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Cataloging Department Annual Report 2004-2005

Summary

The year in review was dominated by preparations for, and outcomes of, the improvement project for the lower two floors of the East Wing of the D.H. Hill Library. Tens of thousands of reference, special collections, government documents, ITT gifts, and book stacks volumes were transferred or cataloged prior to the move. Temporary quarters at the Brickhaven Library have presented us with numerous opportunities for streamlining workflow between Acquisitions, Cataloging and Preservation, including some implemented since December and others that will be implemented in the coming year. Due to the move and to continuing trends towards electronic over print acquisitions, the total number of new print volumes added to the collection this year is lower than normal, while the title count is considerably higher. On the personnel side, turnover was relatively high, but we finished the year with all positions filled for the first time in several years.

Departmental activities

The Brickhaven facility

Long-planned changes to both public and staff space on the main and basement levels in the D. H. Hill Library culminated in the evacuation of technical service operations from there in November 2004. Because of excellent planning for this move, both from the Libraries' administration and the departments involved, and a supportive staff contingent, we were able to relocate staff with minimal disruption to cataloging operations. In fact, loss of productivity was limited to a two-day period in which most staff either took vacation or worked on the prior weekend to maintain their 40-hour work schedules. The Department Head, Assistant Department Head, and Computing Consultant to ensure that furniture and equipment got relocated to the proper location and actually fit within its new space, and that all computers were functioning when staff returned to work.

While there have been subsequent adjustments to workspace, equipment, office hours, and naturally, to thermostats, staff have adjusted quite well to their new setting. Pre-move concerns about parking largely dissipated on arrival, and residents have been appreciative of the proximity of their vehicles to their workspace. Transportation between Brickhaven and the main campus has also been less problematic than expected, with materials and staff, and even students, passing easily between the two centers. While it is difficult to be separated from our colleagues at Hill, we look forward to being reunited in 2007!

Cataloging productivity

In anticipation of the construction in D.H. Hill, a number of Cataloging projects that had been on hold or in slow-motion, were put on the fast track to completion. The first of these was the "Four Thrust" theses project, an all-original cataloging project that had been trickling through the workflow for almost three years. New streamlined procedures were developed to ensure that we would not be moving these materials to Brickhaven, but rather directly to a commercial bindery. Monographs and Database Development worked throughout the summer to ensure that cataloging of these materials was completed. Similarly, the ITT collection, which arrived at the end of FY 2003-2004, was pushed through over the summer to allow facilities to begin moving Special Collections and Reference to temporary quarters in the Hill ground floor. A few thousand titles flagged for transfer to SCRC were also processed through the Database Development Section in early fall, to help clean out the stacks area in Special Collections.

By far the largest project accomplished over the last few months at Hill was DDS's bulk transfer of materials from the Reference and federal documents collections. Documents were moved first, to free up space on the second floor of stacks for temporary housing of reference materials. Much of the GPO materials went to Duke's storage facility. The reference moves were more involved, as some of these titles were needed for a small but essential "Ready Reference" collection during construction. Other materials were transferred to the stacks, either temporarily or permanently. Altogether, over 10,000 volumes were moved out of the reference collection, using a combination of manual and API edits in Unicorn. Whole sub-collections within the Reference collection were permanently decommissioned and changed in the catalog, including the former Business, Law and Census Alcoves.

Again this year, there was a continuing rise in the total of electronic publications added to the Libraries' collections. For the first time, this has created an interesting statistical phenomenon whereby the title count is double that of the volume count for newly added materials. When counting remote (Web-based) electronic resources we count only titles, since volume counts hold little meaning on the Internet. Constant holding changes at the publisher end, particularly for serial titles, makes an accurate volume count nearly impossible to maintain, except perhaps by the vendor itself. The FY2004 print volume count was comparatively low this year, mainly due to a low level of microform acquisition compared to previous years. Still, significant collections of Urdu materials, gifts, videos, and conference proceedings were processed in addition to current receipts and the large transfers noted above.

