Cori Wilhelm: Alright. Thanks for joining us, everyone for the next session of the spotlight on suny libraries. Where we're joined today by folks from Suny Cortland, and they're gonna share their K. 12 fiction cataloging scheme. And so our presenters today are Sue Slivan, the technical services librarian. As Sooni Cortland
Cori Wilhelm: she was hired in January 2023, and is responsible for purchasing and cataloging all materials for Memorial Library. In addition to managing the technical services staff.
Cori Wilhelm: Jennifer Parker is the discovery services librarian at Suny, Cortland, and was the interim technical Services librarian during 2022.
Cori Wilhelm: She manages the library systems and is responsible for project management, including major cataloging projects. And Lisa Scheer is the
Cori Wilhelm: teaching Materials Center librarian as soon as Cortland and it's the instructional librarian and liaison to the education and literacy programs who are the primary users of the teaching materials collection.
Cori Wilhelm: And with that I will turn it over to our presenters.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Click!
Here we go
Lisa Czirr: alright. So I'm going to start us out with. Some of the background and history what this collection is who uses it? And then a little bit about what we were dealing with. So setting the scene.
Lisa Czirr: So I am the teaching material center librarian. Yeah. So I lead. I'm the liaison to the school of education. I work closely with them. My teaching material center is a curriculum material center that has Pre. K. Through 12 items more than just books. I will explain a little about that, and you can see some ideas there already about what we have.
Lisa Czirr: I want to mention that the school of education are our primary user base. So our statistics actually reflect that the highest population that use these materials are undergraduates.
Lisa Czirr: and that our highest circulating kind of like subcollection within that teaching materials center are our Tmc or pitcher books. That's gonna be like one of our featured collections will be talking about a little more today. And so you can infer that the school of education, specifically the childhood, early childhood departments are the folks who are really using this right undergraduates in those departments.
Lisa Czirr: And it is a wide variety of purposes. Right? They're bringing things into their courses for just assignments. They're getting to know how to construct lesson plans right? They might be actually going out in the field into placements and bringing stuff to the the kind of end users right in in with children and working with them directly. So they need things on a wide variety of different levels, different topics.
Lisa Czirr: They need stuff that's current that's relevant. That's appealing, right? We don't anything that's kind of dated and old, or doesn't look great. They're also really busy. I mean, I'll I'll just add that on they need quick and easy access. I think that's really something that's really critical to emphasize right? They need to be able to get what they need and and move on right?
Lisa Czirr: So and actually, Sue, if you'd be able to click on that link. You see a list there we can just open up real brief. We'll show real briefly, the collections. I'm not gonna read through at all. We're not gonna scroll through everything right
Lisa Czirr: but just to give you an idea if it if it'll work right, if it'll if it'll behave right. Fingers crossed
Lisa Czirr: but it is a wide variety of formats that we have. So that's the main thing that I want to impress upon everyone. Right? There is a lot to keep track of. It's a pretty complex collection.
Lisa Czirr: and you know. So we have not just books. We have everything from board, books, chapter books.
Lisa Czirr: the picture books. I talked about games, realia kits.
Lisa Czirr: and I don't know if the the actual and that's fine, the link is there, though we will share obviously, this presentation. We can also share the link in the chat in a moment. We may be able to do that as well right. But I just wanted. You get to get the to get the idea that we do have a wide variety of stuff to keep track of, and the users have a lot to look at. Alright. So that sets the scene. I think we can go on to history. And like I said, we'll share that link. No big deal if that's not gonna cooperate.
Lisa Czirr: Alright. So the next slide, yeah.
Jen Parker (Cortland): do you have the next slide? Now you have to move the slide show because you're sharing
Jen Parker (Cortland): no next one. First one.
Jen Parker (Cortland): are we in there?
Lisa Czirr: Yes, perfect. Yup.
Lisa Czirr: Okay. So the history of like kind of a system. We had. It actually predates me. It's well over 10 years old. It was kind of this homegrown system, and it was meant to make things easier at the time.
Lisa Czirr: So we have kind of a hybrid where.
Lisa Czirr: for example, our nonfiction plus collection is using. Lc, so it does use library of Congress call number system like the main collection upstairs. But our tmceez, our board books, are alphabetical by author.
Lisa Czirr: and if you think about it is difficult to put a long Lc. Number on a very thin spine label for a picture book, right? That's part of the reason they look the the way they do and the way that folks look for, say, like a fiction books? So if you're thinking of a picture book or a young adult novel looking alphabetically makes sense. If I'm looking for Eric, Carl, I should, you know, be able to find the books all next to Eric Carl, right? Or, you know, same thing for any other author.
So there's some reasons why the way we you know our homegrown system worked.
Lisa Czirr: It looks the way it does in inside the system. Likely because of some limitations we had with the previous system, with Alice, right? So there was some stuff. There's a little more flexibility now for what we can do right. There are things we could not do then. And there was kind of you know, it worked right inertia. The Co. We had colors on our spine labels, which you know Sue will really get into. How that all worked right, how how we changed it over! But
Lisa Czirr: visually it stood out really nicely. But there were some definite issues, and I will mention we did not wanna change over the whole Tmc to be like Full Dewey or anything like that right? We really wanted to keep, for example, the Nonfiction Collection Library of Congress. Keep everyone kind of on on the same page with that
Lisa Czirr: but, as you can see in that picture right?
