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Technical Services has had another very busy and productive year. The inventory project has had a major impact on the amount of work generated for TS. In addition, the Library of Congress's decision to stop tracing and authoritizing series as of June 2006 will generate extra work for the unit. When LC made the decision we contacted the Reference Unit for their opinions about having uncontrolled series headings in our catalog. Untraced series are only searchable by keyword. We received about six replies with the majority stating that they would like to continue with controlled series headings in order to maintain the integrity of our catalog and because there are faculty who know their series and are used to searching for them as titles. We have therefore agreed to run a test for six months (or more if that does not prove adequate) continuing as before to see what impact flying in the face of LC would have on our workflow. Procedures were generated and distributed and in six months time we will see how we fare.

Acquisitions/Serials

We are happy to report that Acquisitions has had a "quiet" year, sorely needed after last year's tumult of vendor and bindery changes. The Acquisition Unit spent out about one and half million dollars and Fiscal Period Close was a resounding success yet again. We are also looking forward to working with the new Collection Development Coordinator. Since the "old" coordinator will still be very much involved with CD and e-journals, I trust we will not have much opportunity to miss her.

The Serials area has added 22 new periodical titles and cancelled 197. Periodical volumes sent to bindery totaled 2,674 and 1778 books were sent. In addition, Serials sorted 12,334 pieces of mail in various formats. Serials also began the "incomplete volume" project, i.e., sending these volumes to bindery. As of June 20, 547 volumes were bound. Collection Development also gave us permission to withdraw those incomplete volumes that we have in electronic format.

All e-journals ordered this year have been entered into Serials Solution and the Serials clerk has been trained as a backup.

Cataloging

This past year Cataloging added 16,217 pieces of material to the database and withdrew 3,329 excluding government documents. The large number of withdrawals is again mainly attributable to the inventory project, which focused this past year on third floor circulating materials. In addition to withdrawing old, unused and sometimes unusable volumes, we have barcoded thousands of volumes and have solved many problems. We also barcoded about 500 books from the rare book room, primarily the Springer Collection. Many books in the Springer have duplicates on the third floor resulting in barcoding as well as other problems so it became necessary to do them at this time.

We have also begun a project to "consolidate" the many records that represent one long playing record. Due to past cataloging practice (before my time) as well as record size constraints in Notis, we had created analytic entries for selected bands of music on an LP. We are now deleting these analyts and putting the information in the main record. In the process we are also barcoding them. This past year 186 records for LPs were added to the database and 365 analyt records were deleted.

All of the unplayable U-matics were withdrawn from the database. The few items of archival interest were copied onto VHS and cataloged.

The unplayable Howard Shelley Michigan Outdoors videos were given to Gabe VanWormer, who is the current producer of Michigan Out-of-Doors TV. He was delighted to have them and promised that he would send us a copy of any that he digitized and that Oakland University would get attribution for any shown. The ten that had been transferred to VHS are in the catalog.

We have processed several huge monthly Marcive authority loads. LC has been adding death dates to authors/composers, which they have not done in twenty years or so. Many of the composers have large numbers of uniform title authority records many that we had created, which had to be brought into line with the name change. While Gary Strawn's program was as usual a huge help, the program does not address in-house authority records, which therefore had to be searched and changed manually.

The Documents clerk processed 709 shipping lists, which included over 2,088 paper, 8,365 micro and 85 CD documents. More importantly, she created or edited over 7,700 electronic links and deleted our holdings from both our catalog and OCLC 5,244 older documents that we no longer have. She also withdrew a number of materials which are now available online. In addition, our wonderful volunteer has barcoded about 5,000 older paper documents.

Cataloging added 709 and withdrew 333 Michigan documents.

Students and our volunteer repaired 1,244 books.

The above are the highlights of the past year. The many regular tasks accomplished with efficiency and in a timely manner are yet again unsung in this report. Each and every member of Technical Services is to be commended for the outstanding work that they have done this past year both individually and as a team. I find their commitment to providing the best and fastest access for users to our materials truly inspiring.