Changes in current receipt processing this year were largely due to changes at the order and receipt stages. To prevent a buildup of materials at Brickhaven, approval materials were sent to Hill directly, ready for use with catalog record, labels, and property stamps supplied by YBP through an arrangement with OCLC's PromptCat service. Approximately 60% of approval titles by-passed Cataloging and Preservation through this program, with the remaining 40% sent to Cataloging for supply of call numbers and, in some cases, for full cataloging. While this "shelf ready" process ended in June, plans are underway to use PromptCat for both approval and firm orders next year. OCLC will supply a catalog record and receivers in Acquisitions, working with a team of Acquisitions and Cataloging supervisors, will perform "exact match" processing for a planned 50 to 60% of new receipts. This rapid processing program, enabled by the onset of subscription-based pricing with OCLC, will be monitored for effectiveness throughout the year and is expected to improve the speed at which eligible current receipts are processed and made available to users.

The Integrated library system

Two years into our Unicorn implementation, the integrated library system has become just another staple tool, at least in terms of Cataloging use of the application. Armed with API training, our Computing Consultant has affected most of the large transfers and bulk edits required of the department, such as the Reference transfers, as routine matters. Batch loading of hundreds or thousands of NetLibrary, EEBO, ScienceDirect and other records can now be accomplished within the Department overnight. In fact, we have batch loaded as many as 74,000 records into the system in as little as one week, with Unicorn automatically generating appropriate item records to identify location and call number. This has increased productivity and taken much of the load off of the ILS Librarian position.

One great improvement over DRA has been the ease of report generation. An example, using statistics generated by an automatic report is shown below. This maps the percentage of titles cataloged on different days of the week over the six-month period between January and June of this year.

Over the next year, we hope to be able to implement the new Unicorn Java staff client, which will allow staff to customize their WorkFlows interface for better readability, as well as fixing some of the minor annoyances of the present Windows client.

Non-MARC Metadata Projects

The NCSU Authors Database continues to grow at the rate of about 2,500 citations and 250 new journal titles per year, even while the number of authors has diminished through continued cleanup activities within the database. This year, it was determined that the Database will become an integral part of the Digital Repository, an electronic archive of university authors' publications. The database, presently limited to publications dating from 1997, will potentially be expanded back through time to cover present faculty members' publications, back to the outset of their careers. The public interface for this product, currently a Cold Fusion template querying a Microsoft Access database, will likely shift this fall to a more robust interface using an Oracle table that accesses full-text of articles and technical reports in addition to citations.

The NCSU Authors Database is not the only non-MARC metadata project supported directly or indirectly by Cataloging. Through new cataloger, Hayley Kyle, we continue to be engaged in building the Design Images database, and Jacquie Samples, the department's Metadata Librarian is engaged in the North Carolina Geospatial Data Archiving Project funded through NDIIPP. Jacquie also helped to build and maintain a local subject access thesaurus to supply metadata for the Libraries' Web content as part of the Web Redesign Project. Most of the department's well-developed Web site has been ported over to the new Libraries' template, with Dublin Core metadata on each page. The significant number of Cataloging pages that achieve a high relevance ranking in search engine results demonstrates the effectiveness of embedded metadata in Web content.

Personnel

The move to new quarters brought an end to the previous year's temporary respite from turnover, though we ended the year at full personnel strength. This year, we lost three Library Technical Assistant I's when Jamie Vermillion, Lynn Ballance, and Eve Mitt left the Department. Eve, who earned her M.L.S. at NC Central University last spring, accepted a permanent professional cataloging position at the State Library, while Jamie left for a position at UNC in Chapel Hill. Jackie Dean, an EPA who reported to Karen Letarte in Cataloging while working in the Special Collections Research Center, left in November for a job with the archival NC-ECHO project.

