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ANNUAL REPORT 2000-2001 REORGANIZATION In
January 2001, Karen Ramsay was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department and
as the head of the new unit Monographic Acquisition/Copy Cataloging [MACC]. MACC consists
of the staff from the former Monographic Acquisitions Unit [a library technician and a
word processing typist] and the copy cataloging staff [two library technicians] formerly
in the Catalog Unit. The final portion of the reorganization will be completed some time
in the future, with the appointment of a faculty position to oversee the Serials Unit.
This reorganization balances the responsibility within the administrative team of the
department, consolidates tasks and procedures, and positions the Department to more
effectively respond to the exciting exigencies which the electronic environment demands. PERSONNEL CHANGES The
Department had many significant personnel changes during the year. In November 2000, long
time colleague Pauline Moulson died suddenly. Pauline was a valued and talented librarian,
and her loss is incalculable. Since the reorganization of the Department during the
previous year, Pauline played a central role in the
Department through her work as the HELIN liaison, and her support work in the systems
office. Her humor, good will and intelligence
are sorely missed. RIP. The
appointment of Prof. Ramsay as head of MACC, created a librarian vacancy in the Catalog
Unit. At year’s end we have these two support staff vacancies, as well as the open
faculty position of Serials Librarian. Marjorie
Jackson, librarian in the Serials Unit, received the Library’s Staff Excellence Award
for the year 2001. This was a well deserved selection, and all of the Technical Services
staff were delighted. Ms. Jackson also went onto half-time status as of July 2001. Monographic Acquisitions/Copy Cataloging Unit[MACC] Since January 2001, the Unit has been organized and housed on the lower level in the former space occupied by the Acquisitions Unit. With the help of Systems, the staff was provided with comfortable and efficient work spaces. Prof. Ramsay is cross training staff so that the new unit can perform all duties associated with it. With the further classification upgrade of the word processing typist to library technician, and the upgrade of some of the computers to handle the Millennium software, adjustments and refinements to procedures and processes due to the reorganization will continue into 2001-2002. As new procedures are developed, they have been added to the Department’s homepage. Under Prof. Ramsay’s guidance, and with the good-will, good-humor and active support of the staff, the creation of MACC has been accomplished with little turmoil or trouble. Congratulations and thanks to all. MACC plans to begin to develop an ongoing and continuing inventory program during the Summer 2001. It has been twenty-five years since an inventory has been conducted, and we expect that it will produce no end of work for all Technical Services units [relabeling, recataloging, data base maintenance, removing items from HELIN], as well as additional work for the Circulation Unit [reshelving, searching for missing items, declaring items missing]. HELIN catalog statements ‘available’ have been one of the most frequent and continuing patron complaints since the online catalog was created. We have never been able to actively and consistently remedy this problem. Another reason for Technical Services to actively take on this responsibility is to create projects which allow deskbound staff to get some relief from repetitive tasks and find valuable tasks elsewhere. We expect that support staff in MACC with student assistant help to continually [daily if all goes as planned] work on the inventory. Other plans for MACC include uploading of OCLC holdings [thus reducing OCLC charges further] and introducing Millennium Acquisitions software when upgrades to computers are implemented and the present inadequacies in the new software are eliminated. Catalog Unit Cataloging was also reorganized by shifting copy cataloging to MACC. Prof. Lahiri worked closely with Prof. Ramsay to keep problems to a minimum, and there was no disruption of ongoing projects. Cataloging is current in all respects, and special projects continue, have been completed, and new ones begun. Projects completed include the successful recataloging of dewey classed journals and relocating select serial titles into storage [Mezzanine]. There are 1661 titles now located on the Mezzanine. We expect to add more titles to this collection when Circulation shifts more volumes from Serials into storage in the upcoming year. Joseph Lawler provided an outline of how the microform collections should be set up, and personally completed the cataloging of the theses/monographs section. New item locations were established for microfilms [RIUM1-- formerly ‘newspapers’; RIUM2—formerly ‘journals’; RIUM3—formerly unnamed, but basically sets and overflow from ‘newspapers’ and ‘journals’; and RIUM4—formerly ‘theses/monographs’], and for the microfiche collections [RIUM6—microfiche monographs and theses is completed]. At the start of the project last Fall, HELIN identified 15,459 undifferentiated titles in our MFORM Area. As of June 28, 2001, we have 1954 items left to place into one of the new locations. We have cataloged over 1000 items into the expanded locations, and expect to find many more titles to catalog as we continue with the mfiche collections. The Mform supervisor will be making further recommendations as to the organization of the collection in the coming year. The first phase of the barcoding project was completed. This phase consisted of student workers going to the monograph shelves and removing those volumes which lacked barcodes. These volumes were then brought to the Catalog Unit where item records were created, recataloged if necessary, barcodes affixed, and returned to the shelves. This part of the project was completed this year. Since the Fall 2000, Cataloging began the next [and final!] phase of the project by systematically creating lists of item records without barcodes attached for titles in the stacks [riuu, riuj, riuo] by LC call number. MACC staff and Catalog staff have been going to the shelves looking for the volumes, and processing if found. Those items not found have been sent to Circulation for further searching and to be declared missing if