Cataloging Department Monthly Report
January 2009
Subject: Monthly Report — April 2009
Date: May 2009
From: Magda El-Sherbini, Cataloging Department Head
To: Sally Rogers, Assistant Director for Technical Services
Western Languages Section
April 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 continued to work with Sheryl Williams, a student from the Kent State School of Library and Information Science, who is doing preliminary work for her practicum. The practicum will involve cataloging books for the Ohio State University African-American Community Extension Center. Jesse Higel, a volunteer from the Kent State School of Library and Information Science, continued to work with Beverly. Jesse wants to learn more about cataloging and is working with English language books from the new book truck in the Cataloging Department. Beverly also spent time with Kevin Carey, a Kent State practicum student who also works in the Law Library. She trained him how to do original cataloging.
Beverly attended a Diversity Committee meeting (April 16, 2009; as recording secretary, she took the minutes). As a member of the subcommittee of the Diversity Committee to prepare a proposal for an American Library Association Diversity Research Grant, she attended weekly in-person meetings and dealt with daily emails about the grant. The deadline for submitting this grant was changed from April 30 to May 17, 2009.
Jim Whitcomb also worked with Kevin Carey. Jim gave Kevin an overview of several ebook workflows, including ETDs, eSpringer and ebrary. Kevin then worked independently to process materials in these three categories. Kevin's cataloging knowledge from his position at the Law Library was very beneficial in doing the cataloging. Because Jim was swamped with ebook cataloging, Magda El-Sherbini made the decision to have regional campus surrogate cataloging returned to Anna Batchev.
Vera Enesey finished the David Benseler collection this month. Theresa Wei created a series authority record. GAA Eunice Min spent her time doing analytic retrocon.
Many members of the section took leave time this month (Beverly, for example, took six days of vacation leave and two days of sick leave).
Non-Roman Languages Section
News
New GAA for Korean cataloging, Kyong Young Ha (a.k.a. Ki Ha) began to work at our section. She was the first Korean GAA at Cataloging. The position was created to meet an increasing workflow and new receipts of Korean materials in the library. The work-study student, Catherin Lee completed her federal funding and will leave us this month. She is officially hired under Prof. Li at the East Asian Collection and she has been helping us to catalog Korean books.
Summary
This month the section cataloged totally 1,320 titles, and received 613 new titles.
Sherab Chen (section coordinator)
Sherab continued to oversee the process of contract cataloging project for Grasselli Library of John Carroll University. He reviewed the records created by the student assigned to work on this project, and gave necessary instruction.
He was collaborating with Melanie on creating the E-learning for Authority Record courseware. They worked on Google Docs and the Library wiki to create and co-edit the scripts. At this point they were working on the first course. Currently, the project is waiting for the installation of Captivate 2.0 onto one of the department computer work stations in order to start the actual creation of the e-learning course.
Sherab created and contributed 5 new Chinese name authority records to WorldCata as the NACO CJK project.
Sherab began training the new Korean GAA, using a combined training method, including the use of e-learning, Web 2.0 applications, and one-on-one instruction.
Zaineb Bayahy (Middle Eastern cataloging team)
Zaineb oversaw the cataloging workflow of Middle Eastern materials, and her team production shown as follows
| Languages | Original | Copy | Enhanced | Total | Volumes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arabic books | 104 | 82 | 82 | 268 | 181 |
| Turkish Books (Mesut) | 0 | ||||
| English (Mesut) | 30 | 10 | 3 | 43 | |
| Thesis retrocon (Students) | |||||
| Arabic books for CSU | 1 | 2 | 3 | ||
| Cd-rom for CSU | 1 | 1 | |||
| Total | 315 |
Anna Batchev (Slavic cataloging)
Anna cataloged 177 new Slavic books cataloged (46 original), 5 gift books, 3 serials; and 22 English books. She also cataloged 189 regional libraries books (21 original).
GAAs cataloging performance
ChineseYang Yu (GAA) cataloged 111 new Chinese titles (in 122 volumes) and 1 DVD title. She also assisted Sherab on the NACO name authority record project (she searched name authority records and captured those have author names needed new authority record).
Hsiao-feng Tsai (GAA) cataloged 91 new Chinese titles.
Special project GAA
JapaneseNatsumi Hirota (GAA) led the JMSTC Japanese Meji Publication microfiche project and she cataloged 233 titles (in 240 volumes) all in original cataloging.
Gumiko Monobe (GAA) cataloged 70 new Japanese monograph titles (89 volumes).
KoreanKyoung Yong just began training.