Joining us this year were Janette Mina, Hayley Kyle, Glen Wiley, Mary Kaiser, and Courtney Horton. Glen Wiley, who finished his M.S.L.I.S. at Syracuse in December 2004, filled the Serials and Electronic Resources Cataloger position vacated late in the previous fiscal year, and has been learning his new role quite quickly. Jannette Mina came to us from a position in the NCSU School of Design, while Mary Kaiser arrived from a public library in the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area of Virginia. Hayley Kyle and Courtney Horton are both recent Fine Art graduates.

This year saw Dawn Pearce, Computing Consultant for the three Brickhaven departments, win one of the University Awards for Excellence for the Provost's Unit. Jacquie Samples was selected to attend the 2004 Minnesota Institute for Early Career Librarians from Traditionally Underrepresented Groups, while both Jacquie and Veronica Walker won scholarships for attendance at library conferences.

Organization chart as of 1 July 2005

The year ahead

With a number of significant vacancies throughout rest of the Division, and some administrative staff seconded to other activities in the Libraries, the pressure will be upon us to help out in the larger Collections and Technical Services realm. Indeed, our Metadata Librarian and Serials & Electronic Resources Cataloger have already assumed some of the duties normally associated with Acquisitions to help out while the Serials Librarian position is vacant and the Assistant Department Head there assumes facilities management responsibilities for Brickhaven. This is likely to continue for the duration of our stay here, but presents our staff with both personal growth opportunities and the challenge of further integrating workflow between the two departments.

Goals for 2004-2005

1. Expand cross-divisional "rapid cataloging" service.

With the Libraries' move to OCLC's subscription-based pricing model in July, we have gained a great deal of flexibility in our use of the bibliographic utility. We intend to put this to immediate use in reducing the lag time between receipt of current firm or approval orders, and their general availability to the public. The division's goal is to have 60% of current materials on the shelves within five days of receipt. To this end, a joint team of Acquisitions and Cataloging managers has been working towards achieving a sustainable balance between staff effort at the point of receipt and catalog maintenance thereafter for these materials. This should have a positive public service impact, both in speeding the most-used materials to the shelf and allowing catalogers to concentrate on gifts and the more difficult print and A-V materials.

2. Identify "hidden" and other candidate collections for cataloging.

There are a number of candidate collections for cataloging attention that we have been unable to work on due to staff vacancies, wholesale transfers of materials to Satellite Shelving and in preparation for construction in the East Wing of D.H. Hill, and the high priority of current receipts which will now fall within the "rapid cataloging" service. Some of these collections/projects include the Agricultural Experiment Station publications, retrospective conversion of federal documents, analyzing monographic series previously cataloged as serials only, and holdings cleanups for monographic series and historic (ceased and superseded) serial titles.

3. Work with the Special Collections Research Center to redefine metadata responsibilities.

With the creation of a Head of Technical Services position in the SCRC, it will be critical to negotiate a reasonable division of workload between Cataloging and SCRC, to ensure a smooth transition of responsibilities, and to maintain communication towards achieving consistency in cataloging practice.

4. Work with DLI on the repurposing of the NCSU Authors Database.

With planning underway towards building a Digital Repository for University publications, we have already begun discussions with DLI towards repurposing the NCSU Authors Database. This work will continue throughout the year.

5. Endeca.

We will work with Systems and public services to guarantee the integrity of catalog data and indexes for keyword searching in the Endeca environment.

6. Reevaluate metadata capture, editing and presentation for current periodicals.

Cataloging will be integral to the discussions on the future of access to serial and electronic resources in the post-E-Matrix era.

7. Collaborate with the Web Librarian on metadata issues surrounding the Libraries' Web redesign.

Having earlier developed the vocabulary used for subject access to the Libraries' Intranet content, Cataloging has expanded this for use on the Internet site as well. We will continue to provide advice on metadata issues pertaining to the Web, while migrating the Departmental Web content to the new format and server.

8. Increase communication.

We intend to work with the Interim, and eventually with our new Associate Director, to increase library awareness of the potential for, and practice of, Cataloging.

List of Cataloging Department employees as of 1 July 2004

Appendix A: Summary of Cataloging processing activity by library and/or collection 2004-2005

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