Categories 2-8 Activities, Technical Services Division Program Review, UM Libraries

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Technical Services Program Review

Blue Ribbon Committee discussion
Categories 2-8 activities

Category 2: Which recommendations should be considered in long term planning? (These are activities that should be considered at the time of implementation of ExLibris or later)

Evaluate the statistics collected in TSD and identify those statistics that are needed and eliminate those that are not

Take advantage of changes that can be made to the workflow which come about through implementing the new ILS

Establish turnaround times for acquisitions, cataloging, catalog maintenance, and preservation activities

Workflow between acquisitions, cataloging and catalog management, and preservation (can workflow be re-engineered to reduce the number of units through which a volume must pass?)

Acquisitions

Investigate alternatives to placing order by "snail mail" (eg. Fax, e-mail, Web, electronic transmission from ILS)
Review and revise the procedure for brittle materials replacements, including microfilm copies purchased from commercial vendors as well as libraries
Review and revise the content of flyers and sort coding for materials that move on to Cataloging; reduce amount of paper included with material (including creating new flyers for "official fascicle processing", loose-leaf and superseded material
Investigate how payments can better interface with campus accounts payable and beyond [category 1?]
Review procedures and priorities for pre-order searching [move to category 1?]

Cataloging and Catalog Maintenance

Work with ITD staff to develop/implement electronic quality control features in ExLibris, (eg. on demand reports, systematic 019 processing, error notification, loader specifications)
Look into distribution of cataloging distribution amongst catalogers. Consider alternatives such as organizing by subject areas
Systematic evaluation of Prompt Cat/Bib Notification effectiveness and other bulk loads-are they working together as anticipate? Can they be adjusted to work together more effectively? What is the effect of loader overlay hierarchy on their effectiveness? What is the effect of the absence of heading authorization on the records?
Explore the possibility of supporting an informal USMAI NACO "funnel"
Look into distribution of cataloging amongst catalogers. Consider alternatives such as organizing by subject areas
Incorporate Rapid Adds queue into chronological Rapid Routine queue [category 1?]

Preservation and Physical Processing

Preservation planning and prioritization - part of recent update of Strategic plan. Explore strategies for managing and maintaining priorities for both general and special collections.
Collect and analyze data related to outsourcing end-processing services that may be included in purchase plan vendor proposals.

Category 3: What library policies have been identified which need to be discussed beyond TSD?

Library record keeping. Record all information: order, bibliographic, holdings, etc. in a single database. Eliminate redundant files.

Category 4: What activities are well suited for process improvement?

Electronic resources procedures (ordering, licensing, cataloging, maintenance)

Government Documents procedures (including establishing volume and turnaround time for materials which have been acquired through the GovDocs Regional Program)

Gifts policies and procedures, (eg. Standardize and share selection policies, review preservation issues, including establishing volume and turnaround time for materials which have been acquired through the gifts program, priority setting, guidelines for retention of maximum # of copies, serials, editions, offprints, reprints, donors with special language skills assisting in processing Pilot: Selectors will pre-select gifts, and Acquisitions will search items and return potential added copies for final selection. The pilot program will run the summer of 2001).

Serials procedures- centralize or distribute within TSD? How should we treat numbered monograph series? Do we need to create a parent record for every item in a series?

Dissertations and Theses processing and binding.

Acquisitions procedures including: converting adds when they search/pre-sort as they do PromptCat (monographs), define what "rush" means; clarify the various meanings of this term and how to best communicate these definitions, workload impacts, the pilot program which tests an online MRF and ERRF form and decide whether to broaden the effort, the price ceiling on hand-delivered items to determine whether it should be raised.

Help desk procedures (reduce the number of Help Desk "by-passers"; study usefulness of: keeping the completed Help Desk reports; having departmental Help Desk contact log & track referrals to the departments)

Transfer/withdraw process (Improve interaction between Circulation and TSD, change forms to make them easier to use)

Preservation selection policies/prioritization for general collection materials. Policies regarding the treatment of prioritization of damaged materials transferred to off-site storage or to new collection locations.

