Week Ten

This week has been very exciting for a few reasons. First, it seems that many of the supervisors like our idea of deselecting some titles in order to change our Marcive status to "small" collection. Ms. Englert gave me a list of the library's government documents collection and I spent a large part of the week highlighting the documents that are available in both print and online. I found over 120 documents that fit this category. Of course this still leaves us with over 200 more titles to try to weed out, but it does bring us closer to our goal. I also started a time line this week in order to show when different services were chosen from Marcive and who Cook's government documents librarian was at the time. It was interesting reading past correspondence between the librarians here at Cook and the representatives at Marcive. Ms. Englert has assured me this project will be very useful to her and future librarians at Cook.

Week Nine

This week I contacted Mr. Noel at Marcive. He was quick to respond and answered all of our questions. Most of our questions focused on what type of services the Cook Library receives from Marcive and how much each service costs. Recently I have been working with Ms. Englert and reviewing the changes that have occurred in how much Marcive has charged for their services. We both noticed that the amount has not changed much, but we did notice that if we could deselect about four hundred titles, we could get the reduced rate for a small library collection. Ms. Englert told her supervisor about this discovery and I went directly to the collection and began to see what items were duplicates. Ms. Englert and I thought that if there are many duplicates, we could remove them and get closer to our goal of four hundred titles. This move could potentially save the library over nine hundred dollars.

Week Eight

This week has been hectic. After I discovered what items from the Core Collection list were actually in the Cook Library's collection I started to discover the library's profile with Marcive company. Marcive creates all of our labels for the government document collections. My supervisor, Tracy Englert gave me the contact information for Marcive's representative, Jim Noel. Tracy and I then figured out what type of questions we wanted to ask Mr. Noel and prepared to contact him the following week.

Week Seven

Here are the results from the study.
From the 681 titles on the Suggested Core Collections provided by the Federal Depository Library Program, the Cook Library contains 439 titles. This means the Cook Library has 64.4% of the titles. Also, I discovered that 24% of the items that the online catalog used at Cook Library, Anna, were not actually on the shelf. I thought this number was pretty high. But, I did notice that many of the missing items are available on online databases, so researchers can actually get to most of these documents. I will have more calculations later this week.

Week Six

I spent last week looking through the catalog in order to see what was properly shelved and what was missing. This process was long but the Spring Break holiday was nice. I finished my search and I will provide the percentages in the next blog. I was somewhat shocked to see all of the materials that were not in their proper place. I did notice, however, that many of the files that were missing could be located online. I have a feeling that maybe someone took out a few of the files after they noticed some were available online. Though, I'm sure someone would have told me if this was the case.
The Spring holiday was nice. I did not do too much except re-read a few of my favorite books.

Week Five

Last week was very busy seeing that I had to find out if the information ANNA claimed was present was actually there. This means that I spent most or all of last week shifting through the microfiche and CD ROM collection to see what was missing. I think overall the library administration should be happy with ANNA. Most of the documents ANNA counted as present was actually there, so that's a good thing. I'm sure we have had our share of unhappy patrons looking for documents that are not actually there. But, what can you do? With a collection of our size, not every document will be in place. Some documents could be misplaced or stolen. There is nothing the librarians can do but be diligent and keep an eye out for rogue documents.

Week Four

This week has been a good deal like last week. I am mostly searching the ANNA catalog in order to see if the collection contains the documents listed in the "Suggested Core Collections" from the FDLP. This process takes a good bit of time. I conduct the search by placing the call number into the appropriate field and then pressing 'search.' This may not sound too difficult, but after I find out if the document is in the collection, I have to check to see what type of format is available. Other than this, I have looked at some correspondence between the former Government Documents Librarian and the people at MARCHIVE. MARCHIVE is a company that catalogs our government documents, and some other materials for the library. I hope to be able to conduct some sort of narrative once all of the data has been collected, but I'm just getting started on this project.