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Cataloging Department Annual Report 2001-2002

Summary

The year ending in June 2002 saw the winding down of a nearly three year long project to first load, then clean up 360,000 federal document records. At the same time Cataloging began another project expected to result in the movement of a half million volumes into the new satellite shelving facility on Sullivan Drive starting this fall. We also worked on development of new bibliographic searching routines between Acquisitions and Cataloging, built several smaller databases (offsite storage serials, USAIN, and links between the NCSU Authors and Serials Solution data), developed a small thesaurus for use with Libraries' Intranet metadata, added subject descriptors to over 5000 e-journal records, and worked with Special Collections to develop a crosswalk between EAD and MARC for use in cataloging of archival finding aids. This year also saw the arrival of Karen Letarte as permanent Assistant Department Head and Section Head for the Database Management Section as well as our first ever lay-offs of permanent staff.

Departmental activities

Cataloging productivity remained at the level established by the large increase in monograph allocations dating back to 1996/97. Title counts this year are up by 4,000, reflecting a large increase in the volume of e-texts processed late in 2001, primarily netLibrary and federal document titles. While it would appear from the table below that the volume count is down by 25,000 items from last year, this figure excludes volumes added to the offsite storage facility since these do not represent materials new to the Libraries. Over 230,000 volumes were virtually removed from the collection by changing their location code to that for the storage facility while keeping their catalog display location as "DH Hill Library" until the physical move is completed. These represent primarily older serial titles which have either ceased or been cancelled without having been superseded by a currently published title. Several thousand volumes thus edited have already been virtually (or physically, in the case of branch materials) returned to their original location through subsequent decisions by faculty members or Collections librarians. The coming year should see increased activity on the flow of older materials to Sullivan Drive, particularly monographs, but some reduction in new materials processed as the monograph budget is reduced in response to state fiscal measures.

The GPO project, begun three years ago to bring all document technical processing and catalog access in line with that provided for commercial and academic materials, reached a critical plateau with the conclusion of the smart barcode clean up. This phase saw smart barcodes placed on materials in the U.S. documents stacks, as well as the removal of records representing titles not held. An important component of this year's work was the linking of separate analytical titles to a single barcode where multiple documents have been bound into a single physical volume. Still to be processed are titles missing from the stacks because they were checked out, misplaced or lost at the time of processing, as well as cartographic materials and publications listed by GPO as sent out in microform only. Some of the latter were actually received at the NCSU Libraries in print format, but a system report will be needed to identify the records thus loaded into the catalog with microform-only holdings. This next logical phase of the project will likely take place over the course of the coming fiscal year, using students to check printouts against the documents shelf list to determine which format is held. Additional work is needed to identify CD-ROM titles held locally, cataloging for which was not received with the Marcive GPO load. Unfortunately, the very key position of Documents Librarian was vacated during the report period and has yet to be filled. This vacancy has affected much of the decision-making regarding documents processing over the last half-year, as it will into the next.

The loading of GPO URL records commenced early in the report period but was still not completed at year's end. There were a number of problems with matching to Marcive Shipping List Service records already in the catalog, and GPO cataloging practice has not been uniform over time. Some URLs were simply added to print or microform records for titles we may already have had. In other cases, new records were created describing only the electronic form of publication even though it may represent a total replication of a print original. Much manual checking of these records has resulted, thus slowing down the process considerably. It is hoped that we can complete the loading of the URL records by summer's end.

The NCSU Authors database continued to grow over the report period and now contains over 12,000 citations by over 6300 authors in 2700 journals. Faculty interest in this project seems to have increased this year with many contributed bibliographies and an increased use of the online submission form. Several departments contacted project staff to talk about starting their own listings of internal publications, and at least one, in Textile and Apparel Technology and Management, has gone live. An important addition to this project took place when we were able to provide query links to the Serials Solution data, thus enabling far more live links to electronic versions of cited papers.

In the last quarter of the fiscal year, Cataloging took on two smaller database projects in cooperation with Access and Delivery Services, Systems and Preservation. The first of these projects involved cleaning up a database created in EndNote for Preservation's USAIN Grant project and then moving it to MS Access so that it could be manipulated and placed on the Web. The second involved building a Web-searchable listing of titles slated for movement to offsite storage, using citations captured from DRA by ADS staff and put into an Access database where they were cleaned up for later presentation by Shirley Rodgers in Systems using a Cold Fusion search interface.

