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Technical Services has had an excellent year despite having to deal with a number of major changes. In the personnel area, we have lost the Level 9 position due to budget cuts. The other changes are outlined below.

Acquisitions/Serials

A number of major changes occurred in the Acquisitions area. With Faxon's bankruptcy we moved the majority of our serials subscription to Ebsco. This move entailed rapidly notifying Ebsco of our PO's (ILS # to them) so that they could supply us quickly with needed subscriptions. Much time was spent on the big January quote to ensure that the ILS's matched our PO's so that the title numbers Ebsco was using matched the titles that we had requested in the quote. We also wanted to ensure that we received free online access to the print titles where applicable. A great deal of this work was done in conjunction with Millie and Richard. We also instituted EDI with Ebsco, and have received invoices through that interface. The invoice for the January start subscriptions, although it took a long time to receive from Ebsco, was accurate. In March we worked on the July start subscription for which Ebsco sent duplicate invoices in EDI, which required a lot of cleanup, since the invoices did not totally duplicate each other. The unit has also started claiming issues via EDI.

We also planned for and actually did some preliminary work on using the embedded order feature of Voyager for the Yankee approval books. Since we had to wait until the start of the new fiscal year, that is until the old fiscal year is disabled in Voyager (the two fiscal years run concurrently for a few weeks), this really is next year's news. But we did set everything up and are ready to use embedded order when the old year is disabled. It will save one clerk a lot of time.

Fiscal period close went extremely well this year. Acquisitions people managed the whole operation using Richard only in an advisory capacity and only as a last resort.

This June we sent our standing orders to Franklin Book Company for a discount quote. We have had our standing orders with BNA since 1984 and we thought it was time to see what else was out there. BNA has been giving us a 5% discount with us paying postage. We received a quote from Franklin for an 11% discount, while still paying postage. We have decided therefore to switch these order to them. In the process of getting the quote we also identified a lot of dead, not received, etc. titles that BNA neglected to notify us about, resulting in a lot of cleanup of standing orders.

Serials canceled 210 journal titles and instituted 15 new subscriptions. Barbara Moore sent 2,295 issues to bindery and checked in 12,650 issues.

Cataloging

This past year Cataloging added 8,903 pieces of material in various formats to the database and withdrew 2,354, excluding government documents. Jerri S. cataloged two major microfiche collections, the Rerum Britannicorum (100 titles) and the Chaucer Society papers (150 titles), per the Reference Unit's request. All the works in these sets now have individual records in the database.

For government documents, Jocelyn has processed 942 shipping lists, which included 2,330 paper, 10,308 microfiche and 120 compact disc records. In addition she has created and/or edited 10,381 electronic links. She has deleted 1,850 records for items that we no longer have and 4,150 records for items that have been bound together. Empty item records that the system created when we migrated from Notis to Voyager are also being deleted. In addition six sections of SuDocs numbers were sent to bindery and the Oversize materials were re-labeled and barcoded. Jerri has continued work on the government documents asterisk project and with student help has checked on and altered 43,560 records.

Geoff began cataloging the Bingham videos. In addition he has added 935 and withdrawn 724 Michigan documents. He has also continued to maintain our statistics and the gift log.

Shirley P. continues to hire and supervise the student employees. Physical processing, in addition to their regular processing activities, repaired 848 books. These materials were left over from the security-tagging project and were waiting for librarian decisions.

Cataloging has also instituted the Overnight Authorities with Marcive, greatly enhancing our authority control procedures. We no longer need to depend on the extremely time consuming reports generated by Voyager. These reports include every single heading entered into the database within the time period requested, whether authoritised or not. The Overnight service supplies authorities when available, changes the headings if incorrect and only reports to us those headings that really need attention. It is an excellent service, particularly useful for subject headings since the Voyager subject reports are virtually unusable.

Discussion began with George Preisinger about moving the video collection housed in ITC to Kresge. Since there is no money for continuing to outsource the cataloging of these materials TS would take over that project.

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 this Unit routinely and efficiently accomplishes.