Cataloging Department Monthly Report
December 2008
Subject: Monthly Report — December 2008
Date: January 2009
From: Magda El-Sherbini, Cataloging Department Head
To: Sally Rogers, Assistant Director for Technical Services
Western Languages Section
December 2008 was a busy month for the section as we continued to do our regular tasks. This month section members continued to work on titles in Western languages (for example, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish), both new and backlog. We cataloged in non-book and book formats, including analytics and ebooks.
Beverly McDonald spent her time this month training, answering questions and solving problems. She spent time working with Adam Cassell, a practicum student from the Kent State School of Library and Information Science. Adam worked under the direction of Magda El-Sherbini. Beverly was responsible for training him for twenty-five hours in copy and original cataloging. Section members Vickie Fitzgerald (non-book materials) and Jim Whitcomb (electronic books and theses) also worked with Adam. After Beverly and section members finished their training, the practicum student spent time in other areas of Cataloging and Technical Services. Beverly held a meeting of the Western Languages Section (December 11, 2009).
Magda El-Sherbini assigned Vickie Fitzgerald to a new project: preservation electronic books. Cheryl Obong, Scholarly Resources Integration, started to train Vickie to catalog these books. There are quite a few preservation electronic books to be processed. Christina Moore is now the Vice Chair of the Training Advisory Council.
Many members of the section took leave time this month (Beverly, for example, took eleven days of vacation leave) and we all had two holidays (December 25-26 for Christmas).
Non-Roman Languages Section
Summary
Sherab Chen (section coordinator)
Zaineb Bayahy (Arabic cataloging)
Anna Batchev (Slavic cataloging)
GAAs cataloging performance
Chinese Japanese Korean Turkish(see under Zaineb)
Principal Cataloger and Special Projects
No Report
Authority Control and Database Maintenance
Melanie finished up her Freshman Seminar and applied for another topic for next year. Melanie also met with the volunteer Moriana to discuss the work she did for the section. Moriana went through a month of the names from the Backstage report to see if the names could be corrected and find names that needed authority records. Melanie also worked with Adam, a practicum student, for the day of 15th. They worked on authority work and reviewed and created a few authority records.
Melanie met with Joan from Special Collections on the 12th to discuss the authority work that needs done for the cataloging of materials for the Byrd Polar Center (Operation Deep Freeze).
Andrea and Melanie have been discussing sending the blind references to Backstage so they can delete them from OSUL’s file. The blind references for authors, subjects, and MESH were collected separately in Booleans. There were no MESH, but the subjects and authors were exported to an Excel spreadsheet and sent to Backstage. They deleted them from their file and then they were deleted from OSUL’s. The blind references had not been cleaned up for at least 3 years and there were 1700 ARs and 181 subjects.
Amira graduated this month, and Melanie will be posting for a new GAA when the quarter begins. Ed completed the work that Amira was working on (short bib books from MAI). Indre and Nora were on break most of the month, but they continue to work on inventorying problem books and assisting Andrea with reports respectively.
Because December is during the winter break, Melanie completed many system wide things. She loaded the TOC load received from OhioLINK, added an openkb to the appropriate masters’ theses when asked to by Rocki and Beth (5064 records), and deleted the holdings on 480 records in OCLC for Nancy. She also fixed a problem with the 945s in the Backstage records from May ’08. There was a change in the load table to accommodate the information that Google needed, so our records from May had 945s with what looked like gibberish on the staff view. 13976 records were fixed over the course of a few days.
At the request of Jim and Barb, Melanie deleted a Boolean of Safari titles. There was a mix up from OhioLINK about the records, so instead of Jim overlaying them all or fixing them manually, he re-loaded the records. Melanie deleted the old ones first so he would not run into any problems (2825 records). She also ran the GOV Docs Boolean to collect withdrawn items (278 items suppressed 172 holdings deleted from OCLC).
Melanie also ran a Boolean for Amanda G. in Fine Arts to find how many of their items that were ordered for FIN ended up in STX. This is an ongoing problem for FIN and ARC especially. They order books and during processing they are assigned STX locations and sent there. Because of the future de-duping at STX, Amanda and Jane are concerned that their books may be withdrawn from STX when they don’t even belong there. The strategies that Melanie is trying are not successful yet, so she will continue in January.
Ed completed the backlog of duplicate OCLC reports. He will still work on them week to week, but we were behind by years. Completing the backlog was important and Ed did a quick and efficient job. With Beverly’s permission, Melanie also gave Ed a few books without copy on OCLC to work on from the problem shelf. He continues to work on the long list of hanging bibs given to the section by Brian Miller from ILL.
Catalog Librarian
Rocki Strader attended the following meetings and events: faculty meeting, Dec. 9; OSUL2013 Implementation Community meeting, Dec. 10; Renovation Committee, Dec. 11; Holiday celebration, Dec. 11.
Masters ETDs and ILL lending issues:
Jennifer Kuehn expressed concern about getting ILL requests for embargoed masters ETDs, for which there will be no archival fiche (the electronic copy in OhioLINK will be the only copy anywhere). The basic problem was how to deflect ILL requests for copies of embargoed masters ETDs. Lending rules are controlled in the MARC 008/byte 20 of the Local Holdings Record. Brian Miller regularly does maintenance on these records for Rare Books and Manuscripts and other non-lendable materials. Brian and Rocki determined that Brian can collect masters ETDs in a boolean to do similar maintenance to deflect requests.
Jennifer also asked if we could change the wording of the 538 System Info note, but her suggestion would be inconsistent with our use of that note and would not add any value to the record display in either OSCAR or WorldCat. In OSCAR, the note can be seen only if someone clicks on the Full Record tab, and in WorldCat the user has to scroll down to see it. In either case it is buried and difficult to see.