End processing procedures and policies (emphasis on but not limited to free fly workflow). Review all documented procedures for end-processing focusing on all variations to determine the necessity of these variations. Collect and document the "why" behind procedural variations, re-negotiate variations with all interested parties to minimum number of variations needed, investigate pros and cons of centralized vs. decentralized packing and mailing of materials by TSD to other Library units and branches. Examine issues for materials exchange with special collections units now located at Hornbake (security, physical condition of fragile and oversized, unusual format items, etc.).
Who should be included: TSD (including EPU and Preservation), branch staff and collections managers, Circulation staff.
*C-Team recommended that the following be taken to CMT and CCC as soon as possible; review current procedures/policies regarding barcoding, labeling, date due slips, addition of free flies and stamping [move to category 1].

Category 5: What new activities must be incorporated in the new structure/workflow (activities that we don't do now, but should be doing)?

On-going communication between Acquisitions and selectors reporting claims reports to selectors via the online form

Incorporating more materials from special collections into the workflow.

DLO projects (co-development of non traditional discovery tools, including less than full cataloging, and/or non-MARC cataloging for select materials)

More time/opportunities to learn, cross-train, etc.

Enhanced quality control through the use of LIMS3 reports

In-house RUSH services for certain classes of materials.

Action surveys - reinitiate and support as on-going activity

Procedures/policies/preparation for exhibition and loan of materials

Recommendations that emerge from the Preservation Dept's strategic planning effort

Electronic resources

Category 6: Are there topics that would be good candidates for continuing education programs, both inside TSD and library wide?

Develop a curriculum to build core competencies in TSD

Develop a curriculum for non TSD staff in the use of tools, forms, and procedures

Internal cross training - brittle books/reformatting and bindery in searching functions, quality control (microfilm inspections, vendor preservation photocopies to address "down times" in workflow).

On-going preservation training for all TSD staff to provide catalogers and other processing staff with an understanding of Preservation priorities, policies, and procedures. Part of an orientation requirement for certain staffing levels.

Category 7: What issues will affect staffing and the organization of work?

LIMS3 implementation

Team structure.

L&A funds. Level of staff performing activities, currently higher lever staff must perform activities which could be done by students if we could afford them

Level at which we agree to contribute to national programs

Distributed authority control workflow for current cataloging (rather than centralized at CP)

Effect of USM centralized authority work for a single database local system configuration with multiple thesauri

Effect of outsourcing authority record/heading matching

Electronic resources may place increased demands

Physical processing policy changes (eg. Free fly policy, date due slips, double barcoding)

Workflow for new materials which require "preservation consideration" materials (eg. Materials in poor physical condition)

Backlogs and special languages (i.e. Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese)

Requirements for Permanent status and Promotion for faculty

Recommendations from PITS

Category 8: What additional data is needed?

Acquisitions - Ordering

evaluate the reasons that MRF's are returned to selectors

chart the volume of work to see where the peaks and valleys fall

what can be ordered by credit card

Acquisitions - Receiving

how many large m-fiche shipments does Acq get in a year?
number of purchase plan receipts
number of approval plan receipts
number of firm orders
number of standing orders
number of serial issues checked in

Cataloging, first time in

statistics: activity (originals, enhances, PCC, work in CARL, etc.) and volumes added

Cataloging revisits

clarify terms:
BNA= Blackwell North America
Funnels= the way UMD contributes to the national cooperative cataloging and authority databases (LCAF, LCSH)
reports and who get them
number of transfers and withdrawals per year
time length of an authority record form point of identification to point of appearing in database

Serials

CATM: Of what Serial Adds receives, what percent are from Acq. vs from Cataloging. What are the statistics for Serial Adds.
claims: how much time on average is needed per claim.
how many "ceases" are there? (A meeting has been set up with Jeanne Baker to fill in Cataloging statistics)

Gifts

workflow changes due to Scott handling gifts: done
does Serials report cover gifts that are serials: no it does not cover gifts as a separate category of serials
Backlog information: all backlog is together, size is reported in the Catalog report

LB:BRCcategories 2-8.doc; rev. 3/23/01

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Technical Services Program Review

© 2001 University of Maryland Libraries Last Revised: March 23, 2001

© 2001 University of Maryland Libraries
Last Revised: March 23, 2001