Lisa Czirr: It is a little tricky. So the call numbers in the system were not real.
Lisa Czirr: I like to say, that's kind of it's easy, but it's not simple. So what I mean by that is, you can see. There, I've got circled right. It's a Tmc easy book. So you look up, Dr. Seuss, and in our in our system, right in our one search, and you can see there that Tmc, easy. And then you get this little message that tells you. Oh, by the way, it's filed by author last name.
Lisa Czirr: Oh, and here in brackets is also our full blown. Lc, number. Okay, this is like, this is kind of a lot to parse through. If I'm looking at this as a user, I have to think about this for a moment, and I have to backtrack and go. Okay, author, who's the author there? Oh, Seuss, right? So I have to go over the Esses right?
Lisa Czirr: The call numbers. Not true in the system. All right. So there's that issue. I will show you an example later. But the fiction or the Ya write young adult middle grade novels. Section
Lisa Czirr: was true in the system. Had those nice lengthy PZPZ. 7 numbers.
Lisa Czirr: But I'm going to say that that fiction collection was not just A. PZ. 7. Collection, and we will get into that. The Library of Congress did create A. PZ. 7.1
Lisa Czirr: due to overcrowding in in their collections. And that actually features authors who first start publishing after 2015. So anybody who's brand new. So you know, if I published a book tomorrow it would be A. PZ. 7.1
Lisa Czirr: so what this meant was that collection of young adult fiction
Lisa Czirr: was alphabetical, but only kind of so you would be going through. And then suddenly you'd see, oh, we'd start again with A's right, you know. You'd see authors that start with a so it would get really confusing for folks. And we already have a pretty complex collection like I alluded to. We have a lot of different stuff to look at a lot of different subcollections.
This can be a lot right on students. They already have to learn that
Lisa Czirr: and so the struggles from an instruction and reference perspective. Right? It's a little. It's a lot to teach. But there's a lot of explaining and explaining again and re-explaining right? The reminders, a look at the author name, you know. We're going through. Call numbers again. Let's talk about call numbers again. Students will get confused right? They might be going to you know. They might be looking around and going to the wrong section inside of an instruction session which I would often see right. You really have to re-guide them and refocus them
Lisa Czirr: and call numbers really need to help and not hinder. They need to be intuitive, right? It takes time away from, you know, time that we could spend on other things right? So there's that issue. And it's obviously, you know, I'm immersed in this.
Lisa Czirr: But for somebody who's not a Tmc librarian, right? Somebody who is, you know, on reference, you know, they they obviously also have to be able to explain this right. And if they're not doing this every day, that can be, you know, a little tricky to remember.
Lisa Czirr: and the PZ. 7 so the shelving stuff right
Lisa Czirr: mit Ctl and Pz. 7.1 became a very tight mess for us. I mean, it may have been awesome for the Library of Congress. Not so much for us. So we were really seeing stuff really getting packed in there. So it was very tight.
Lisa Czirr: And you know, easy, easy, and board could sometimes get out of order. I'd see chunks kind of being this place. So that was happening quite a bit. You know. And again, people going to the wrong sections that goes back to instruction right? But people would be going along to the wrong places.
Lisa Czirr: Alright.
Lisa Czirr: but we can move to the yep. Move on to next one.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Alright. So for us. We already talked a little bit about the the growth of the 7.1. So having to shift and fit things in there and then, there's also things that weren't PZ. 7. So PN, or PS. They really didn't fit into like the bell electro category so they would get filed in somewhere. That didn't make sense alphabetically. For the staff.
Jen Parker (Cortland): I just found this this morning. The 8 fifty-two's is where you put this, the the call number, and here are all the variations that showed up for our subfield K. And our subfield M. And
Jen Parker (Cortland): clearly people were typing this in by hand. So I've got a possessive then no possessive. Then I'm not sure what's going on? Oh, third one, I've got lower case and for name and all all these are unique variations. And this is what was showing up in the very first one they forgot to put in the subfield K. In the subfield. And altogether so this looks ugly when you have a
Jen Parker (Cortland): you're looking in one search and you get a result list. And then you have all this inconsistent. It just looks. It looks tacky to me. It looks like somebody wasn't paying good attention or paying attention to De to details. Also, we couldn't do the shelf in an inventory procedure, because things were not in the order on the shelf with Library of Congress and also it just looked kinda ugly.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So you see, here is the tape
Jen Parker (Cortland): so colored tape was used to differentiate parts of the alphabet, and then authors
Jen Parker (Cortland): last name first, 3 letters. Here you can see some of the
Jen Parker (Cortland): some of the marker got smeary probably susceptible to to fluorescent and heat, and whatever just kinda looks kinda nasty, and the tape itself started to deteriorate. So it was really gooey and the rolls of tape
Jen Parker (Cortland): were rolls of tape. So the sizes of the tape were inconsistent. They they didn't wrap around the book consistently. The roles got Gui. They were hard to take apart. It was just kind of a a mess. Here's an example of the subfield K, and this whole thing. After a while, I, after being here a while, I found that I could create what those called it was a
Jen Parker (Cortland): controlled vocabulary within Alma, and I could say. If it's easy, then include all of these prefixes in there and put it in there. But the damage was already done. So. For years people have been typing in
Jen Parker (Cortland): this file by author's last name. However, they wanted to.
