12/17/08 Stuff Session

JoAnn speaking at the session  Jim handing out candycanes

Agenda  

  • Technical Services Coordination and Consolidation Team Report (Michael Norman)
  • Holiday Trivia and Prize Drawing

The discussion of Fostering Excellence in Customer Service in the NSM Process was deferred until the next Stuff Session due to time constraints.

Notes from the session

Technical Services Coordination and Consolidation Team Report

  • The Report is available and can be downloaded as a pdf from the Technical Services Coordination and Consolidation Team website.
  • Michael believes the report is bold and will help us reach the level of peer institutions.   He says we need to look critically at how we "do" technical services and redefine where we want to be in five years.
  • The Report identifies six major problems: 
    • Insufficient access to the Library’s growing electronic resources and digital content in all languages. 
    • The inaccessibility of large parts of the Library’s legacy collections.
    • Less than optimal integration of acquisitions and cataloging operations.
    • The failure to process, catalog, and create metadata for archival, unique, rare, and foreign language materials, as well as special collections, government documents, newspapers, and maps, in a consistently timely manner.
    • The pressing need to use more automation to facilitate access to materials, particularly those in non-Roman languages.
    • Inadequate training of many technical services personnel in the use of non-MARC metadata schemas, such as MODS, Dublin Core, VRA Core, and EADs.
  • The Report does not address cataloging newspapers and law materials.  The Executive Committee asked the Team to look at these areas and address them.
  • The Report also outlines basic principles and guidelines that helped form the 16 recommendations from the Team.
  • We also need to figure out the best way to direct users to our collections.  He said that in five years most items in this building will be available digitally, so are surrogate bibliographic records the best way to provide access to these materials?  He believes it is in the short term, but we have to be flexible.
  • Michael said we currently we catalog 100,000 titles a year, but this is not keeping up with the backlog.  The Team wants to schedule workshops on how to better utilize OCLC and records from other sources.  Three years ago it took 32 days to get something from acquisitions to the shelf.  Now it takes 20 days, but the Team wants to decrease this even more.