Cataloging Department Monthly Report
July 2008
Subject: Monthly Report – July 2008
Date: August 2008
From: Magda El-Sherbini, Cataloging Department Head
To: Sally Rogers, Assistant Director for Technical Services
OVERVIEW OF THE MONTH
Continued to provide training to two practicum students, were Austin Pevler and Quinton Kiser.
Moriana Garcia, the Kent State Student, continued to volunteer in cataloging and she is working on several projects with members of the department.
Many members o the Department took longer vacating in July.
Western Languages Section
[No report is available]
Non-Roman Languages Section
Summary
This month the section processed 1102 titles including new records, retro-con, and problem solving on Millennium. The figure is based on statistics sheets submitted by staff and students. The section received 867 new titles (956 volumes) of books and 85 non-book format titles.
Sherab Chen (section coordinator)
Sherab assisted the head of the department on setting up a new non-Roman host-contact cataloging project. He evaluated and provided statistics on all non-Roman cataloging students' cataloging performance in the last two years. For better evaluation on student workers' performance, he revised the cataloging statistic form, and assigned different cataloger's code to each individual hourly students.
Beginning from this month, a work-study student, Catherin Lee, joined the section to help cataloging Korean materials. The student is officially hired at the East Asian Studies Collection under Guoqing, but she was assigned to Sherab to be trained to do Korean cataloging. Sherab was supervising her work and giving her cataloging trainings.
Zaineb Bayahy (Arabic cataloging)
This month the Middle East cataloging team was mainly working on Arabic retro-con and helping the Western Language Cataloging Section. The Turkish GAA worked on the e-Books project. A detailed report follows
| Languages | Original | Copy | Enhanced | PCC | Volume | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arabic books | 0 | |||||
| Sound recording Arabic | ||||||
| CMT Non-Western (English) | ||||||
| e-Books | 13 | 20 | 19 | 52 | ||
| Turkish Books (Omer) | ||||||
| French Books | 1 | 11 | 19 | 31 | ||
| English | 7 | 7 | 4 | 18 | ||
| Arabic retrocon | 200 | 200 | ||||
| Thesis retrocon | ||||||
| Thesis retrocon | ||||||
| Musiccd (Turkish) | ||||||
| Analytics | ||||||
| Total | 301 |
Anna Batchev (Slavic cataloging)
Anna cataloged 272 gift books (40 original cataloging) and 17 new Slavic titles 17 (5 original). She also cataloged 24 serial titles.
GAAs cataloging performance
ChineseYang Yu (GAA) reported cataloging of 75 Chinese titles. The Millennium system indicated 41 new records made by her in this month.
Hsiao-feng Tsai (GAA) reported cataloging of 77 Chinese titles (16 original and 18 duplicates), and the Millennium system indicated 61 new records made by her.
Miao Liu (hourly) cataloged 109 new Chinese titles.
JapaneseFusako Yoneda (GAA) processed 83 new Japanese titles (in 113 volumes, 31 in original), 43 serials (19 in original), 6 CD-ROM and 1 DVD.
Natsumi Hirota (GAA) was taking vacation during July. She processed 7 Japanese microfiche titles.
KoreanCatherin Lee (workstudy) cataloged 110 Korean titles in copy cataloging.
Turkish(see under Zaineb)
Principal Cataloger and Special Projects
July 2008 was a busy month for the section as we continued to do 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. Time was spent working with two 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 and Quinton Kiser. Beverly was responsible for training them for 30 hours each in copy and original cataloging. She spent extra time working with them at the beginning of July because the people that they were scheduled to work with were not available (e.g., ALA, vacation).
Quinton spent some of his time working on the Real property inventory by the United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, a "set" of housing surveys of 64 cities in the United States that had the call number HD268 W55 A3 1934 in the bibliographic record. The "set" had no volume numbers and had to be redone as 64 individual titles. Care had to be taken to attach the item record (already in the system and with the correct call number for each piece in the item record and on the piece itself) to the correct bibliographic record number (newly assigned as each piece was cataloged). After Beverly finished her training, the practicum students spent time in other areas of Cataloging, Technical Services and Information Technology.
When not working with the practicum students, Beverly continued to work with Lisa Chiong (staff), Moriana Garcia (volunteer) and Eunice Min (GAA). Beverly also helped out when there were ten German rush books in one day. Beverly did the five books with good copy and saved the other five books for Vera Enesey, who returned from vacation the next day.
Beverly and section members attended the open meeting and the Cataloging Department meeting with April Davies, a candidate for the Western Languages Section Cataloging Coordinator position (July 29, 2008). All section members asked the candidate questions.
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. 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 July 8 using the already existing format. She started to work with Robin Smith, a practicum student from the Kent State University School of Library and Information Science who was working under the direction of Magda El-Sherbini. Christina was responsible for training Robin for 30 hours in copy and original cataloging. Theresa Wei helped with this training by providing English language books to catalog.
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 did a student statistics boolean for Magda El-Sherbini, with the assistance of Barb Dunham and Melanie. He continued to do the monthly statistics. GAA Eunice Min spent her time doing analytic retrocon.
Finally, members of the section took some leave time (Beverly, for example, took 32 hours of sick leave time).
Authority Control and Database Maintenance
Lin and Melanie began to make a more concentrated push to resolve problems from the “problem backlog” in the section. Although Lin and Melanie stay current with the recent problems, this backlog will need to be processed before the Cataloging Department moves. Melanie worked with Nancy Helmick to delete 764 reserve records from JOU.
Andrea worked with Rocki’s student, Bridget, to assist her in completing reports from Backstage. Because Rocki does not need Bridget at all times, Bridget will work on these reports when she has down time from ETDs and MA theses throughout the summer.
Melanie had 9 days of vacation during July. She attended a meeting for the WorldCAT Local Working Group (24th) to transition to a new team once Rebekah Kilzer leaves. She continued working with the Search Committee and was involved in the visit from a candidate on the 29th. She also attended the lecture on “Doing User Research: OSU and the eXtensible Catalog” on the 24th.
Catalog Librarian
Rocki Strader completed her Special Research Assignment time period and resumed her regular schedule on July 7. She attended the following meeting and events: Catalog Committee, July 10; at Sally Rogers’s invitation to all TS faculty, meeting of TS dept heads for ALA reports, July 16; presentation, "Conducting User Research: OSU Libraries and the eXtensible Catalog," July 24; CAT coordinator candidate interview, July 29.
misc.:
Worked with two Kent State practicum students on ETD cataloging and LCSH.
Cataloging Department Monthly Statistics