Jen Parker (Cortland): that's
Jen Parker (Cortland): probably yes, that's probably it. Okay. So where I pick up here is, I became the interim tech services librarian when our last one retired, mid 2022, and I started to collaborate with Lisa.
Jen Parker (Cortland): I was, you know I had the staff. We were trying to inventory the easy collection. Which was long overdue. They were running into the shelving problems.
Jen Parker (Cortland): I've been at research, help, and experience the things Lisa talked about for myself, and you know I was working with lace and said, What are you know? What are the other things that we need in this in this area. And one of the things she mentioned was this long standing wish to have them cataloged? Actually the way they are shelved
Jen Parker (Cortland): so, and I want to give a shout out here to our colleagues at sunny Genesio. Phil, Elena and Elizabeth met with Lisa and I, on a Webex call in September of 2022 to try to help me think about what might
Jen Parker (Cortland): be needed to make this happen.
Jen Parker (Cortland): but it was so clearly way over my head. I had not even done copy cataloging at that point for myself, let alone try to figure out how to do some sort of normal and do these cataloging changes. So at that point we had already started to look for a text services librarian.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And so what I started to think about is, what do we need to do before we do this? And the first thing was waiting? Because why would you want to spend all that time redoing labels on things you want to get rid of, anyway. Time cost and think about how demoralizing for staff like do something and then turn around and throw it away.
Jen Parker (Cortland): We also had the space issues that Lisa has talked about before. One of the things we had done was a shifting
Jen Parker (Cortland): one of the projects we did that summer was shifting with this easy head outgrown. It's space allocation. So I worked with Lisa. We came up with a plan to do the meeting. I wanna say, at this point I only really had one clerk but we did have 3 part time assistant librarians. And Lisa's real criteria for this meeting project was her time during the semester was not very.
Jen Parker (Cortland): She didn't have a lot of it. So we worked it out. So she came up with the criteria.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and these assistant librarians would pull the books on the list based on her criteria, and then she would review them, and my clerk would either resell or we would withdraw the items, and we accomplished our goal of less than 25% of what was pulled had to go back on the shelf. The one thing assistant librarians
Jen Parker (Cortland): we're not as aggressive as Lisa and I doing is pulling the you or IC. Or I wouldn't want that on my table past and Lisa and I pulled a lot of that at the end.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So over that a academic year we pulled over 10,000 items. Including about 3,400 of them that would have been sticker, recall numbered.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And then in January we hired Sue and asked her to come up with a plan for how we were going to do this cataloging project
Jen Parker (Cortland): next.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Alright. So
Jen Parker (Cortland): what do we want from this project? So Lisa, you want to talk about the first 3, and then I'll take the next.
Lisa Czirr: Yes, yes. So in a lot of this. You know, I kind of alluded to with some of those right my background on those problems.
Lisa Czirr: But it needed to have all these things all at once. Right? So students need to get there. Get what they're looking for in a reasonable timeframe, right? So browse ability for them, making it so that it wasn't difficult on them to just go to the shelf and get what they're looking for.
Lisa Czirr: making sure, though, at the same time, you know, we for our users to be able to do that. We need the staff to be able to shelve things in a way. That is precise right that keeps things in order alright. So those 2 fold together, and then, of course, making it teachable for librarians. So, as I hinted at, and I, you know, talked about already a little bit before.
Lisa Czirr: It really needs to be a little more straightforward, so that what we are teaching is something that doesn't have to be taught. And Reta right? You know, it should be really intuitive is what I was looking at. And I think where I was doing those you're gonna go into the
Lisa Czirr: kind of along the same lines. So we weren't
Jen Parker (Cortland): ha coming up with something completely new. And it was slightly related, the visual aspects. I was not a fan of the tape in the marker. I really wanted something that looked a little more clean and professional and streamlined. So I wanted to find a way to run labels off the laser printers so that they would all look uniform. We we wanted an inventory that would work so that we could run it by.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and it would give us an inventory, and we also wanted the virtual brows within primo to work. So you could literally browse what's on the shelves from
Jen Parker (Cortland): from Fremo?
Jen Parker (Cortland): Was that me or unique?
Jen Parker (Cortland): Okay. So I've just talked about these first 2 project requirements, and I do the project management here, Portland in the library. So you know, we did need the new schema.
Jen Parker (Cortland): We needed to retain 4 characters of the author's last name is what we decided color coded and have it be on the spine.
Jen Parker (Cortland): We had to come up with a way that it wasn't going to be disruptive to Lisa and the students, because we started this project in September of 2023.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So Sue came up with a work flow that you know her student. Her staff would pull only what they could do in a day off the shelf. So I think they're doing like 15 or 20 books of time. And you know they're putting it into a work order. It's hidden from Primo. We don't have staff and students looking for things.
Jen Parker (Cortland): They're just very briefly out of the collection, and then they're back. And the call number actually matches the way that we are doing it. So I did the project management. We kind of broke the different collections into smaller sections to keep track of it. A high level
Jen Parker (Cortland): we talked about why fiction was added to the project. It was just such a hot mess, you know, for other reasons. It wasn't originally part of what Lisa and I talked about, but clearly needed.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And then the thing I want to really bring up here is how important collaboration and flexibility are, because
Jen Parker (Cortland): if Lisa and Sue weren't willing to work around each other. You know, things are not ideal in some cases for either of them in in what we're doing, but they're willing to sit and listen to what the other person needs and say, oh, that makes sense. I understand why you need that. What can we do? It's it's not just text services saying, Well, this is the only way we can do it. Or Lisa saying, Absolutely not. During the year. It really takes a group effort.