necessary. Cataloging has completed all titles classed between A through M, and is now working its way through the P’s. The Circulation Unit must give priority to this work [see “Inventory” above]. A project to eliminate all short records [created by Circulation Unit when a volume was first circulated in the CLSI system and continuing as ‘fly’ records], and transfer our holdings to full HELIN records began in Spring 2001. This is a rather complicated process which has required the attention of Prof. Lahiri and the support staff in the Catalog Unit. Of the 14,000 items now on short records, he believes that many are for Government publications, and that Cataloging may be able to eliminate the others within the coming year. Serials Unit Serials developments have been many this past year. In Binding, Pauline Contois successfully transferred our binding to the Ridley Bindery. In addition, we began to use a less expensive storage-type binding [sort of quarter buckram with uncovered boards] for all of our binding, except reference, in an attempt to reduce costs and increase the number of volumes bound at the same overall cost. This transition has gone smoothly. Processing was completely revamped under Marjorie Jackson’s suggestion and supervision. We have finally weaned ourselves away from the costly and outdated Selin system and replaced our labeling onto the HELIN system. This minor step will have a major impact on the quality of all labeling, eliminating most typos, and guaranteeing that the label and the HELIN record match. The upcoming results of the inventory, when we identify mislabeled volumes from the past thirty years will only reinforce how major this improvement will be. Serials Checkin was relocated from the CPR in early 2001. The checkin staff, and the serials acquisition support staff were relocated to the space vacated by the copy cataloging staff on the second floor. Work was completed on updating and creating checkin records for all serial bib records in HELIN in preparation for updating our holdings in the CRIARL Union List, maintained by Brown University Library. URI’s holdings have not been updated for many years. Now Brown will be able to receive a list of URI serial titles with the accompanying checkin records and update the union list through a computer algorithm. Nearly 9,000 checkin records were created [many for microfilm holdings] during the past year so that the union list update could be accomplished. We will work with Bob Aspri to create the necessary data files to send to Brown within the next few months. In May, after training sessions and preparatory work by Laury Turkalo in Systems, Michael Carpenter in checkin, Marjorie Jackson and Kathleen Farrell, and tests involving Pell, government publications, CCE and all serials staff, the Millenium software was introduced for the serials system. Due to the hard work and cooperation of Laury Turkalo Millennium was seamlessly introduced into our procedures. While some tweaking will continue to take place into the new year, it looks to be a improvement over the character-based system which we had used in the past. Electronic Resources In response to the increasing importance, complexity, and interactivity, Technical Services created the position of Electronic Resources Librarian[ERL], who will be responsible for coordinating and creating the processes and procedures which will guide the Department in controlling this new and exciting phenomenon. The delivery of information and processes [see Millennium above] via the web is the present wave of the future [we hope the technology lasts longer than the cd-rom craze did]. Training was the most important activity in the area of electronic resources. Identifying and cataloging e-journals was the main focus of the ERL: attending several training sessions [including a HELIN sponsored CONSER session in Providence in June, and a NERCOMP Information Technology SIG Workshop on Journal Locators at Wesleyan, in January, and an extensive OIS sponsored workshop on web publishing]. As a result of the NERCOMP meeting, Technical Services is attempting to purchase, via HELIN, a program developed by the Tri-College Consortium in Pennsylvania which allows the rapid cataloging and updating of our opac of full text journal titles available through the aggregators such as LEXIS-NEXIS and other sources. Due to the volatility of these full text titles through aggregators we need an efficient way to update these holdings. We have recommended that HELIN subscribe to this service [Aspri and Kirk had begun working on this by year’s end]. URI now subscribes to Ebsco Online, and we have added web access directly from the library homepage to 898 e-journals [we have access because we subscribe to the print versions of these titles]. HELIN is in the process of purchasing CONSER records for all of these titles, and placing them in the opac. In addition to access via Ebsco Online, we continue to catalog into the opac those titles which we do not receive through Ebsco. We have begun to add direct opac access to all e-databases which we now subscribe to [either directly, via Ebsco, Nelinet or HELIN] and will create order records for all such titles. The Ad Hoc Committee to Consider E-Journals was formed by the managers and chaired by Michael Vocino in order to make recommendations about moving from paper to electronic format. The committee developed several recommendations and presented them at an E-journal Forum sponsored for the Library Faculty on May 24. The package of proposals is expected to be presented to the managers in Fall 2001. Committee members are Vocino, Kirk, Rathemacher and Downey. New processes and procedures for handling e-resources are being developed for future use. We expect many changes as the coming year progresses. Summary The attached statistics show steady progress in all of our activities. We have been able to reorganize, make major shifts in relocating staff, re-prioritized when necessary current processes, introduced new technology and added new responsibilities without disrupting our ongoing responsibilities. All accomplished while experiencing significant staff reductions due to death, retirement and retrenchment. It takes an extraordinarily talented, hard working, and good willed staff to make this happen. It would not have happened otherwise. My sincere thanks to the staff of the Department of Technical Services. William T. O’Malley
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