Monday, February 25, 2008

Documenting and Managing Projects

For our migration project, I have committed the Support Services team to documenting our decisions on a wiki. I hope this will prove a worthy task in the future when we (or someone following us) wants to know why or when a decision was made regarding cataloging and ILS management.

I have also asked the two other people in Support Services to provide me with quarterly reports including projects tackled, statistics accumulated, and continuing education opportunities attended. This will provide me with "snapshots" of everyone's work from which to manage priorities and create strategies for accomplishing our mission to provide access to the resources provided by the library.

We have a number of clean up projects to tackle before we send the final bibliographic load to Innovative in June. Reports of lost, missing, and overdue materials have been run and decisions on each title are being made after the shelves are checked for the items. We have incorrectly tagged call numbers to fix. Weeding of the collection is ongoing.

Since we will be implementing electronic serials check-in, we have made the updating of all serials holdings a priority. A new manual check-in procedure was started in the fall. Each print title is being evaluated for retention and correct holdings data is being collected. Once this is complete, a title by title evaluation of the cataloging will begin. Most of our library's cataloging for serial titles has not been updated regularly. Our holdings will be updated on OCLC as the cataloging is updated. Once we have migrated to Innovative, we will add the holdings data in our catalog. This is a very time consuming, labor-intensive project, but one that will add value to our catalog. Once the titles are updated, a regular schedule of title evaluation will be implemented.