Jen Parker (Cortland): My screen here.
Jen Parker (Cortland): there we go. Okay. So the first thing I wanted to do was devise a new schema. So I came up with Subfield H. Last name.
Jen Parker (Cortland): first name, and then subfield. I title
Jen Parker (Cortland): and color. The second word of the title, or whichever was more unique. You know the Baron Stane bears go fill in the blank, so find the the next one that is different, so that they would uniquely show up on the shelf, so I've got last name 4 letters, and then I cut the first name, and then I've got the title Normalized Lower case 3 letters, and then cutter that out, and then the dates on the end. So
Jen Parker (Cortland): cutter tables are not fun. But Kyle Banerjee, I don't know
Jen Parker (Cortland): any more about him other than I follow him on Instagram. But he created this cataloging calculate. I think he works for Ebsco, and he's been adding this calculator over the years, and it will cut her things for you. So you don't even have to know why or how the calculator works. It just does it. It's fantastic. He's got some other tools, and that which are useful, but I showed all my clerks how to use cataloging calculator
Jen Parker (Cortland): showed them how to cut her, and we prepared the spreadsheets ahead of time, so we made call new columners for all the books, and put them into a spreadsheet.
Jen Parker (Cortland): The hard part was cuttering it. I could do a little bit of formulating to have the pieces extracted, but there were. There was quite a bit of cleanup we had to do, but the cuttering I couldn't automate. We talked briefly about trying an Api and making a spreadsheet and then finding a way to upload it. But we would have to get in and
Jen Parker (Cortland): touch each record, anyway, and we'd have to touch each book anyway. So we said, We'll just do it manually. It was a challenge to find some colored labels that would fit. We had a very specific size
Jen Parker (Cortland): restriction. But we found some and then we had to create the workflow procedures. Not only for this project, but what if things come back from being out on loan we get a Jlg shipment from the Junior Library Guild every month. How are those gonna fit in? Because they're not gonna be in my pre printed? She's what are we gonna do about that stuff. So as things went along, we figured out how we're gonna do that. Of course, everything changes.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Here's a shot of my spreadsheet. So this is just a report that I dumped out of analytics
Jen Parker (Cortland): I've got. This is my column here. My left column
Jen Parker (Cortland): came from the first letter of the author that I did run in some problems there. So sometimes last name
Jen Parker (Cortland): didn't come from the author column because
Jen Parker (Cortland): the author was listed as the illustrator, which isn't gonna be exported in the correct field. So that was one of the things I ran into. And then just a couple of excel formulas. So here's my last 4 letters.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Here's my
Jen Parker (Cortland): cutter, first name that we had to insert by hand, and then my title last 3 letters, or first 3 letters and then cuttering that. And I have extra columns in here because I found that I had to cutter them out a little bit more when I ran into things and my normalized title. So I didn't have to deal with the or Anne or and then my copy paste. I just concatenated a field to give them the data to paste.
Jen Parker (Cortland): All they had to do was click in the box copy and then slap that into the 8 52.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And here's how I ended up cuttering the last name and then cutting the title.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And there's also a
Jen Parker (Cortland): shelf browser in the Metadata editor. So if you create a call number. You can see if it fits correctly on the shelf. Or if it's out of order, you can adjust from there.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Okay, that's you.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Okay? So from a high level, what we decided to do was we start as we do with it, as we have done with other projects, we start with board because it's only got 500 books. Wanna start small on any project. See if it works. See what you have to adjust when we did board we had the circus staff, and the other librarians come and look and make sure they were happy. We did tech services, did a little self inventory to make sure that was working as we hoped.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and we had Lisa evaluated to see if it was. You know this is actually what she wants, because you don't want to do the other 12,000 books and then find out it's not what take what she wants. After board was done. We did tweak the process a little, and then we moved on to fiction because it needed a lot of shifting.
Jen Parker (Cortland): it. It just made sense to do that so that we could get things where they belonged, and usable and then we went on to easy after that which we started just before Christmas, and the screenshot here is a nice before and after kind of all in one picture, except for it's the after, and then the before just so you can see how nice the new stuff looks relative to the other.
Jen Parker (Cortland): to the old, to the old.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Okay? So here's our, here's our workflow we had our clerks pull a chunk of books as one as as many as they could manage a day. Jen created a work order called the Call Number Project. So in the event, someone walked in the door and knew what they were looking for, but couldn't find it on the shelf where they remember it.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Anybody could help them see? Oh, it's it's being cataloged right now. They had to pull the old color tape off.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Pull of labels off. In some cases, sometimes there were layers, sometimes there was tape on top, sometimes there was a couple of of the layer label protectors. There was a variety of different things we ran into. They had to copy and paste the call number.
Jen Parker (Cortland): We had to change the first subfield to a 5, so that it would be recognized as a title schema, and not automatically pull from the O. 50 in the bib record and then we had to change the settings and spin ematic. For the same reason
Jen Parker (Cortland): they printed a new spine label.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and then I had these pre printed colorized lists that we divided among the other. I think we had 6 colors.