Non-MARC metadata initiatives this year involved primarily the Dublin Core and EAD schemas. Working with Tom Zack and May Chang in the Digital Libraries Initiative Department, we helped design a Dublin Core (DC) work form for content providers building pages for the Libraries Intranet and then developed a thesaurus of subject terms to enable subject searching of this content. A presentation on this work was made at the Digital Library Federation's Fall Research Forum.

The first Libraries' Fellow to choose Cataloging as her home department, Kathy Wisser, spent most of her project time in Special Collections working on EAD development. Besides learning to catalog monographs in her home department, Kathy trained Jennifer Roper, our Rare Books Cataloger, in EAD coding as the two developed EAD to MARC21 crosswalk capabilities to enable automatic generation of MARC for loading into the Libraries' catalog. Successful presentations on this topic were made at both LAUN-CH and the ACRL Rare Book and Manuscript Section's annual meetings in Atlanta.

This year saw increased Cataloging interaction with remote electronic resources as MARC records representing netLibrary monographs purchased through Solinet were loaded into DRA. These records, purchased quite inexpensively through consortium arrangements with OCLC, provided instant access to over 15,000 e-texts, but have also provided departmental name authorities staff with considerable post-load clean-up opportunities as access points were poorly controlled by the utility.

The addition of MyLibrary subject descriptors to over 5000 electronic journal and a couple hundred e-database records was another significant event in the Serial and Electronic Resources Section's year. Using locally created macros, several staff members worked on this project for weeks, enabling Systems staff to harvest e-resource titles for the subject listings maintained on the Libraries' Web site using catalog records. These terms will feed MyLibrary discipline-oriented user profiling. These descriptors should be searchable in their own index in the Sirsi Unicorn system scheduled for implementation this winter.

Personnel

On the personnel front, the department saw a balance between arrivals and departures this year with four of each. Much of the staff movement was at the Library Assistant level, with Christy Starnes leaving DMS for a position as Stacks Manager in Access and Delivery Services while Eve Mitt and Rob Loomis transferred into DMS from Preservation. Karen Williams, of Serials and Electronic Resources, left her position early in January to attend library school and was replaced by Lynn Ballance from Acquisitions (and a former member of this department). The University-wide "reductions in force", caused by fiscal difficulties in the state, claimed two long-term Library Technical Assistant IIs as the year came to a close, Ellen Bennett and Anne Renegar who, between them, represented an impressive fifty years of service to the Libraries. Besides losing long-term colleagues and friends, the department lost two permanent positions to the reduction, bringing our total staff complement down to 23 from 25, exclusive of the shared Computing Consultant position. One of the 23 positions, that of the Metadata Librarian, remained unfilled throughout the year.

Bao-Chu Chang, who served ably as Acting Assistant Department Head for over a year, relinquished this role in August with the arrival of Karen Letarte from Southwest Missouri State University. Karen brings with her impressive credentials, including service on several ALA committees and a widely praised report on patron acceptance of core level cataloging records written for the Program on Cooperative Cataloging (PCC). On top of her role as Assistant Department Head, Karen serves as Head of the Database Management Section.

The year ahead

The year ahead promises a lot of change for cataloging in general, but even more for our sub-profession at the NCSU Libraries. Nationally, OCLC will be phasing out its successful Passport terminal emulation software in favor of a browser-based search and edit interface called Connexion. The new software promises the functionality of the CORC client, a client originally designed for the cataloging of Internet resources, and one that still has well-documented bugs. With the implementation of Sirsi's Link product this fall, it remains to be seen whether we will be accessing the utility through SmartPort, Sirsi's built-in Z39.50 client, or through Connexion. The implementation of Link is also expected to be a major undertaking in the next academic year as we attempt to move over a million and a quarter bibliographic records, 800,000 name authority records and an unknown number of holdings, item, and other records into the new integrated library system. While there is some trepidation concerning this change, the promise of a simpler editing system, vastly improved reporting functions, Z39.50 access to remote bibliographic databases, and tighter integration of functional modules, all provide staff with a great deal of hope for the future.

