Princeton Update June 2005: ALA Annual meeting

**Acquisitions:** Small budget increases over the past few years,
combined with the declining value of the dollar have put ever greater
stress on the acquisitions budget this year. The result of the rapid
burn rate on the budget was a partial hiatus on routine ordering of
traditional formats in the last quarter of the fiscal year. The ensuing
lull allowed us to temporarily redeploy acquisitions staff to cataloging
tasks.

Our rapid response ordering service continues to "win friends and
influence people." In addition to the satisfaction expressed by our
public services staff, the instances of faculty buying an item and then
requesting reimbursement have dropped to nearly zero.

In process records are now being loaded into our Voyager system for
Greek approval materials in addition those from previously reported
vendors.

**Cataloging:** The reorganization in Catalog Division, the final phase
of which was reported in the January update, has resulted in improved
workflow within and to the staff in the Division, and has also achieved
the goal of better balancing supervisory load. For additional
information about the new structure you may refer to the organizational
charts posted at:

<http://library.princeton.edu/departments/tsd/tech/orgchart.html>

The cataloging hold has been reduced by about 10% over the previous
year, and over 33% from its peak in July 2003.

By the end of July the final clean-up phase of our retrospective
conversion project from 1998-2000 will be completed. The East Asian
Library's CJK retrospective conversion, currently underway, will finish
up the first phase in July, and enter the clean-up phase.

An Electronic Resources Cataloging Committee has been formed to develop
policy and procedure to insure consistency in treatment. We have also
developed standards for cataloging data sets and accompanying code books
for our Data and Statistical Services collection.

**Circulation:** As we continue to be space-challenged in the main
library, Firestone, we have also made a commitment to eliminate
"overflow" shelving throughout the building before the beginning of fall
term. This will be accomplished primarily by moving more material to our
storage facility.

Based upon a recent quality control study, we are pleased to report a
94% shelving accuracy rate for material that has been returned from
circulation or used in house. The overall shelving rate should improve
even more as the result of the shelf reading project we expect to
undertake during planned system down-time in July.

**Electronic resources management system:** We will be implementing
Endeavor's Meridian e-resources management system shortly. Princeton,
along with the University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, and the
London School of Economics, is a development partner with Endeavor
Systems in the creation of this ERM. Meridian will be independent from
the Voyager system, but will be able to query Voyager and retrieve
bibliographic and acquisitions data for display. Work is currently
underway to customize the configuration of the system and load data from
numerous local sources. The first phase of Meridian is intended
primarily for support of "back room functions" such as license tracking
and acquisition of e-resources. A future release, already in the
planning stage, will support additional public services functionality.
We expect that Meridian will immediately replace one of our local
e-resources databases, and eventually supplant several other such local
databases.

**Metadata and digital collections:** The Digital Library Operations
Group is working on a prototype digital library of images and
metadata, based on 5 collections:\
\-- Calixtus Bull\
\-- Western Americana Stereographs\
\-- Board of Trustees Minutes, Volume 2: 11 April 1797 -- 25 September
1823\
\-- Historic Postcards of Princeton University\
\-- *Gender in the Academy* (a book published by Princeton University in
1990)\
The prototype will deliver full-text searching of all the materials,
leveraged from Text Encoding Initiative and VRA Core metadata.  Users
will also be able to interact with the images through zooming, panning,
and rotation tools. The prototype can be viewed at
[http://diglib1.princeton.edu](http://diglib1.princeton.edu/)