Jen Parker (Cortland): 5, 5 colors. So Abcd. ef and then we start over
Jen Parker (Cortland): with a pink, orange, yellow, green, blue, so that there were enough far enough apart that you wouldn't mix up A and H. But you could see that they all belong to each other. So most of these are 4 letters, but you can see like framp. I had to add
Jen Parker (Cortland): a P. I'll show a better example of the exceptions that we ran into later. When we had to print off a label that wasn't on these sheets, for whatever reason didn't make it on. I just mail merged it into a a document. We found that we could not run these sheets through the copier more than once, because it would start to leave like a
Jen Parker (Cortland): a dark silt behind it. So we needed to find another way to print off one off labels, and we found some Dymo labels that are for thermal printers that are clear, and that was a great find. So II run that on my desk so that
Jen Parker (Cortland): my clerks don't have to switch it out, and it's just a tiny little piece. We don't want to waste a whole label, so they send me a list. I need 4
Jen Parker (Cortland): WXY. Z's, and then I put them in a template, and I print them out and and
provide them to them so they can finish what they're doing.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So I created a problem cart.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And that's for problems. So I've got my 3 clerks here. They just plop it down if they need one of those clear labels. I usually wait until there's a few on here, and then I print them out and then put them back on here.
Jen Parker (Cortland): They finish them, they shelves them, and then they repeat.
Jen Parker (Cortland): the data collection they are. They were doing on a good day when they didn't have other things to do, because we all have other things to do. They can do 80 to 90 books a day.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and that's from start to finish. And we did project some end dates in here.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Leave this open.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Okay? I'm gonna show you. My.
Jen Parker (Cortland): yeah, I want it to. Where's analytics?
Jen Parker (Cortland): Actually.
Jen Parker (Cortland): I got pictures of it. But I've got the actual updated thing.
Jen Parker (Cortland): are we not? Gonna
Jen Parker (Cortland): and come back and do that?
Jen Parker (Cortland): Do you have my thing bookmarked?
Jen Parker (Cortland): No, okay.
Jen Parker (Cortland): so thanks.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And I can search for it. Right? So and this easy one moment.
Jen Parker (Cortland): really.
Jen Parker (Cortland): okay, maybe not. We'll we'll pull up the analytic at the end. While we're answering the other question, add a little more to it. So on the left. I have a report that breaks down by
Jen Parker (Cortland): letter. So I had broken up the alphabet.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Not only so, they wouldn't be running into each other physically downstairs, but to kind of give everybody an even number of workloads. So the green is the ones that are still under title Schema, and the blue is still under Library of Congress schema, so I can kind of get an idea which letters are, how far they're they've gone, how much has been done
Jen Parker (Cortland): and on the right is a daily. So this runs overnight, and then in the morning I can kind of see what the progress was the previous day, and then it's a stacked column by clerk, and there's a couple of mine in there where I change the holdings. So this is counting.
I think
Jen Parker (Cortland): the change holdings date. So it logs the date, and then.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So if I went in and changed something 3 times that day, that's gonna be different than when it got
Jen Parker (Cortland): originally changed. But it's it's a pretty good ballpark, and you can see that when we started back here th! The reports running from last month to this month, and so I had added to my
Jen Parker (Cortland): dashboard that I wasn't able to pull up. I've also added a pie chart, so I can also see like the big picture, and we are just over a third done with this. Oh, my prediction is that we could be done with this by the end of March.
Jen Parker (Cortland): I hope.
Jen Parker (Cortland): you know, come hell or high water, who knows? Depends on what else craps up right?
Jen Parker (Cortland): So the challenges. So, finding the stickers that took a little bit of time finding the the clear Demos was good and learning about thermal printers. Because I'm like, what is the thermal printer? Why can't I just run any old label through here. Well, it it's important, and I was lucky enough to find the clear getting the old tape off. What a nightmare! Not just the tape, but the the spine labels themselves in some cases, and then the protective labels over the top.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So we end we for the first couple of loads we were doing. It was really hard not to tear the covers. Some of them were fragile, and so we brought in a heat gun and
Jen Parker (Cortland): love the heat gun. It's like the best thing ever. So we have tweezers. We have a heat gun gets the stuff off. Great
Jen Parker (Cortland): Google takes all the X-ray pieces off. They look as good as new. We would have torn up a whole lot of books without the heat gone. We did run into some duplicates. When I ran the report it was quite some time before we actually got to some parts of the alphabet, and was like a stagnant list. So there were things that had been withdrawn that were
Jen Parker (Cortland): on the list. So as well, we've got copy 2, we also phone cataloging problems. Somebody in the past, instead of adding a copy to edit a whole new holdings record. So we had. Well, I've got
Jen Parker (Cortland): the same book should be on one holdings record. How do I transfer that? So teaching my clerks how to
Jen Parker (Cortland): get rid of a holdings record and transfer to the the new one also duplicated call numbers. So we just found the other day we had books in English and books in Spanish. They're gonna kinda have the same call number in some cases depending on what the title is. But they're different books. So how we gonna fix this. So we had to figure out how to cutter those out. The author problem.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Lots of books are not really published by a person. They're public.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Walt Disney. They don't. They don't have any sort of entity that you can add as a author, so nothing would show up in my spreadsheet as author, because there wasn't anything in that column when I exported it, or sometimes the illustrator was listed as the author, and I'm like, I don't want the illustrator as the author. He didn't write the stuff. I want the actual person who wrote it. So these are the one off things, and they were. That's not a huge number. But there's always a couple every day that we have a question about
Jen Parker (Cortland): alright.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Oh, so here's some. Here's some good stuff here. Okay, so here's an example. So I've got all these greens a green burg, green deer green with an E. Green field, green Law, Greenstein. So if I only wanted them to have 4 letters GREE.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Then how do I get green?
