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Our student staff
is not the only part of our staff that is being depleted
this spring: at the end of June, Carmen Epstein will be
moving to Des Moines where her husband has accepted a
promotion to Eastern Area Supervisor of the USDA Market News
Division. This is a kind of going home for Carmen and Jim,
since they started out in Des Moines 21 years ago. Once she
has settled her family into their new home, Carmen will be
looking to for another librarian position in some lucky
library in the Des Moines area. We will be missing her a
great deal! |
We will be looking at
creative ways to fill this most recent library faculty vacancy,
both short-term and in the longer view. More news on
that come fall.
With so many people leaving campus for
the summer, students and faculty alike, it is often assumed that
we have little to do in the library in the summer. In fact,
while it is true that our walk-in business does drop off, summer
is when we accomplish a number of substantive projects that we do
not have time for during the academic year. You may recall, for
instance, that last summer we created the new music resource space
on the library's third floor and also the Archives room on the
main floor.
This summer, while we will no doubt
also do some more juggling around of our space use in the
building, our principal project will be the implementation of a
new library system (online catalog etc.). Fortunately, most of us
already have considerable expertise and experience with such major
computer system migration. Still, as any of you who have been
involved with the Millikin campus implementation of Banner can
understand, there is a mountain of data decisions and conversion
to be accomplished, new workstation-specific software (client
modules) to install and configure, and not to mention learning the
specifics of new software for all day-to-day computer activities.
Some highlights:
As you recall from my February
newsletter, two of our librarians, Jen Masciadrelli and Susan
Avery, are serving on different state-wide committees working on
customizing the new system. They have put in many hours on this
work, in conference calls and intermittent visits to Champaign.
Jen is also our project coordinator in the library, making sure
that all the implementation details are being attended to.
Almost everyone on the staff has
already received intensive training in those modules of the system
that they will be working with most closely. Jen and I have
attended at least a week total of overview and training, since we
need to be familiar with all aspects of the system.
During the second week of May, all
of our bibliographic records and associated we-own-it records are
being loaded into the new system (some 300,000 records total); and
then Linda Chitwood, our Cataloging Associate, will quality-check
those records against representative records that she and other
staff have already selected. Once she is satisfied that this
record load has been done accurately, we can start working with
this data to create additional records.
Linda Rash, Periodicals Associate,
will be working with Jen over the summer to create about 1,000
grids for recording ongoing daily receipt of periodicals
subscription issues. Using those grids, we can make sure that we
are actually receiving what we should be receiving; and that same
information will also be displayed in the public catalog.
Marsha Leach, Acquisitions
Associate and Office Manager, will be implementing our library
materials fund structure as well as creating hundreds of vendor
and publisher records, this in
the service of ordering materials and keeping track of what we
spend on various categories of materials. She and I are refining
the fund structure this week, prior to her implementing it.
The Circulation Desk staff (Cindy
Dothager, Circulation Desk Supervisor, and Gavena Dahlman &
Ben Gardner, Circulation Associates) will be reviewing the
accuracy of the newly transferred borrower address records
(approximately 5,000) as well as attendant loan records (what
people have borrowed and not yet returned). They will also have to
create new procedures for loading new address records in the fall,
using extracted Banner records.
Our regular work must continue
alongside this implementation work, of course. For one thing,
Jason Butterick and Gavena Dahlman will be sharing interlibrary
loan responsibilities during Ruth Nihiser's annual two month
absence.
We are aiming to be up and running
with the new system by August 1, 2002, keeping in mind that even
with all our careful planning, computer system implementations
sometimes can take longer than intended.
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The
list of titles newly catalogued in April 2002 is available. 
