Cataloging Department Monthly Report
August 2008
Subject: Monthly Report – August 2008
Date: September 2008
From: Magda El-Sherbini, Cataloging Department Head
To: Sally Rogers, Assistant Director for Technical Services
OVERVIEW OF THE MONTH
The Western Language coordinator interviews is completed and the position was eliminated.
Robin Smith,, a student form Kent State, volunteered to work in the Cataloging Department for a month. She was helping Beverly to do copy and original cataloging.
Ed Plunkett was temporary assigned to work with the AC & DM section to help in problem solving and in acting on many of the authority control vendor’s reports.
An ad hoc committee for the CAT Dept presentation was formed. The group comprises Sherab Chen, Melanie McGurr, Christina Moore, and Rocki Strader.
Western Languages Section
[No report is available]
Non-Roman Languages Section
Summary
This month the section cataloged 1105 titles in 1326 volumes (this is not including Middle Eastern cataloging because Zaineb was on vacation). We received 427 new titles in 549 volumes (not including Middle Eastern as well).
Sherab Chen (section coordinator)
Sherab hired one GAA, Gumiko Monobe, for Japanese cataloging, and was training the new work-study student, Catherin Lee, for Korean cataloging, while managing the section's workflow and problem-solving.
He began to act as the chair for CFBPR and contacted committee members for agendas in future meeting. He worked with Melanie, Rocki, and Christina on planning and making a department presentation video to be shown on next Technical Service meeting.
Zaineb Bayahy (Arabic cataloging)
Zaineb took her vacation during this month.
Anna Batchev (Slavic cataloging)
Anna cataloged 184 titles (40 in original) in gift book project, and 30 new Slavic books (4 original). She also cataloged 32 serials (1 original) this month.
GAAs cataloging performance
ChineseYang Yu (GAA) cataloged 118 new Chinese titles (50 in original) in 156 volumes.
Hsiao-feng Tsai (GAA) cataloged 149 new Chinese titles (54 in original) in 189 volumes.
Miao Liu (hourly) cataloged 77 new Chinese titles (17 in original) in 121 volumes.
JapaneseFusako Yoneda (GAA) cataloged 147 new Japanese titles (67 original) in 177 volumes, and 13 serials (10 in original) in 25 volumes.
Natsumi Hirota (GAA) cataloged 211 Japanese microfiche titles (all in original) in 248 volumes.
KoreanCatherin Lee (workstudey) cataloged 144 new Korean titles (2 original) and added 20 duplicates.
TurkishOmer chiefly helped on the electronic cataloging project led by Jim in this month, while Zaineb was taking vacation.
Principal Cataloger and Special Projects
August 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. She did not have practicum students to work with this month but continued to work with Lisa Chiong (staff), Moriana Garcia (volunteer) and Eunice Min (GAA). Beverly and section members attended the Technical Services Division meeting (August 13, 2008). Beverly attended the Diversity Committee meeting (August 5; as secretary, she took the minutes). Finally, she marched at Summer Quarter graduation (August 24).
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 finished working 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 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, however, did not take any leave time).
Authority Control and Database Maintenance
On the 24th of this month, Ed Plunkett became a part of the AC & DM section. Ed was already doing some work for the section (like duplicate OCLC number problems). This is a great addition to the section and everyone was happy to have a new person on board. He will continue to work on PromptCat material and compute departmental statistics, but he will also begin to work on other work within the section.
There have been a number of problems with the Backstage Loads (specifically the bibliographic records received from processing). This month the diacritics were a problem. Melanie worked with Backstage, Rebekah, Sherab, Joseph and Faye to analyze the problem. Because OSUL works in MARC8 and Backstage has switched to UTF8, Backstage needs to convert our records. The problem occurred when Backstage forgot to convert them back to MARC8 before sending them on to OSUL. The records were reloaded. Next month Melanie will be looking closely at the bib records we receive back before loading them.
Melanie, Rocki, Sherab, and Christina are working together to plan and arrange a video for the Cataloging Department to show at the next Technical Services Division meeting.
Melanie met with Rebekah Kilzer and Beth Black so that Rebekah could update Melanie and Beth on some WorldCAT Local information on the 1st. Melanie also had her annual meeting with Sally Rogers on the 12th, attended CAC with Magda on the 14th to discuss short bibliographic records and retrocon, and went to the Staff Appreciation picnic on the 21st.
Catalog Librarian
Rocki Strader attended the following meetings and events: Technical Services Division meeting, August 13; Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society, OSU Chapter Executive Board, August 13; meeting with Sally, August 25; ad hoc committee on CAT Dept presentation, August 29.
misc.:
An ad hoc committee for the CAT Dept presentation was formed. The group comprises Sherab Chen, Melanie McGurr, Christina Moore, and Rocki Strader. Sherab solicitied first-person "job descriptions" from all staff and faculty in CAT, and Rocki compiled the responses, so that the group could start to write a script.
Near the end of the month, Rocki substantially increased involvement with reviewing and producing thesis retrocon records created by student assistants.
Cataloging Department Monthly Statistics