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This past year Technical Services was fully staffed making the time propitious to institute a desk audit of all staff. We did this in order to identify work flow snags, overloads or underloads and to come up with a plan for cross-training. When we lost one casual position (Michael and/or Brian), the position which was responsible for USBE, due to fiscal exigencies, the audit allowed us to readily identify the person who would be trained to take over. Since a consultant will be coming to look at TS we decided to hold off any further decisions based on the audit until that worthy does his consulting thing.

Acquisitions/Serials

Last year Acquisitions finished implementing EDI with Faxon, not an inconsiderable task. EDI worked beautifully and therefore knowing that we would continue with it we wrote a procedures manual. Because the gods are vengeful in late 2002 Faxon went bankrupt.

Richard completed a procedures manual for Fiscal Period Close and using it Shirley A. with Nicole's help implemented FPC. The monies rolled yet again as they should.

Shirley, with other acquisitions staff, continues to work on procedures manuals for all acquisitions tasks. The Faxon fiasco created new and interesting challenges for serials as well as acquisitions. Using information from Faxon a database was created to track our serials publications with particular emphasis on whether the publisher would "grace" or not. TS updated the database as information became available from any number of sources. Because we did not receive many of our subscriptions, staff donated journal and newspaper issues, a happy fact, but which required extra care in check-in and claiming. Due to the cut casual position's hard work we were also able to get 600 issues via duplicate exchange. At the risk of sounding Pollyanna-ish the bright note in this otherwise dreary mess was that we had to go through our serials records title by title and thus were able to identify and correct problems, such as POs that needed cancelling, changing the statuses for title changes, deleting check-in records for cancelled titles, changing vendor information and other types of record infelicities.

Serials also sent 2,624 issues to the bindery and sorted 14,143 pieces of mail.

Once Ebsco was identified as our new serials vendor the staff was trained in the use of Ebsconet. The first order of business will be claiming issues. Then we can begin EDI prep work yet again, but that is next year's news.

Cataloging

This past year the cataloging unit added 12,003 pieces of material to the database and withdrew 1,002, excluding government documents. The music cassette withdrawal project was finished. In addition, we added about 600 e-journal records and deleted six. The electronic journal resources inventory, all 86 pages of it, was completed. Records were brought up to current cataloging standards and holdings and URL's were verified.

The "in-process" flag on newly cataloged items seems to be working well, allowing us to better track the location of new materials. The removal of all subject headings but LC's is continuing apace. We have removed all medical and French headings but are still left with a vast number of children's, which are being removed and/or changed to LC. This project is ongoing because all types tend to creep back in. Eric has loaded the circa 1,300 "Making of America" records and was able to strip offending subject headings from records prior to the load thus saving many person hours. The records have, however, begun to show up with a vengeance in database maintenance, since they contain many headings new to our catalog and since some of them are not in the correct form. (This unhappy fact is also true of the video records.) In addition, many do not have subject headings of any kind even when they sorely need them.

Jocelyn has processed 922 documents shipping lists, which included 2,400 paper, 10,425 microfiche and 86 CD's. In addition she has created and/or edited 6,770 URL's. The government is doing a retro cataloging project to make older documents electronically available, hence the number of URL's. She has also deleted about 2,800 records generally for materials that we do not get, never received, or no longer have. Another ongoing project is deleting empty item records that the system created when we migrated from NOTIS to Voyager. So far she has edited the holding records for over 4,500 fiche.

Security tagging for all documents over 45 pages has also begun.

The huge documents "asterisk" project is also making headway. With student help Jerri has verified and/or altered the location of 23,494 documents. We now know for sure whether these are paper or fiche.

Geoff has added 1,127 Michigan documents and withdrawn 591.

Editors have also gone through our Local Data Records on OCLC and updated 556, created 52>and deleted 115. This project was important since First Search's World Cat now pulls holdings information from these records. The tattle-taping project identified large numbers of books needing repair and Shirley P. oversaw the repair of 1,007 volumes. There is about a half of a truck left waiting for librarian decision. They are generally books that cannot be bound or repaired or would require a great deal of time to repair.

As in the past this report highlights the special projects that we have begun/finished this year. I have not included the many and varied ongoing "regular" tasks, which we routinely and efficiently accomplish. I must include, however, the staffs' generous contribution to the tattle-taping project.

Objectives 2002/03

Objectives 2003/04

1. Implement EDI with EBSCO
2. Implement EDI with Yankee
3. Identify materials without item records
4. Finish acquisitions manuals
5. Continue to cross train personnel
6. Implement OCLC connection