Present: M. Burnette, J. Carter (recorder), J. Ceballos, D. Hsiao, S. Mendoza, C. Potts, J. Schultz, V. Shih, D. Sullivan (chair)
Guests: A. Barone, L. Leighton, J. Spohrer
1. Report of the Collections Integrity Task Force – Jim Spohrer.
J. Spohrer, chair of the Collections Integrity Task Force for Doe Library, provided a summary of the recommendations made by the Task Force in its report dated November, 2007 and available at this URL: http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/wikis/doemoff/uploads/Main/collectionintegrityreport.pdf
The recommendations:
• Review all aspects of our technical services, conservation, circulation and routing procedures to insure that all of them promote the prompt arrival of materials at their ultimate shelving locations.
• Review policies for housing “in process” materials and develop simple, reliable methods for finding items in response to requests for specific items by users, including making an online request feature available to patrons in need of in process materials.
• Create a system to mask “withdrawn” items from public view in the online catalogue, while maintaining staff’s ability to see those items when needed. [L. Leighton noted that withdrawn items would not be present in the WorldCat Local catalog.]
• Develop a plan for the targeted use of security cameras in selected high-risk areas of the Gardner Stacks to discourage theft and damage.
• Continue the practice of providing funding for replacing missing and damaged Gardner Stacks materials (including those in NRLF).
• Train and evaluate selectors in best practices of collection maintenance, including regular replacement of missing and damaged materials (as appropriate).
• A systematic program of periodic inventory for the collections is urgently needed. The report recommends establishing a repeating 10-year cycle for the full inventory, with 10% of the collection being done per year.
• The Library should take urgent measures to deal with the alarmingly high number of damaged or deteriorated materials identified by our surveys of the Gardner Stacks collection.
• Create a special locked facility (“The Keep) for “medium rare” materials not suitable for
integration in the collections of The Bancroft Library.
While the report noted that loss rates for materials were quite low based on the CALIPR reports conducted by the Preservation Dept, some selectors feel these figures don’t accurately reflect either the often expressed frustration by our users who cannot find the materials they need in the stacks, or the amount of time and money selectors spend replacing missing materials. It was suggested that part of the problem may be that some patrons have trouble finding materials that are actually on the shelf, and that more help from reference and circulation staff needs to be provided.
The Council thanked J.Spohrer and the Task Force for all the hard work they did and heartily endorsed the recommendations made in the report. The Council was especially supportive of the inventory program and the reestablishment of “The Keep.”
2. What’s on the Horizon for Technical Services? -- Lee Leighton, Armanda Barone
L. Leighton and A. Barone noted that this month marked the one-year anniversary for the new workflow procedures developed as a result of the Technical Services Review. They remarked on the successes in reducing backlogs, such as through the MarcNow projects to catalog Slavic and Arabic materials, and the practice of creating Level 2 or IP brief records in order to make materials available to users while awaiting fuller cataloging. The new Data Control Unit has been fully staffed with head, Dana Jemison and assistant Steve LaFollette. Lisa Rowlison has been hired as head of Serials Cataloging effective January, 08. The Head of Acquisitions position will be reposted soon.
Other projects:
UC Shared Cataloging has been very successful in cataloging Tier 1, some Tier 2, and open access journals for the UC campuses. The cataloging is currently done at UCSD. However, the project has had its budget cut by 18% so the UC technical services departments will need to meet to figure out how to make up some of the cataloging work that will no longer be done as part of that project. One promising suggestion is to collaborate with the State Library to catalog California documents.
MarcNow was used successfully to catalog current German acquisitions. Berkeley’s participation has been discontinued due to lack of funding.
Technical Services staff participated in a New Directions forum, the results of which are posted on the New Directions website.
Library of Congress produced a report on bibliographic control in which they announced the availability of many hundreds of thousands of authority records to help catalogers create “subject strings.”
Several “reclamation” projects are underway to upgrade Berkeley’s catalog records in order to make them acceptable to OCLC for the WorldCat Pilot Project. A major problem for Berkeley is the existence of 80,000 c-level serial records which cannot be loaded in their current form. One of L. Rowlison’s top priorities is to see if it will be possible to match these records with higher level records in OCLC.
3. Council Reports
None
4. Announcements
D. Sullivan and C. Potts attended the inaugural meeting of the UC Europeanists Bibliographers Group in Southern California. They are hopeful that this group will help gain support for European collection interests at CDL.
S. Mendoza is expanding his duties to include assisting Claude Potts with the Romance Languages collection.
Go to Arts & Humanities Council minutes