Annual report, 2008/2009

MIT Libraries Serials Cataloging Section

Fiscal year 2008/2009 was a productive year for the Serials Cataloging Section (Sercat). Though faced with an environment characterized by uncertainty and change, Sercat personnel not only met the challenge of meeting and exceeding the previous year’s levels of productivity but also participated in a number of important projects and initiatives.

Personnel:

The makeup of Sercat staff remained stable this year, a welcome change from previous periods. The section has two professional full-time employees (Ben Abrahamse, section head; and Jennifer Edwards); one full-time support staff (Arnie Scheinfeld); and two part-time support staff (Walter Powers, a full-time employee who spends half his hours working for ALS; and Kathy Hamilton).

Production highlights:

In keeping with recent trends, Sercat devoted more time and energy to the creation and management of cataloging copy for electronic resources than any other type of material. In FY 2008/2009, Sercat created or upgraded 1,437 records for e-journals and 22 records for other electronic resources (such as databases or web services), compared to 255 records for new material in print and other formats. All in all, Sercat cataloged 471 more titles (electronic, print, and other formats) than they did the previous fiscal year, an increase of 30% over last year’s total.

The bulk of e-journals that Sercat cataloged were new acquisitions. However, considerable progress was made in cataloging important electronic resource packages that have been licensed by the Institute for some time but never fully cataloged. This included two important e-resource packages in the field of technology (IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital Library), and a large collection of international country profiles issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

In the print world Sercat continued its efforts to catalog serials and journals in the Dewey Decimal Collection (DDC) held in MIT’s Library Storage Annex. We completed Dewey ranges 331-332, containing materials topically focused on industrial relations, labor unions, and wages. A total of 468 titles – chiefly derived from the DDC – were reconned this year and furnished with either CONSER or “contributed”-level records.

Not all cataloging activity involves the creation and maintenance of bibliographic records. Sercat also created or updated 164 authority records for corporate bodies and conferences, as well as reclassifying 422 items. The relatively high number of reclassifications this year reflects the transfer of print journals from the soon-to-be closed Lindgren and Aeronautics / Astronautics Libraries into Hayden basement, thus necessitating their reclassification to MIT’s idiosyncratic “half-class” system.

Customer service

Sercat continued to explore ways to share our cataloging expertise with the MIT Libraries as a valuable service. In the second quarter of the fiscal year we began an experiment to track the number of interactions with other departments in the MIT Libraries, along the number of cataloging activities that result from these interactions. The results – though obviously incomplete – offer an interesting insight into the amount of time and effort we spend offering “customer services” to the Libraries. We tracked a total 194 separate “interactions” (7 by phone, 87 by email, and 100 through written notes or face-to-face interactions), which resulted in 159 cataloging interventions large and small. In addition to this, two of our members monitored Request Tracker lists, automated services that enable MIT users and staff to present problems and ask questions on specific topics to resident experts. We hope to continue tracking these numbers in the following fiscal year, with the aim of providing a fuller picture of the value that local serials expertise represents to the Institute libraries.

Other activities

Sercat personnel also participated in a number of special activities that serve the MIT community beyond the catalog. Members participated in library-wide committees, including the WorldCat Local and Authorities Strike Forces (J. Edwards); the User-Interface Group and the ad-hoc Committee on Centralized Processing (B. Abrahamse); the E-journals Team (W. Powers); and Access Services Group (K. Hamilton). The head of Sercat presented at MIT’s Diversity Day, an event held in autumn of 2008 to introduce graduate students in information studies to the Institute, and also held a series of information sessions designed to introduce or reintroduce Serials Acquisitions staff to basic serials cataloging concepts.

Sercat members also participated in a few professional activities outside of the Institute. Jennifer Edwards attended the New England Technical Services Librarians (NETSL) annual conference, as well as this year’s National Serials Interest Group (NASIG) gathering. At the latter she presented a poster entitled “From email to Web to wikis: the evolution of e-journal communications among libraries staff”, which was favorably received. Ben Abrahamse attended the CONSER annual operations committee meeting as MIT’s official representative to that body.

Finally, Sercat members continued to work to maintain and upgrade their skills. Jennifer Edwards worked closely with Kathy Hamilton to revise her cataloging and hone her skills with the goal of Kathy being able to provide CONSER-level cataloging without revision. Both Jennifer Edwards and Benjamin Abrahamse participated in an online course in the cataloging of print and online integrating resources, and Jennifer also attended a session on bibliographic metadata for electronic resources held by the Boston Library Consortium.

Looking to the future

Though Sercat is certainly not immune to the uncertainty the MIT Libraries face, we continue to look positively on our future. We believe that Sercat provides a special service to the libraries, which can only be enhanced through developing our individual skills, maintaining positive group dynamics, and fostering effective communication. Specific projects that Sercat will be involved in during the upcoming fiscal year include:

• cataloging several large collections of print materials gifted to the Institute and currently housed in the LSA;

• developing better procedures for the judicious batch-loading of vendor-supplied serial records into the Barton knowledgebase;

• learning to apply our cataloging skills toward the management of metadata outside the domain of MARC;

• maintaining our sectional wiki and webpage, making sure all documentation is current and useful;

• developing a centralized system for tracking problematic material and production statistics.

As we look to the future, we realize that it is necessary for Sercat to become a more flexible unit and adaptive unit, which will able to take on new responsibilities and projects, while still maintaining our longstanding commitment to bibliographic accuracy and excellence. We believe that this year we made positive strides in this direction.