Jen Parker (Cortland): So I decided to. What I was gonna do is I was gonna cut her out the remainder of his name. Their name. Sorry I gotta Bernadette and a Katie and I added a one to it. So one doesn't actually exist in a cutter table. They start with 2. But this is my schema. So I'm gonna do whatever I want. So if I want N. One to come before N. 2 or N. 3, I can do that.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and my goal is to have it come up correctly on the shelf. I it. I'm not gonna have anybody coming in and critiquing my cuttering skills. I wanted to be on the shelf correctly, and then I had to cutter this out by name, but I was able to do this, so
Jen Parker (Cortland): and a few of them. I did come up with 5, and then I'm like, you know what? I don't need to have 5 on there and then 3 columns of cuttering for my author's first name, so that cleaned it up a little bit, and it didn't work. In all cases it did work for green. I think Smith became a problem.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Some of the common names that have the have a normal beginning like Peter. So it'd be Peter Peters Peterson. Things like that. So they all got really brown. Brown was fun.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So we got creative. And it didn't matter.
Jen Parker (Cortland): The the goal was if we get another book by this person?
Jen Parker (Cortland): Are we gonna have to change a whole bunch of stuff in order to get it to show up on the shelf? And we wanna change as little as possible. We don't wanna have to restick or a whole bunch of books, because
Jen Parker (Cortland): the cutter number is too restrictive loans after the fact. We kind of figured that out managed to fit them in, and then we got this curve ball thrown at us. That hey? Guess what? You're not gonna be able to get in and out of the Tmc. For a few weeks because they're gonna put a new floor in. So that meant that we weren't gonna be able to take our 10 or 15 books down.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And as the day went on, so we kind of guesstimated how long it was gonna be shut down? How many can they probably process in that time we went down, pulled 600 books, put them on 6 cards, and then they worked on that over the the holiday break.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And that worked out okay. And then they just went down to shelf them. Once it got open again. So we were in a slight panic for a while, but it turned out to be okay.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Okay. So
Lisa Czirr: yes, I am. And so I'm gonna talk now about the results. And I've got it broken down into those different categories that I talked about at the beginning, right? The issues we had, and how? What are we seeing? How did this resolve them? The thing with the Tmc fiction, the young adult fiction chapter books. It is now fully alphabetical
Lisa Czirr: mit ctl, and so I. In other words, we're not thinking about. Well, is it somewhere at the beginning? Is it in that weird chunk. Is it a. PZ. 7. Is it a. PZ. 7.1 that is now eliminated? 124.
Lisa Czirr: I put those 2 side by side illustrations of the before and after of the actual shelf labels. To really demonstrate that I think it makes it really clear, right. Think about the average user, somebody walking up to the shelf, and which one of those 2 would you rather see? Right? It's now much more straightforward. We have that simple. It's you know. I'm looking for Cornelia Funka's dragon rider.
Lisa Czirr: I can go and see that it's in that somewhere. It's an F, okay great. Just go to the shelf and find it right? So the average user can actually, you know, sure, they could copy down the whole call number right if they wanted to, but as long as they have that author last name they should be able to just navigate, find their way on the shelf, so that really improved that section a lot
Lisa Czirr: similar with board and easy having those cleaner spine labels is just so much easier to eyeball on the shelf. Right? So again, thinking about a student who's walking up. They need to find something. It is much, more, much more intuitive for users, and much nicer.
Lisa Czirr: And I really do think, this goes. This actually does also go for fiction. But I just because bored and easy, we're having that, you know that problem of oh, sometimes things got kinda moved around right. It is the best of both worlds. So it's simple but organized. It has both things we need.
Lisa Czirr: So it's simple. The author lasts names. That's really what a user needs that will get them to the book, right? So navigating is much more straightforward.
Lisa Czirr: but that we have that precision for the sake of you know, for us, for the librarians, for the library staff, right for circulation staff, who are resolving things right, having all of that call number information really makes it clear where they're going, you know, for resolving purposes, for finding something, for tracking something down right. Those books have an exact kind of address on the shelf where they live. So that was really, you know, that's really important, right? So, having both of those things.
Lisa Czirr: This resolves that that dilemma right? We want something that covered both. Alright. So that's kind of a little of the shelving. You see there, just another example, right of how it looks right, as far as kind of you know, that Cornelia funk a book right
Lisa Czirr: within one search our navigation. So again, this thing I like to say all the time it now reflects reality. You know. So we have true call numbers 23. So I have once again an example of one of those old ones right? How that look before right with that kind of like, oh, I got a backtrack. I gotta think of author. Last name. Oh, what's that? What is it? A funky thing in the brackets? Do I have to use that, you know? Right? No. Now they actually just see it right there. I see that team see easy brow. And if they even just know that it's by Brown, I can go there to the shelf and find it so. It's so much more intuitive for users
Lisa Czirr: mit Ctl, and we can go to the next, because also alongside that the virtual browse is much more user friendly. Now, right? So I can actually look and see kind of what surrounds it on the shelf. This also reflects reality. This is also what is actually there? 220.
