cataloging & cleanup
we're rocking & rolling a little bit this evening, but it's another generally beautiful day in the Atlantic Ocean.
And other busy day in the library. We got our first request to go to a class (tomorrow) from Rachael, the geologist. Sherri's going to do this one and she'll be great. Sherri says so long as I agree to do all the cataloging (!), she's happy to do the class. She's been working on a Powerpoint today. We've gotten several dozen requests for proxy server accounts in just the last couple of days, so that's good too. Folks are doing work.
I've been doing a lot of data cleanup with the workstudy students. We removed all the non-UVA barcodes (those items we believe to be lost, from the fall inventory) and we made sure that all the books were LC-classed. There are still items on the video inventory list that we're not finding on the shelves and items on the video inventory list that are not in the catalog and items in the catalog that are not on the video inventory list. Ugh. It makes everyone very grumpy. And many, many, many brief records in the catalog for videos (title only, in most cases), so we're fixing that. I showed one of our workstudy students, Ericka, how to do some copy-cataloging & that all went well today. She's very smart & she's asking exactly the right questions so now I'm determined to turn her into a cataloger! If we could get to a place where we didn't need two separate video lists (one in Excel and one in the catalog), that'd be lovely. There's a bit of original video cataloging that will need to be done too, but I'm putting that off for right now! The Connexion client software is not working for me, because the oclc.org domain is behind the proxy server for Firstsearch authentication and I can't get the Connexion client to make the connection successfully through the proxy server. The Browser works fine and suffices for copy cataloging, but it seems very clunky to me for original cataloging. Especially since the Internet connection is so slow. I'm working with ITC on ideas for fixing my connection through the client.
On the to-do-list definitely includes putting together a best practices manual for cataloging. You can see looking at the items in the catalog & their corresponding creation dates that some things (like the call number formatting, handling of articles when folks didn't understand indicator values, the use (or non-use) of gmds or alternate titles, etc.) varied significantly from voyage to voyage. It would make all my catalogers squirm! And it means you can't get a shelflist, which would be very handy for a collection as small as ours, and you get some very unpredictable results when searching. And, while we're certainly hoping that we'll be taking care of most of the cataloging centrally now at UVA, there will still be items that will get added during the course of the voyage that will need best-practice guidance.
I'd like to get a few last data cleanup issues out of the way before we move to Destiny. Late in the day, I exported a file of all the patron records out of Winnebago so that we could try importing them into Destiny. Stay tuned there.
We haven't been having any trouble with stolen travel guides (or torn-out pages) or stolen staplers (just pens, which I think is innocent enough!). People seem to be using the printed check-out sheet overnight. Reserve materials are largely returned on time. This is all very good news & different from some warnings I had heard/read. We definitely have a number of hot-item reserve books and we've been restricting reserves to one-at-a-time and, when the title is in very hot demand, we've been asking the students to hang out in the library area so that everyone understands what the demand is and the books can be more fairly shared around. Everyone has been incredibly understanding. Textbooks are definitely an issue. Many many students did not buy textbooks in advance through UVA. They were very anxious to try to get library copies in the first week or so, but that's settled down. They're going out on reserve, but my hunch is that folks have also found friends to share with. A few of the Desmond Tutu books are in high demand and we probably could have stood for a few more copies of his biography, for example, but others are sitting. I imagine that'll pick up more as we near South Africa and he starts to lecture in Global Studies.
Announcement a few moments ago: the water depth currently is 2,372 meters. We are crossing over the largest underground mountain chain in the world, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. We are at Greenwich Mean Time (UTC) or 5 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, so about even with London. We should cross 0 degrees longitude in the next day or two. And no time-change tonight ... wahoo! ...
