Library Technical Service

LITS Annual Report 2004-2005

I. Technical Services Staff:

• Departmental changes: personnel and work responsibilities
  
  • Sandy Berestka left MHC in August of 2004. Her position as Head of Serials and Acquisitions was folded into the Head of Cataloging (vacated in FY2004) and filled by D. Ellen Bonner in April of 2005 as the Head of Technical Services. On 1 July 2005, the two departments were merged officially.
    
  • Janis Kordana reduced her hours to half-time in July of 2004. Consequently, several tasks previously performed by Janis were shifted:
    • Nancy Pelis took over processing of continuation titles (including check in and invoice processing);
    • Cleo Milionis assumed responsibility for processing Latin American approval receipt
  • Other shifts in responsibilities:
    • Nancy Pelis posts accessions list to the web
    • Heather Fahey pulls periodicals for binding
    • Anne Boutot processes Harrassowitz invoices
  • Jeannie Jones (cataloger) left in September of 2004, after which Anne Miller and Jane Ting took over DVD cataloging
    
• Professional development:
  • Conferences/workshops/training sessions attended:
    • Library disaster planning
    • Bowker Books-in-print training (July 2004)
    • Report2Web in-house training
    • ALA Mid-winter (Boston, January 2005
    • Introduction to MODS—Metadata Object Description Schema (NELINET, May 2005)
    • Workshop on MARC holdings format (NELINET, December 2004)
    • Music Library Association New England Chapter Meeting (October 2004)
    • Music Workshop at Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury, VT (March 2005)
    • Nelinet Bibliographic Services Annual Conference (November 2004)
    • NETSL (New England Technical Services Librarians) Annual Conference (April 2005)
    • ACRL New England ITIG/SLIG on electronic journal archiving (June 2005)
    • Various ALEPH overview/training sessions
  • Presentations made by staff members:
    • 5 College Brown Bag presentation on Ex Libris MarcIt (July 2004)
    • Mellon program for undergraduates: class on Organization of Library Materials (April 2005)
    • Simmons Technical Services class guest lecture: Managing OPAC access to electronic journals (June 2005)

• 9,255 order records were created in Acquisitions during FY2005
• Although all observations about the nature of orders placed in FY2005 are subject to further data input evaluation, the following data appear to be indicative of current trends:
  • Roughly 25% of orders derived from an approval process (either direct-ship approval from vendors, or orders generated from Midwest approval notification slips), while the remaining 75% are firm orders.
  • Geographic coverage focuses on the United States (29%) and Western Europe (17%), with 31% coded “World”. All other tracked geographic topics account for less than 3% each
  • 91% of orders were for new titles; less than 6% were coded as monographic series orders
  • Less than 6% of orders (494) created in FY2005 are still open (i.e. are not yet received)
  • Less than 1% of orders (84) were cancelled with the vendor.
  • Orders in FY2005 were dispersed fairly evenly among 76 funds, with an average of 53 orders (<.6% of total) placed in each
  • 80% of orders were placed for the main stacks in Williston; 5% were for remote access electronic resource (Internet)
  • Orders were placed with 81 different vendors in FY2005. By far, the largest majority were placed with Midwest Library Services (61%). 10% went to Eastern Book, and nearly 4% were handled by Media Services on their purchasing card
• In order to ensure the accuracy of year-end data in the future, we will be working to further standardize code input, and will spend some time cleaning up codes that may be entered erroneously.

• Newspapers: 268 volumes were added; no subscriptions were cancelled or added in any format, although 16 volumes were withdrawn
• Taken together with the cessation/cancellation totals, the number of print subscriptions active at the end of FY2005 suffered a net loss of 48 titles. Given the nature of the current electronic journal industry, this trend is consistent with national changes.
• Until we develop a more effective method of maintaining statistics for aggregated packages of electronic journals, fluctuations in subscription numbers are not particularly meaningful since I suspect that they are somewhat incomplete tallies. In spite of this fact there was a net gain of 255 electronic subscriptions this year.

IV. Trends in Collection Management:

• Comments
  • Taken as a whole, activity has remained nearly constant:
  • Although titles withdrawn reduced by 40%, volumes withdrawn increased by an even higher amount than that. Presumably this is related to multiple copy weeding projects.
  • 1,093 withdrawn volumes were sent to Hands Across the Water

• Activity measured across the two collections has remained nearly constant.
• The number of video recordings processed for the leisure collection has declined significantly, while activity in the rental collection has increased proportionally.

• As staffing declined over the last fiscal year, original cataloging production followed suit:

VII. Status of the collection at year end:

Prepared By
D. Ellen Bonner
July 18, 2005