Tim handed out a draft of the new job description for what is currently called the Director of Collection Management. He mentioned that he expects to fill this position within the next 6 months. Tim asked the managers to bring any concerns to the next MSD meeting.
Tim talked about OrangeBoy’s strategic planning efforts.
He mentioned plans for staff to wear new magnetic name tags to replace the current photo IDs. The new tags will show first name only for all staff except for managers, whose tags will include last name. The department or library will no longer be part of the information on the tags.
Tim announced that future charity and fundraising efforts will mostly be done online by the Staff Association and no longer on library time. DVS should not be raising money for outside charities. More information will be forthcoming about this subject.
Tim mentioned possible changes to staff rewards. Instead of strictly going by the number of years of service, the awards should look to reward staff’s special efforts made though out the year to best serve their customers. Tim said he would keep the division updated about any possible changes.
Collection recovery efforts are to be increased by looking into hiring of an outside company to help with these efforts.
The System is considering buying two MLS themed shirts, possibly golf type shirts for every employee; employees would have the option to purchase additional shirts. Tim said staff would then be allowed to wear jeans any day of the week, as long as they were wearing their library shirt.
Since the beginning of the fiscal year MSL has ordered 19907 titles for a weekly average of over 569 titles. A total of 124,960 items were ordered for an average of 3570 per week.
MSL received over 7654 recommendations from customers to purchase titles, for an average of 219 recommendations per week.
1,691 titles new to the collection were cataloged in January; 1,245 in February.
About 14,000 new items were added to the collections in January, 17,000 in February. About 3,000 of those items were added to browsing collections.
In January, TP received a total of 14,259 barcodes from Cataloging. The average daily run for January 2016 was 750 items. In February, TP received a total of 16,035 barcodes from Cataloging. The average daily run for February was 764 items.
During January, TP received a daily average of 46 boxes of materials a day, for a total of 874 boxes. In February, TP received a daily average of 44 boxes of materials a day, for a total of 930 boxes for the month.
Because of the transition between systems in ILL, statistics are not available at this time.
The biggest news is that ILL went live with ILLiad borrowing on February 8, and began fully transmitting all requests to borrow materials through ILLiad as of February 26. ILL staff are still learning the procedures, but are already enthusiastic. Some of the things that they like best are the reduced amount of data entry, the speed with which tasks can be completed, and the ability to communicate more fully with customers.
Pauline plans to meet with the Regional Directors on March 8, and the Library Managers on March 9, in preparation for having library staff input ILL requests online. She has set up a few Service Center staff with personal ILLiad accounts so that ILL staff have live customer accounts to work with.
Since mid-February, the keyword search in ITSi and CarlX has not been working properly. Searches that should produce multiple results return none, and it is not possible to search the call number field. This has been a problem for the Catalogers, because one of the most effective ways to check for duplicate call numbers has been through the keyword search. Pauline reported the problem to Anne Fischer on February 22. Anne communicated with TLC and determined that there have been no updates to ITSi, so she opened a trouble ticket. TLC indicated to Anne that the issue has been forwarded to their developers. The Catalogers are managing with workarounds, but hope to get keyword search back soon.
Problems with barcodes that are printed, but cannot be scanned at the libraries, continue to pop up. The issue appears to be primarily tied to one specific printer, but it does not occur all the time, nor with all barcodes. Some of the items can be scanned in Tech Processing, but do not scan at the libraries; others scan in CAT, but not in TP. IT has cleaned and calibrated all the barcode printers, and the Cat Techs are diligent about keeping up with Maintenance. Pauline is communicating with Anne about the issue.
Thanks to Curtiss Ray, ILL now has a four-wheel cart with a hydraulic lift. This allows cartons of materials to be raised to desk height or lowered for easy mobility, and has cut down on the need for staff to lift boxes of materials. Pauline had contacted Curtiss for ideas about what to purchase; he located the cart and purchased it with Maintenance funds.
In response to Stacy Schrank’s call for ideas regarding the next Focus, Cataloging and ILL staff shared their thoughts with Pauline; she compiled them and forwarded to Stacy.
Ashley Welke, new BI manager, visited on January 11 as part of her onboarding staff training. She was impressed and interested in all operations.
Devin has begun Dewey classification training with Pauline.
On January 14, Pauline was contacted by David Newyear, DC Manager, about several FEMA publications that the city of Del City had asked to have added to the library’s collections and catalog. The items were sent to CAT in December, but no deadline had been established for their addition. Unfortunately, the city indicated that it was essential that they be added immediately. Pauline was able to catalog all the titles, Cataloging staff rushed them through barcode printing, and Technical Processing pushed them out to DC.
MLS was notified by GPO that various publications that had been made available to depository libraries have been determined to contain personally identifying information regarding military personnel. The titles were recalled; libraries were required to respond as to whether or not they had received copies. Sharon Bish, DN, was able to determine that MLS did not select the affected titles, and responded to GPO.
Maria Watkins has responded to Pauline’s inquiries about how returns to non-MLS libraries are handled. Pauline is finalizing procedures for ILL staff, and will send out a notice to MLS library staff by Monday.
TAE appears to be resolving the issues with courier deliveries to MLS. ILL staff are monitoring the situation.
Devin attended an Amigos online workshop on cataloging with RDA February 16-19. She reports that she learned a good deal about the RDA framework and is better able to understand how it has been implemented at MLS.
It was decided to schedule the bi-weekly MSD managers’ meetings for 8:30 a.m., each first and third Thursday of the month. There will not be a meeting on March 31 due to OLA Annual Conference in Tulsa. April 7th also has been canceled due to conflicting schedules.
Pauline demonstrate the interface in ILL for Tim and Janet. It was decided that MSL staff would receive a demo at DN.
Tim mentioned that CarlX is supposed to supply the requested reports for Cataloging and Technical Processing.
The meeting adjourned at about 11:30 a.m. The next meeting is scheduled for March 17, 2016. Pauline will chair.