July 2015
HIGHLIGHTS
Excelling at Princeton
Barbara Wolf-Liebhart participated in the “Excelling at Princeton” program and is seen here to the left of
President Eisgruber at the ceremony for staff who completed their classes. Congratulations, Barbara!
Princeton Writes
Ruth McGuire was selected for an honorable mention for her essay “In the Plaza” for the Princeton
Writes Prize contest. Great job, Ruth!
ACQUISITIONS SERVICES
Congratulations to Acquisitions Services staff for their hard work leading up to fiscal close. Starting in
May, the receiving units made a push to check in everything with an invoice that was in the building.
This allowed the invoicing staff to be totally caught up with all payable invoices several days ahead of
fiscal close. This smooth end to FY15 was especially welcome at the end of a year that included so much
extra work in changing over our routines and procedures to fit in with Princeton Prime. It is to be noted
that the only invoices we were unable to pay before fiscal close were due to vendor onboarding issues .
New university rules on creating new vendors instituted last year have resulted in what can be a very
lengthy onboarding process, especially with small, non-traditional vendors. In a couple of cases vendors
have declined to do business with us rather than fill out the necessary paperwork.
Staff of the Monograph Acquisitions Team have taken over the processing of a number of approval plans
previously processed by Approval Copy Cataloging Team of CAMS. ACCT has been dealing with the
conflicting priorities of fast Acquisitions approval processing, and moving the maximum possible amount
of cataloging through the unit. We expect this change to help speed up invoice payment as MAT staff
are accustomed to fast Acquisitions processing, including the creation of Voyager invoices for the
approval shipments. ACCT staff did not create invoices, so this change will help with tracking all invoices
awaiting payment.
Coutts/Proquest will be visiting for 1-2 days in August. Bob Black is working on setting up a schedule for
Acquisitions staff to cover business issues and for selectors to meet individually or as a group for
approval profiling issues.
Finally, a reminder that the memorial service for our friend and colleague, Diane Michelson, is on
Saturday July 18 at 11:00 at the Quaker Meeting House in Princeton.
CATALOGING AND METADATA SERVICES
Travel guides
A large number of updated Lonely Planet travel guides were received, cataloged, labeled and are now
available in the collection at Firestone.
LD4P meeting
Princeton was represented by Peter Green, Tim Thompson and Joyce Bell at a second meeting of the
Linked Data for Production group consisting of Princeton, Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard and the
Library of Congress. Each member of the group is investing some effort in creating native linked data for
library material—primarily using BIBFRAME. Collectively the group is discussing and planning for ways
to share data, harmonize schema profiles and develop issue papers and best practices.
CIRCULATION SERVICES
Ivies Plus Access Service Symposium
On June 11 and 12, Peter Bae, Angela Knox, Joan Martine, and Liza Scherff-Nesarikar attended the Ivies
Plus Access Services Symposium held at Yale University Library. The symposium started with a "Behind
the Scenes at Yale University Library" tour which showed various access service points and workflows at
the Sterling Memorial Library and the Bass Library.
Kevin Smith, Director of the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communication at Duke University, Peter
Hirtle, Senior Policy Advisor to the Cornell University Library, and Joan Emmet, Licensing and Copyright
Librarian at Yale University were invited for the panel discussion on Fair Use and the GSU decision. The
session provided much-needed updates and information on Copyright issues related to access service
tasks. During the symposium, various access service topics were discussed among the group and the
topics included Evolution of access services staff skills and strategies for dealing with change, Discovery
tools and access to services and collections, Service point redesign, and Course Reserve.
New Interlibrary Loan Web-page
The web interface of the Interlibrary Loan and Article Express services was updated on 6/23/15. The
new interface has a look and feel similar to the main library website and it was made compliant with
current web accessibility standards. The navigation and requesting process are much easier and more
intuitive than the previous one. For example, as soon as a patron accesses his/her interlibrary loan
account, any outstanding request and electronically delivered articles/chapters will be showing up on
the main page without clicking further links. Paul Diskin and Liza Scherff-Nesarikar in the ILS office and
Axa M. Liauw and Kevin Reiss from Library Systems worked for several months to complete the project.
Any comments/suggestions or issues can be sent to ILSBorr@princeton.edu.
HOLDINGS MANAGEMENT AND SHELVING SERVICES
Book Moves
The renovation related book moves in Firestone has started up again. Our Swing Space crew have been
very busy since the school year ended. At this point they have moved over 330,000 volumes into the
new stack areas on B-floor. We have much more to move, so this will continue throughout the summer.
Shelving by the numbers
During the heavy return months of April through June over 91,000 volumes have been shelved by the
staff in the Shelving Team