Lisa Czirr: So if somebody was starting a search, you know, in a dorm room at home somewhere else, right. They could actually kind of see a little bit ahead of time, or even when they're sitting down in the classroom starting their search right, they can actually start to see what's around it. Right? You can actually use this information in a way that really works. It works much better than it used to.
Lisa Czirr: All right, we can go to the next one. Yeah. So this is the instruction and reference.
Lisa Czirr: so I will say that that you know that concern about construction, you know, thinking about. Oh, we're we're gonna start this project in the fall. We're gonna start it before, you know, I started to have classes and students will be in here looking. You know. There was a little bit of you know. I was a little bit worried about it first thinking, Okay, well, how will this? How will this go? Right? But ultimately we were able to collaborate on this, and you know the workflow that Sue had developed and had go
Lisa Czirr: was great. That was absolutely what we needed. I think you know, the only thing that was really, you know, visible were the signs saying, oh, this section is under construction. Right? You would. You would notice that? But from the user perspective.
Lisa Czirr: I did not have any excess questions of people being confused.
Lisa Czirr: I did not have questions or anything where people were going to the shelf during a class, and you know a book was not there or anything like that. You know, if a book was not there, it simply was not findable. Right? It was like a book that's checked out. It's not there. It's not available at this time, right? But that really didn't disrupt things. I really did not see any kind of a problem, so I will say it was very minimal. That part was really great and really important. If you think about that, right, that user side.
Lisa Czirr: and so I also am spending way, less time explaining call numbers right? I am actually able to devote that time to the more, you know, exciting and interesting. And you know, sophisticated search strategies, right? The reason why we're doing this right? Why we're enjoying why we're why we're teaching students these things right? The stuff that you actually enjoy doing. So I'm not spending this time going over it again, or having all these confused
Lisa Czirr: souls kind of, you know, thinking, well, wait! Where am I looking? Right? So there's way. Less confusion on their part. They get it, and actually did see this demonstrated in a class we had done. I would say most of the Board book section was done. I there was probably a little to.
Lisa Czirr: I usually give them a question in this class where they're looking for board books.
Lisa Czirr: and usually they don't quite get it. Usually they'll put a PZ. 7 in there right? They'll copy in that number. They'll say, you know, where am I going on the shelf? Well, I don't know. File by author last name. Some of them will write that in, so they would, you know. So when I was asking them, What's the Board book call number? They used to give me all kinds of questions, and I used that as a teaching opportunity right to to tell them. Okay, well, we're actually looking. All you have to know is the author last name.
Lisa Czirr: Well, guess what? When they were putting in and seeing those new call numbers.
Lisa Czirr: they got it. It was so. It was so great to see those results coming in right? As they were saying, okay, I just have to go to Tmc, tmc, easy brow blah, blah blah. Some of them might have just put the author less name. They might put the full call number.
Lisa Czirr: But that's exactly what they need. Right? So I thought that was really that those results were really exciting to see. And I will add that in going back to that construction part we were under construction, and I was seeing these better results right? I was already seeing them like in in real time. But you know, as we were, even in that weird transition stage, it was already looking good. So you know, this Semester Board books are done so that board book class will be
Lisa Czirr: full force using it. So I'm really excited to see that
Lisa Czirr: alright. And I think at this time we are set for questions. If anything comes up, or if there's anything in the chat right?
Jen Parker (Cortland): I didn't see any, but we looked at the chat. We didn't see any questions. So
Jen Parker (Cortland): if people have any have at it.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, I haven't seen any yet, but I've definitely seen
Cori Wilhelm: Laura, I think, is that Oswego and said, They're having. They have a similar
Cori Wilhelm: Pv. 7 issue, and I know my previous campus did. April. You've got your hand up. Go ahead.
April Davies-Cobleskill: I have a question about like the picture books.
April Davies-Cobleskill: So I'm looking at this schema. And you're ending up with like a 7 letter, a 7 line
April Davies-Cobleskill: call number. How does that physically
April Davies-Cobleskill: happen on the picture book?
April Davies-Cobleskill: Cause you know, it's like a not even half an inch wide.
April Davies-Cobleskill: Jen's gonna go grab one. Okay? Good.
Lisa Czirr: Yeah. And that is one of the challenges. Right? That you know, absolutely.
Jen Parker (Cortland): I actually one of my clerks came to me and said, wow, this looks like a lot of stuff. And I was like, Yeah, let's, I said, how small do you have to make the font to get this on there. She's like, well, it's pretty little, it's busy, I said. Well, then, let's revisit this, and let's try to make this a little more concise, so it fits better.
April Davies-Cobleskill: She's gonna go grab that. Okay. Thank you.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah. I was saying, on my previous campus, we had a small
Cori Wilhelm: you know, early. There's her collection. But man, that. Pb, so it basically, it's going to go on the front. And then what's on the spine
Jen Parker (Cortland): this one. But this one is just the author's last name.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and then, if we had room on the spine, it would go on the spine. But these are so narrow that it? Really, it's only when you get up into like the Yas, and such that you can put it on the spine properly. Yeah.
Jen Parker (Cortland): right?
April Davies-Cobleskill: So does everything. Get 2 labels. Then
April Davies-Cobleskill: the color coded in the okay. Yes.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and I think previously the fiction did not get the author colored spine label.
Jen Parker (Cortland): But we decided to add those in because it worked so well for the board and the no, I think it was just the board at that time. It looked good and otherwise. You just have this massive fiction. So it was a nice way to separate out each of the authors names. So we added those in where we didn't initially think we were going to
Cori Wilhelm: any other questions from our audience.