Annual report, 2007/2008

MIT Libraries Serials Cataloging Section

FY2007 was a year of transition for the Serials Cataloging Section. The year began with a staff departure: our Head, Bonnie Parks, who took a job as Technology and Catalog Librarian at the Wilson W. Clark Memorial Library of the University of Portland. This departure was immediately followed by the arrival of a new serials copy cataloger, Kathy Hamilton, who had previously worked for our sister section, the Monograph Cataloging Unit. The fiscal year ended with the arrival of our new head, Benjamin Abrahamse, who began at the end of April. In between these moments of turnover, as the section participated in the training of a new copy cataloger and the search for a new leader, daily operations were placed under the steady hand of our senior cataloger Jennifer Edwards.

Despite these potentially disruptive changes in personnel, SerCat successfully completed a remarkable number of projects this year, in addition to fulfilling our ongoing cataloging responsibilities. We made important steps forward toward our department's goal of turning MIT into a digital library of the 21st century, while also successfully managing the present-day complexities of cataloging a large and diverse serials collection in a widely distributed library environment.

Successfully modernizing serials cataloging is a complex process that involves a great deal of planning. SerCat personnel participated in significant planning efforts this fiscal year. Jennifer Edwards and Walter Powers sat on the "authorities strike force", an inter-sectional group charged with examining our current authorities processing workflow, in expectation of moving toward outsourcing of authorities management to a commercial vendor. Such a prospective move does not necessarily mean an end to authority work for our section - SerCat continues and will continue to create and update national-level authorities records for our rich collection of scientific and technological conferences and corporate bodies - but rather an end to the production and curation of local authorities without taking full advantage of our ongoing participation in the collaborative endeavor of maintaining a national authority file through OCLC. In order to transition to this model of nationally-shared authorities processing, the technological and organizational processes underlying the Institute's catalog need to be carefully scrutinized, and protocols for the batch-loading and maintenance of our local instance of the authority file need to be determined. The work of this task force is ongoing.

Another forward-looking process for which SerCat personnel began to lay groundwork this fiscal year was the importation of serials record-sets through the commercial provider MARCit. The goal of this process is not to outsource or replace local serials cataloging efforts, rather to supplement and enrich our catalog with bibliographic surrogates for items that are either ephemeral in nature or do not fit directly within the core subject foci of the MIT Libraries. Jennifer Edwards has taken the lead on this ongoing project, and at the beginning of the fiscal year she and Bonnie Parks developed a set of policies and procedures designed to reconcile commercially-provided bibliographic records with cataloging undertaken by the Institute. In April, Jennifer Edwards compiled these policies into a sectional wiki, and in May a reconstituted MARCit task force convened to determine how best to move forward with the project in the next fiscal year.

Alongside these conscious and sustained efforts to move MIT's catalog forward, the ongoing transformation of MIT's serials and journals collections from print to digital has had a marked effect on the daily operation of the Serials Cataloging section. The cancellation of print titles in favor of their digital counterparts required us to close off many print holdings and, in some cases, bibliographic records. Likewise, the acquisition of digital backfiles from e-journal aggregators such as Elsevier ScienceDirect and Blackwell, alongside our ongoing acquisitions of new and newly-digitized content, lead us to add many new bibliographic records to the catalog. The transition can be seen in our production numbers: a total of 562 e-journal records were either added or updated in our catalog this year, compared to 309 print titles.

Meanwhile, in the print world, there remained plenty of work for serials catalogers to do. The section experimented successfully with a new practice of collection-level treatment for a large collection of ANSI standards held by Barker Engineering. The success of this project opens up new possibilities for efficiently yet responsibly cataloging large, and largely uncataloged, collections of "self-organizing" continuing resources held by the MIT Libraries.

In addition we reclassified over 700 Barker journals, in order to enable that library to move significant portions of its print collection to MIT's off-campus collection, and make much-needed room for monographic collections. The actual reclassification was completed in less than a month, and its timely outcome was lauded by Barker's Processing Manager Maria Rodrigues as "such a relief to have these done and especially to get them done in time to have the entire collection shifted this summer." Much of the success of this project can be attributed to the careful planning and close collaboration between Barker staff and one of our copy catalogers, Arnie Sheinfeld.

Work continued apace on the retrospective cataloging of the serials in MIT's Dewey Decimal legacy collection; this fiscal year, we reconned over four hundred titles, including a large section of serials issued by the United Nations, and another by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Finally, the section worked toward its mission of providing bibliographic assistance to the divisional libraries at all levels, by fielding questions and troubleshooting problems large and small posed by library staff in processing, collections management, and public services. This year two of our more charismatic staff members, Arnie Sheinfeld and Walter Powers, conducted a "road show", leaving the secure confines of the catalog department to meet with processing staff at each of the divisional libraries, in order to demonstrate to them how to maintain serials holdings records properly. These training sessions had the result of responsibly encouraging the independence of the serials processing units at each of the divisional libraries, while at the same time reinforcing lines of communication and collaboration between the divisional libraries and our centralized cataloging department. These sessions demonstrated the fruits of our sectional philosophy of nurturing knowledge-seeking and knowledge-sharing behavior throughout the library.

As the fiscal year drew to a close, SerCat embarked on a new endeavor: to create a sectional wiki to serve as a central clearinghouse for serials cataloging-related information and knowledge.* It is our hope that this site will grow and serve as both a intra-sectional resource, full of useful policies and instructions, as well as a welcoming public hub for the organization and dispensation of serials cataloging knowledge throughout the MIT Libraries.