Turkish(see under Zaineb)
Authority Control and Database Maintenance
The new GAA for the section, Jaspreet Oberi, started working the first day of the new quarter. She worked and trained with Andrea for the first few weeks to become familiar with Authority Records and how they work. Currently, she has started on the long term project of catching up on the personal name sections of the "Librarian's Report" from our vendor. Ed is still working on subject headings, but will eventually be moved over to names also. Jaspreet and Melanie' s student Indre also helped label bound periodicals in the ACK stacks for a few hours during the month.
Sherab and Melanie completed work on the script for the first course of e-Learning for Authority Record creation. They have a goal for this first course to be completed by June. Melanie also worked with two practicum students this month. Kevin worked with Melanie for 20 hours and Adam worked for 10 hours, but is also doing his culminating project with the section. Adam is completing a guidebook for the vendor reports from Backstage, concentrating on the statistical aspect of the reports and how these can help the section in the future.
Stephanie started training 4 students for Rocki on theses retrocon. This is in addition to answering questions and continued support for Rocki' s student Bridget. Melanie updated over 500 theses records that did not have the correct MAT type and no CAT DATE and, therefore, were never sent to processing. Melanie also continued to work with Steve Rogers to update ERIC records, completing over 10,000 records during the month.
Melanie also updated approximately 2000 records for Danny Dotson with a note indicating that the journal Lectures Notes in Mathematics is also available online. This was especially important because Danny will be sending over 200 copies of the journal (which is an analytic) to the section for correction of an error.
Melanie spent two hours labeling bound periodicals on the 16th, attended the Faculty Meeting on the 14th, a WorldCAT Local task group meeting on the 23rd, and a meeting concerning her upcoming fourth year review with select members of the AP&T Committee on the 30th. Melanie was also assigned as the chair of the Cataloging Committee.
| NACO Statistics | Adds | Replaces |
|---|---|---|
| Arabic | 0 | 0 |
| CJK | 5 | 0 |
| Western Lang. | 56 | 7 |
| NACO Funnel | ||
| Practicum Students | 4 | 1 |
Catalog Librarian
Rocki Strader attended the following meetings and events: Ohio ETD Association meeting, April 2-3 (gave short presentation on our process for cataloging current ETDs and older digitized ETDs); Phi Kappa Phi, OSU chapter executive board meeting, April 8; OSUL2013 Implementation Community meeting, also on April 8; conference call with Wes Boomgaarden and rep from Fireproof Records, re: specs for masters thesis microfiche, April 9; Renovation Committee labeling "party", also on April 9; ALAO executive board meeting, April 17; Campus Campaign cake auction, April 20; meeting with Tim Watson and others re: MFA/ETD issue, April 22; ACR research forum (gave presentation on my keyword-LCSH project), April 22; ALAO TEDSIG meeting, April 24.
Misc.:
Rocki reviewed over 80 applications for the new GAA position. Interviewed 4 applicants. Gunjan Kathuria, a masters student in computer science, was selected and will start on May 11.
Student employee Michael Valentino started on April 3. He is one of the four students hired to work on the thesis shelflist project (for Rocki), and he will also go through the remaining cards for the AH/EL conversion project (for Melanie McGurr).
Interlibrary Services discovered that a born-digital Ph.D. ETD was missing from the OhioLINK ETD Center. The title of the ETD was almost identical with the author's masters thesis, which had been digitized and added to the ETD Center. The Ph.D. ETD was inadvertently deleted as a duplicate. Rocki sorted the situation out with Tim Watson in the Graduate School and Thomas Dowling at OhioLINK, and the Ph.D. ETD has been restored. (Rocki still needs to update the bib record for the masters to include the URL.)
Interlibrary Services received a request from an English library for a masters thesis about an English playwright. They received the PDF in accordance with ILS procedures and also asked if it could be made available online. Brian Miller in Interlibrary Services had already forwarded the PDF to be put in the ETD queue. Rocki asked the Graduate School to expedite its release, which was done in two business days.
Brian Miller also brought up an issue raised by a couple of non-OhioLINK libraries, concerning access to ETDs. They asked if they could either printout or download the PDFs and make them available locally to their users. Rocki referred the question to Tim Watson and Thomas Dowling. Although there are no outright prohibitions, the consensus was that since the ETDs are openly and freely accessible, the other libraries should be linking to the ETD Center for their patrons to access directly. Rocki also suggested to Brian that he could talk to Trisha Davis for more information about copyright or other legal issues that could be involved.
ECIP: 3 received; 2 done, 1 leftover (it was received on the last day of the month).
ETD retrocon: Carryover of 120 titles from March; Jim added and recataloged 136 digitized titles and Rocoki recataloged 5 titles out of the backlog. A total of 141 titles were done, leaving a carryover of 115.
Cataloging Department Monthly Statistics