Cataloging Department Monthly Report
January 2009

Subject: Monthly Report — January 2009
Date: February 2009
From: Magda El-Sherbini, Cataloging Department Head
To: Sally Rogers, Assistant Director for Technical Services

Western Languages Section

January 2009 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 Sheryl Williams, a volunteer student from the Kent State School of Library and Information Science, who wants to learn about cataloging. Sheryl is now working Wednesdays and Fridays, 3-5 pm to learn basic cataloging procedures. Beverly met with Eboni Francis and Pam McClung of the Diversity Committee (January 15) to plan the poster that Beverly would be presenting at the Tri-State Diversity Conference in February 2009. January 15 was a face-to-face meeting; others meetings were held via email.

Beverly had two requests for help on January 26, 2009. One request was from a Professor trying to locate three videos that were needed for a class. Beverly was able to locate the already cataloged videos in Sullivant. The other request was from a librarian who was trying to locate a specific masters thesis. Beverly talked to Tim Watson in the Graduate School, who sent her a copy of the thesis as an attachment. She also emailed thesis coordinator Rocki Strader, who was away from the office until February 2, to let her know about the request. Finally, Beverly held a meeting of the Western Languages Section (January 15).

Jim Whitcomb continued to work on the ETD submissions after going over the procedures with Rocki Strader in December 2008 and starting to do the submissions then. He also discovered and reported a problem with some of the electronic materials records. Any new record added for an OSU-owned ebook or serial between September and November was missing the actual link to the electronic piece. Melanie McGurr and Nancy Helmick quickly resolved the problems.

Lisa Chiong discovered that many of the French cat-as-mono books that she received were either added volumes or analytics. To lessen the time that she has to spend working with these titles, a student does a title search in Millennium before Lisa works with the titles. Christina Moore gave two presentations of the New Student Orientation Workshop (January 16 and 21, 2009).

Student Alex Slivinski 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.

Many members of the section took leave time this month (Beverly, for example, took one day of vacation leave) and we all had two holidays (New Year's Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day). Also, Ohio State University was closed on January 28, 2009 because of a level 2 winter storm.

Non-Roman Languages Section

Summary

This month the section cataloged totally 1175 titles and marked 352 new receipts. We removed some old Slavic backlog materials. We are about to begin a special contract cataloging project to catalog non-English books for other universities.

Sherab Chen (section coordinator)

Sherab was busy assisting the head in developing and revising contract cataloging documents. From this month, the section will begin a special project to catalog non-English books for libraries in other institutes that have no special language cataloging staff. Sherab met with the head to set up guidelines and workflow for this project, and provided cataloging specification on the contract documentations.

Sherab communicated with Miroljub, the East European and Slavic Collection librarian for decision making on several boxes of old Slavic books. He invited him to the department to review those materials, and as a result, decision was made and the backlog was cleared. Sherab and Anna met Predrag Matejic, Hilandar Research Library curator, and discussed about how to process a un-cataloged collection of fine art materials in Slavic. We are waiting for the Fine Art Library's response in order to determine the shelf location.

He created and contributed 5 new Chinese NACO records.

He also interviewed and hired one candidate for the JMSTC Japanese microfiche cataloging project.

Zaineb Bayahy (Arabic cataloging)

Zaineb cataloged 72 new Arabic titles (14 original cataloging and 32 enhanced), and 52 French titles (14 original). Mesut was rehired to the team and he cataloged 50 English titles (41 original). Details see below.

She continued to review the Thesis Retrocon project student Briget's records, and trained a student to catalog Persian books.

Languages	Original	Copy	Enhanced	Total	Volumes
Arabic books	14	26	32	72
Arabic DVD CD Arabic				0
Turkish Books
English Books	41	9		50
Persian Books
French Books	14	26	32	72
Total	69	46	59	174

Anna Batchev (Slavic cataloging)

Anna reported two old Slavic material backlog that needed decision making, and helped Sherab to communicate with area studies. She cataloged 148 new Slavic books (26 original cataloging), 143 gift books (76 original), and 17 serials.

GAAs cataloging performance

Chinese

Yang Yu (GAA) cataloged 115 new Chinese books (60 original), 3 serials (original cataloging), 2 CD-ROMs.

