She also continued working with the Search Committee and participated in the phone interviews of candidates. Melanie also attended the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim from the 26th-30th.