Susan Perry: Hopefully, when you guys are done, you can like order cake or have lunch or have a party.
Jen Parker (Cortland): We we had some benchmark Bagel days right? Oh, excellent! Excellent! I just can't believe you had to work deal with the lobby renovation in the meantime. That's like such a suny thing.
Jen Parker (Cortland): right? And they they had to do an asbestos abatement, too. So, and it was like, you cannot go down there at all.
Lisa Czirr: Yup! Yup, I was a librarian without a collection right being cut off disconnected.
April Davies-Cobleskill: April. Did you have another question? Yes, I do. How did you handle the nonfiction?
Lisa Czirr: Is it? Also? Nonfiction is by Lc. Is by Library of Congress, and I will tell you that that does work for that collection. It's it's mixed format. So yeah, there are some picture books that will have it like on the front, right? But when somebody needs a book on Wales, you know. I. That was a weird example, because I'm Wales, the country or whales the animal. But if they need a book on Wales, right? They, you know, going there. That's kind of what's in their mindset. So they going in that brows, ability
Lisa Czirr: makes sense by by topic. Right? So, or, you know, having all the math books kind of near each other that sort of thing. So we decided to keep that as it is. That's a good question, though. Right? They're already using Lc upstairs. So kind of coincides with that, too. That was another reason to to stick with the Lc, I know in the past I've heard some centers go toward, do we? Sometimes?
April Davies-Cobleskill: Yeah, whatever follow up. So
April Davies-Cobleskill: what do you do with author, juvenile author biographies for a juvenile audience?
April Davies-Cobleskill: So if somebody wrote a picture book, biography of Dr. Seuss.
April Davies-Cobleskill: would it go in the Lc number cause it's nonfiction. or would it go with the books he wrote?
Jen Parker (Cortland): So yeah, we had a handful of things where, clerk would say, I'm not sure about this. This doesn't seem like an easy book, and that we would punt to Lisa and say, Where do you want this.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and if she wanted it in she wanted it, and easy, because she thought it was easy. We put it in easy and
Jen Parker (Cortland): catalog it appropriately if she wanted it in the nonfiction, we put it nonfiction and give it a regular library of Congress. And I think biographies over there, too. Yeah, but we have a biography collection. So, but it's all up to Lisa, and then we just catalog it. However, she wants it.
Lisa Czirr: Yep, we do have a, we do have a that separate biography collection so that usually helps, you know, right? That that will take out something that is strictly right. It is very clearly a biography.
Lisa Czirr: but yeah, as folks will point out, and they're often the the really fascinating ones come to me that you know, it's sometimes it can get a little subjective or can be a judgment call right, because there are books that are kind of a mixed hybrid, that it might be somebody's biography. But it's also also in the context of like, you know, maybe like a war or something, right war time, world war 2. And it's really about, you know, kind of a little more than that.
or it's a little too complex to be like to put it in. Tmc, easy. So it does make a little more sense. In one of those other sections. So yeah, absolutely. There are those times. Row those kind of judgment calls to make that is a really good question, because they do come up
April Davies-Cobleskill: not often, but they do
Cori Wilhelm: and, Lisa, you said you've had good response from the students who are using the collection
Lisa Czirr: Yup, absolutely. So I've had it from just the interactions, right? They actually working with them. Those kind of you know those kind of just in the moment ones. But then, what really? Kind of drove it home to me was seeing the responses. II do it via poll everywhere is the one I'm thinking of. And there's also one that I actually ask is a question. And it's in a who quiz, I believe. Yes, but the question I ask they were just getting it, and I was just. I was really excited to see that right there, just
Lisa Czirr: putting the actual call number in done. We know where to go. And when they go up to the shelves it's it's a little bit more, I can tell. There's more. It's more straightforward as they're going out there. So that was really great to see, too.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, that's great that the end user is able to
Cori Wilhelm: find what they need. That's that's really the point of your project. I think.
April Davies-Cobleskill: April, go ahead. Sorry. I just have all sorts of questions. I saw Marcy's comment in the chat about the spreadsheet formulas to help with the call numbers and such are you guys gonna be able to share that like the spreadsheets with the formulas embedded in them?
Jen Parker (Cortland): Sure.
Jen Parker (Cortland): I mean, a lot of it was, I would. Just I'm not really like
April Davies-Cobleskill: spreadsheet Guru, necessarily, but formula.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So I use a lot of left right concatenate.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Probably when I don't need to. I'm learning how to use power query so that you don't have to do all that.
Jen Parker (Cortland): You just make. Make a power query and say, I always want you to give me my author, and then make a column that has the first letter of his last name. Bam. But I didn't. I didn't really know how to use it at that time.
April Davies-Cobleskill: Cool. Thank you.
Cori Wilhelm: And we can include any documents, the slides and any excel documents. We'll make a base camp. Document for this that we can share out with everyone.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Okay.
Cori Wilhelm: anything else from our audience. And do you mind? I think it was probably on the slides. If we share your contact, info with people end up with further questions.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Sure, yeah, the slides do have both our contacts and the links to some of the helpful things like that. Cuttering tool.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And where we found the labels.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, that's great. We really appreciate you sharing this. But then, being willing to share your resources afterwards as well. I will go ahead and stop.