Hsiao-feng Tsai (GAA) cataloged 127 new Chinese books (40 original), 2 CD-ROMs, and 8 fine art painting scrolls (all original cataloging).

Miao Liu (hourly) was taking vacation this month.

Special project GAA

Japanese

Natsumi Hiroda (GAA) cataloged 217 JMSTC microfiche titles (all original).

Gumiko Monobe (GAA) was under training, and she cataloged 35 new Japanese books (19 original)

Mari Konno (hourly) cataloged 200 JMSTC microfiche titles (all original).

Korean

Catherin Lee (work-study) cataloged 43 new Korean books (19 original).

Turkish

(no activities this month)

Authority Control and Database Maintenance

Ed Plunkett began working with the Librarian' s Report for issues with LCSH. Melanie and Ed worked together to go over the reports and how to correct any problems found. He will continue with the work and they will meet periodically for further training.

Indre completed the inventory of problem books (including Stephanie' s). Now all books should be updated to status "a" with a note. Lin has been concentrating on correcting items on the problem shelf and Jourdan has been helping with the less complicated problems.

Melanie and Andrea began to discuss training individual catalogers on NACO Personal Names. We will hopefully begin training of our colleagues one-on-one next month by sitting down with the catalogers and helping them to create authority records for pieces they are currently working on that need authority work.

Melanie and Mary Ann Reis from Gov Docs worked together often this month to finish up discussion about withdrawing Gov Docs. They already have the actual suppression of bibs in bulk down, but this month they worked on withdrawing large sections of fiche through Booleans. Mary Ann runs a Boolean collection a certain range of fiche. Then Melanie appropriately marks the items records for withdrawal through global update, including adding notes that this piece is the last copy and withdrawn per s. moeller. Then the bi-weekly Boolean is run to collect all Gov Doc items with these notes and the bibs are suppressed and holdings deleted.

Melanie and Stephanie discussed strategies for sharing the workload on her problem materials and who could help with the problems. Because of the complexity of these problems, it was decided that Stephanie, Melanie, and Lin would most likely be the only people able to tackle the problems.

Melanie attended the Cataloging Committee on January 8th, participated in a WorldCAT Local conference call with University of New Mexico January 8th, and attended ALA Mid-Winter January 23-26th.

PCC Stats:	New	Replaces
Cataloging	1
Special Collections	26	3
CJK	0

Catalog Librarian

Rocki Strader attended the following meetings and events: Catalog Committee, Jan. 8.

ALA Midwinter Meeting, Jan. 22-27, where she gave a presentation to the ALCTS CCS Cataloging & Classification Research Interest Group, titled "Author-assigned keywords versus Library of Congress Subject Headings: implications for the cataloging of electronic theses and dissertations."

Misc.:

In mid-December, our colleagues at IUPUI requested a masters thesis that had not yet been digitized. The request was made through ILL. Brian Miller (in ILL) suggested that the document be scanned and submitted to the OhioLINK ETD Center. Rocki coordinated with Linda Miller in E-reserves, Jim Whitcomb, in CAT, and Tim Watson in the Graduate School to "rush" it through digitization, submission, and approval. The document was available in OhioLINK, and our bib record updated, by January 5.

LC ECIP: The first two titles from OSU Press were put into our production queue while Rocki was at ALA. She will have them done in the first week of February.

Also while Rocki was at ALA, a researcher in FAES requested a paper masters thesis that was still being held by the Graduate School because of the change in the microfiche contract. The problem was initially referred to Beverly McDonald. Beverly contacted Tim Watson in the Graduate School about the situation, and he sent a digital copy to Beverly. Beverly also apprised Rocki of the situation, and Rocki asked Tim if it would be possible to have the thesis submitted to the ETD Center. Tim is pursuing permission from the author. We may not add it to the ETD Center ourselves. At the beginning of February, Rocki will coordinate with Jessica Page at FAE to get a copy of the thesis to the researcher who asked for it.

Rocki accepted an appointment by Sally Rogers to be Move Coordinator for Technical Services, for the move out of ACK to Sullivant Hall.

ETD retrocon project: There was a carryover from 2008 of 259 titles awaiting recataloging (they are already in the ETD Center). Jim Whitcomb added and recataloged 97 titles; total done for January was 140. This leaves a carryover of 216.

Cataloging Department Monthly Statistics

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