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Bibliographic Control Services Division The report year for all departments of the library has been standardized to the September-August academic year. Since the last report of the Bibliographic Control Services Division was for the calendar year 1998, this report covers January-August 1999. Personnel In May, Chitra Paranajape began working part time in BCS doing copy cataloguing. Ms. Paranajape is a Library Assistant at the Marine Institute's Dr. C. R. Barrett Library and former librarian at the College of the North Atlantic. Mail room and loading door responsibilities were transferred to Lending Services with BCS acting as a backup. There were no other changes in the staff complement during the report period. Carol Kennedy, Bev Rideout and Ena Zaki were promoted to Library Assistant VII and three staff members received recognition for long service to Memorial University: Judy Winsor for 30 years, Bonnie Smith for 25 years and Suzanne Ellison for 25 years. Bill Tiffany was on leave from early June through early October. In August, Marion Matthews began telecommuting one day a week for health reasons. Blanche Keating and Donna Manning were designated divisional computer troubleshooters and attended training sessions taught by the Systems Office. Elizabeth Browne continued to work part-time on the Reference Desk as well as doing collections work in Earth Sciences. Pam Cline-Howley did collections work in Russian, Library Science and Social Work. Current Production The statistical year for Acquisitions and Cataloguing were standardized to cover the financial year from April to March. Book orders for 1998/99 were 12,648 compared to 17,388 for 1997/98. Receipts were 21,067 compared to 23,266 for 1997/98. A project is currently underway to review all active orders and to establish an acceptable amount of time a vendor is given to supply a book. All orders prior to 1997 have now been reviewed. The results of this project will be given to the Collections Division who intend to develop a policy or guidelines on this matter. Because of the change in the report year for Cataloguing, comparisons with previous years are difficult. Ordering through the Internet Although a large percentage of materials are now available from vendors on the Internet, the Division had been largely unable to take advantage of this because most of the firms have not been set up to issue invoices, requiring payment through credit cards. With the introduction of a procurement card system this year, the Division is finally able to utilise this resource. Internet sites have found to be particularly helpful in expediting the acquisition of rush items, of out of print materials, music, scores and publications of smaller organizations and publishing houses. Two very large companies, Amazon.com and Chapters, proved to be good sources for materials that had been on order with Coutts prior to 1997. Orders redirected to these sources had a fulfilment rate of 72.5% with an average additional cost of only $2.50 per title. John Coutts Library Services Ltd. has introduced online access to their database which allows us to directly view, claim or cancel any firm order placed with that firm. Staff have found the present service quite cumbersome and have suggested several much-needed improvements. Catalogue Maintenance The final reclassification and relabelling of large sets from Government Documents reference collection was completed in the summer. Otherwise, there were fewer major summer projects than usual. Because the library is now submitting holdings to the National Library of Canada and OCLC, accounts have been set up so that withdrawals may be done directly in the Amicus and Worldcat databases by catalogue maintenance personnel. The Library of Congress has been updating increasing numbers of subject headings as part of their "subdivision simplification" process. The global change utility in Unicorn is most helpful for making direct changes, such as the change of "tourist trade" to "tourism" or "trade-unions" to "labor unions." More complex changes may require dozens of global changes and hundreds of individual ones. An example of this would be the change of "Public relations" to a free-floating subdivision from a direct heading. Hundreds of headings such as "Public relations-Libraries" had to be changed around to "Libraries-Public relations." Other major changes of this type were "Constitutional history," "Constitutional law" and "Manufactures." The creation of the territory of Nunavut also required several hundred complex changes because only part of the Northwest Territories was involved. Three new Library of Congress classification schemes were released: HM401-901 (Sociology), JZ (International relations), and KZ (Law of Nations). These replace existing schemes which should eventually be reclassified: HM1-299 (7 shelf list drawers) and JX (6 shelf list drawers). The responsibility for Internet link maintenance for items in the library catalogue was transferred from the Maps, Media and Data Division to Bibliographic Control in January. A report was run on Linkbot in May to identify broken links. Out of 2096 records, 627 were identified as problems. About 1/3 of the checking and cleanup work has been completed. Authority Work Authorities processing by Marcive continued on a regular schedule. In the June 1999 processing, 25,956 bibliographic records were processed and 14,609 authority record were loaded. The National Library of Medicine subject headings on Health Sciences records were processed for the first time and a method of updating them locally was formulated. The Division continued to contribute to the NACO program, contributing 173 unique authority records to the Library of Congress name authority file and changing 18. Retrospective Projects The pace of the main shelf list recon picked up considerably with 17,096 titles being converted to machine readable form from January-August 1999. This is nearly twice as much as was done in 1998. Over 20 people were involved in the project, including staff in BCS, Lending Services, the Map Library and Periodicals/Reports, who assisted the regular recon people by pulling shelf list cards, searching for copy and importing records. It is hoped to complete the data capture for the recon by the end of June 2000. When it is completed, all books in the main stacks should have a bibliographic record and call number in the Unicorn database. The final editing should be completed in three years. The library entered into a 12 month flat-fee agreement with OCLC inc. beginning in July and we began doing most current and retrospective searching on the Worldcat database. Exports in August 1999 were 3,523 as compared to194 in August 1998. Searches in August 1999 were 8,915 as compared to 2,570 in August 1998. Despite this huge increase in use, the August1999 flat-fee invoice totalled only 94% of the August 1998 transaction based invoice. Because of the decrease in receipts, it was possible to individually catalogue a number of large sets that had been housed in Periodicals. Acquisitions and the OP section were kept busy ordering replacements for damaged books that have been identified by the Collections Division and cannot be repaired. To accommodate reclassified government documents that would not fit in the main bookstacks, a temporary Government Documents LC section was established in the area formerly occupied by Government Documents reference and current display. These materials will eventually be incorporated into the main bookstacks when space becomes available. Upon completion of the reclassification of the Government Documents Reference section, work commenced on the United Kingdom section. A total of 1911 Government Document titles were reclassified in the period from January-September 1999. Staff Activities:
Elizabeth Browne: Pamela Cline-Howley Suzanne Ellison Marion Matthews Ralph Tapper Bill Tiffany Judy Winsor
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URL:
http://www.mun.ca/library/cat/annrept99a.htm |
1998 Annual Report Last revised: 10 December 1999 Revised by: Suzanne Ellison | |||