Materials Services Division Managers' Meeting Minutes for February 17, 2011

Materials Services Division Managers’ Monthly meeting

February 17, 2011; 8:00 A.M.; Service Center

Present: Karen Marriott, Janet Brooks, Heidi Johnson, Pauline Rodriguez-Atkins.

Update on Action Items

Karen to meet with Playaway regional representative and ask if replacement cases are available.

Completed.

Karen has met with the rep, and replacement cases are available for purchase.

Playaway would like for MLS to buy the product directly from them. Karen will send the rep’s contact information to Heidi, so that she can discuss invoice requirements, etc., with her directly.

 Janet will instruct MSL staff to purchase additional guides for the Great Courses series and to note the total number of guides in the vendor instructions.

Completed.

Janet mentioned that future orders for this series will be phone orders.

 Pauline will review the records for the Great Courses series to see if any notes need to be added to reflect the number of guides.

Pauline stated that she does not see a need for additional notes at this time.

When new titles or copies are received, Cataloging may find that notes visible only to CAT staff are needed.

Heidi will alert receiving techs to watch for the vendor instruction notes for the additional guides for the Great Courses series.

Completed.

Pauline will send copies of the Communications Briefings article on social media policies.

Completed.

Technical Processing update – Heidi

Statistics show the number of items to be processed on average per day in January, was 789. TP processed a total of 15,774 items in January. The daily average so far in February is 553 items. The processors are current on processing all “rush” materials and are processing non-rush materials from Feb. 8.

During the month of January, TP received an average of 38 boxes a day, and so far in February, an average of 48. TP received a total of 869 boxes in January, and so far in February, 434 boxes. On Feb. 14, TP received a total of 132 boxes. That was a Happy Valentine’s Day!

TP has completed its annual chemical inventory and forwarded the results to Candice and the Safety Committee.

The OLA Membership Committee tour of the Service Center is to be rescheduled for May 5 in the afternoon.

Heidi still has been helping with processing on an almost daily basis as several of the processors were out for a variety of reasons. Robyn was out for over a week for a medical procedure, but is expected back today. Staff from Cataloging have continued to help out with processing as much as their jobs allow. Their help is greatly appreciated!

Heidi finally met with Justin Herwig on February 14 for an introduction to the building’s security monitoring system after rescheduling twice due to inclement weather.

When Xpedx delivered our latest order of blue cards, they were cut to the wrong size and had to be returned to be recut. This process was greatly delayed by the road conditions.

Both scanners for Big Bin have been experiencing problems and IT was out several times to replace, fix, and/or reprogram them. At this time, both of them are working.

Materials Selection update – Janet

Library Visits

In January Selectors made an annual visit to BI and a 6-month visit to CH.

During February, selectors are doing annual visits to DN and a 6-month to CT.

In March, selectors are scheduled to do an annual visit to ED and a 6-month to DC.

Inclement Weather Impact

Staff were able to get lists out in spite of the inclement weather. Staff helped each out to make sure orders were completed and checked so they went out on time. Thankfully, lists were smaller than normal, which made it easier to get the lists completed. List 30 had just over 2300 items. List 31 was a little larger with 3578 items.

Also, staff skipped a week of system reserves and did a very small amount of phone orders during the first week of the blizzards, the next week technicians split the list to get it completed early enough that selectors had time to work before the second storm hit.

Everything is back on track this week. System Reserves were worked, phone orders went out on Wednesday and the list appears to be back to an average size.

Orders have been a priority during the first couple of weeks of the month. Consequently, basement work has backed up. Janet plans to have a technician work day soon to sort through the boxes. Then she will plan a workday for selectors.

Chemical Inventory

Staff completed chemical inventory and have turned them over to Candace.

Library Tech Student

Janet met with Stephanie Sells, a library tech student.

She’s shared policies and weeding procedures with her and will be working with her and Jana/DN on weeding a portion of the collection.

Janet has also worked with her on intellectual freedom matters.

Meetings/Workshops

Lisa attended the online genealogy course in February.

Julia is attending the Commission meeting this month.

Janet is scheduled to attend the Xchange meeting on 2/21.

Janet and Melissa plan to attend portions of the YA Services Retreat on March 2.

 Collection Workshop

Workshop is scheduled for March 15, 22, 29.

Managers should send any updates to the manual to Janet by March 7.

 Cataloging/Interlibrary Loan update – Pauline

Meetings and training attended/scheduled:

Vickie – E-media training, February 7

Clyde – Library Forum, February 8

Brittany – OLA copyright workshop, February 23

Vickie – Staff Association, February 24, March 24

Mary, Nicholas – Collection Management workshop, March 15, 22, 29

Mary, Ursula, Stormy – OLA Conference, March 31

Aaron, Clyde, Brittany – OLA Conference, April 1

The new part-time Technicians both began work on February 7. Margo Ellis is the Materials Services Tech; Garry Souders is the Interlibrary Loan Tech.

Pauline and Aaron attended an online conference on RDA (Resource Description and Access), the new cataloging rules, on February 5. Both learned a lot about the changes from the current rules, although they’re still not sure whether the rules will perform as advertised. The official word is that RDA will probably be adopted by the Library of Congress later this year, and most U.S. libraries will follow suit. The new rules will require some changes to the MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) formats used to format catalog records; this will require some changes to the MLS catalog system.

Pauline and Aaron met with Karen and Jimmy Welch on February 8 to discuss the anticipated changes. Jimmy hopes to be able to have some preliminary results by the time that Pauline returns from her FmLA leave.

Cataloging and ILL are struggling to recover from the loss of work time to inclement weather.

ILL has had some trouble with courier deliveries recently. There was no delivery for several days due to weather issues along many of the routes. Even after the weather had cleared, deliveries were late or skipped. As of February 16, the problems seem to have been resolved and deliveries back to their regular scheduled times.

Pauline has made several changes to the ILL unfilled reports. These reports of unfilled ILL requests are sent to libraries each month, so that they may clear the ILL request forms from their files. The reports now indicate that requests are “unfilled” because the material is already in the MLS collections or is in the collection as a noncirculating item.

All staff have been asked to complete safety training by Friday, February 18.

Pauline has ordered new blank barcode labels, printer ribbons, and cleaning cards. ILL still has a good supply of colored labels.

Administration update – Karen

The Ad Team retreat was held on February 16.

The system will be making materials available through Project Gutenberg.

This site provides e-media access to public domain titles.

There will be a link to the site from our OverDrive site.

Materials in this collection do not count toward customers’ maximum number of items out.

Customers can keep the materials as long as they want to.

The launch of the program will be announced soon.

Action Items

None assigned.

The next meeting will be on March 17, 8:00 A.M., at the Service Center. Heidi will chair.