The last few years have seen a proliferation of new metadata schemes as well as the growth and maturation of some of the more established ones, as additional needs are identified within their respective communities of interest. Library automation vendors have already begun enabling the creation, maintenance, translation and communication of records created using some of these schemes, principally Dublin Core. In addition, momentum is building within our marketplace for more widespread use of XML as a markup and communication language. The Library of Congress has recently introduced an XML DTD for MARC21, a scheme that will likely be embraced by the library marketplace as a means for both storage and communication of bibliographic data. This should open the door for the standardization of administrative metadata regarding library collections, information that has been subject to proprietary storage and handling by library automation vendors for over twenty years. Since Sirsi's architecture is conducive to the storage of non-MARC data already (Unicorn can handle COSATI and Dublin Core metadata), I would expect our new vendor to be at the leading edge of this movement.

Finally, it must be noted that an important limit on the department's ability to cope with change in the next year will be the loss of Jennifer O'Brien Roper in July. Jennifer has been a key player in the department, initiating rare book cataloging operations three and a half years ago, running the Monographs Section for the past two years, liaising with the Learning Resources Library and Special Collections, and providing mentoring for our Fellow while also being mentored in EAD developments in the state. Her rapport with staff in her own section, as well as throughout the rest of the department and with Special Collections, has been exemplary and is going to be a very tough act to follow. With no immediate hope of filling this position in the current economic climate, we have had to divide up Jennifer's responsibilities as best we can, with Kathy Wisser assuming many of the Rare Book duties, Kathy, Sandra and Karen handling completion shelf support and the Department Head acting as Section Head for Monographs. Once Kathy's Fellowship term ends in 2003, Cataloging will indeed be in dire straits if we cannot replace Jennifer or fill the Metadata Librarian position.

Goals for 2002-2003

1. Work with Acquisitions to streamline order-receipt-cataloging procedures:

Acquisitions and Cataloging have been working on changes to current procedures for ordering and receipt of materials that will affect searching for best copy within the monographs work stream. In the past, staff would create orders based on the best possible record available at the time given the limited amount of information supplied by faculty, collection managers or vendors. These records often had to be replaced on receipt, as the copy often did not match the edition sent by our suppliers. New workflow procedures based on post-receipt searching in Cataloging, will be developed over the summer and into the fall, with subsequent adjustments made to personnel in the two areas based on demonstrated need.

2. Identification and removal of materials from branch and D. H. Hill stacks to the satellite storage facility:

With completion of the first phase of the offsite storage move nearing completion, planning will need to be undertaken to identify, edit and move the next group of materials to be transferred. This will be accomplished in cooperation with Collection Management and Access & Delivery Services.

3. Clean up of problem bibliographic data in DRA prior to system migration:

Problems with record type and bibliographic level, identified in system reports, need to be remedied before these records are migrated this winter. Similarly, problems identified by the vendor, including "spanned" records, parent/child records, "orphan bibs" (primarily orders which were never received), and records with non-standard MARC usage, will need to be addressed in the system providing the best tools for dealing with them, either DRA or Sirsi.

4. Implementation of Sirsi Unicorn/Link:

Implementation of any new system, particularly one around which so much of our day-to-day work effort revolves, consumes vast quantities of institutional time and energy. Policy tables will need to be set up, Windows clients configured, staff trained and probably retrained, and new work procedures, reflecting the strengths and weaknesses of the new system, developed over time. It is expected that system migration will consume a major proportion of Departmental energies this year.

5. Port the NCSU Authors Database to Oracle:

With permission secured to enable our Computing Consultant to make this move, it is hoped that we can finally move ahead with this goal left over from last year. The changeover will not have any effect on the ColdFusion code that governs our public search interface, but should greatly speed up retrieval of results and enable some searches that we are not allowing at present in order to preserve reasonable response time.

6. Rebuild staff morale and trust following the "reduction in force":

Staff morale, often cited as being low over the last number of years, had risen markedly this year, particularly with the appointment of two new Section Heads and the hiring of an energetic, hard-working new Assistant Department Head. The "reductions in force" in June and the expected loss of one of those new Section Heads in July have already adversely affected morale. DMS is working on team-building exercises, one means of creating forward movement out of adverse events.

Personnel changes in the Cataloging Department 2001-2002

List of Cataloging Department employees as of 1 July 2002

Appendix A: Summary of Cataloging processing activity by library and/or collection 2001-2002

Appendix B: Year-end processing totals by library/collection and material type