"Added Entries," Backstory - News and Notes from Cornell University Library Technical Services

In With the New: Staff Changes Bring New Faces to Familiar Roles and New Roles for Familiar Faces

Quite a few new staff have joined LTS since our last issue, and some of our more seasoned colleagues have take on new roles. We are pleased to welcome the following folks to new responsibilities:

Willa Collins joined the Music Library as acquisitions assistant in July 2007. Currently a PhD candidate in musicology at Cornell, Willa is writing a dissertation on Adolphe Adams’ ballet, Le Corsaire. Willa has had a fascination with books since early childhood and enjoys the intricacies and challenges involved with her new position. She has previous library experience at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Sutani Havananda is the new processor for Thai-language materials in the Inputting Unit. She joined the unit on May 10, having previously worked as a volunteer in the Echols collection. She has also worked as a systems analyst for the Secretariat of the Senate in Bangkok, and as an instructor at the Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, also in Bangkok .

Beth Kelly joined LTS Cataloging in May as music cataloger, but she is no new-comer to LTS. Beth has worked part-time in the Music Library since 2000, where she gained experience in acquisitions, serials check-in, gift processing, materials supply, and reference duties. Beth is also a flutist and performs with various groups in the area and also teaches privately. She has two children and a dog, and she enjoys dancing tango in her spare time.

Johnathon Schultz is a new part-time programmer in Metadata Services. Johnathon is currently a freshman at TC3, but he will be transferring to Cornell next fall to major in computer science. His duties include the management and maintenance of the Metadata Service website as well as writing a variety of programming scripts that typically convert data into XML. Johnathon's work is very important to the support that Metadata Services will be increasingly be offering CUL units, departments, and libraries.

Heather Shipman joined the Inputting unit on August 2nd. A Cornell Graduate in the Astronomy program, she brings a variety of language and computer skills to the unit, as well as previous experience working in the Bookselling business and as a Physics tutor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Sandy Sinclair became as Blanket Order/Approval Coordinator in Acquisitions in May 2007. Sandy was originally hired by Database Management as a term employee to work on the medium-rare books to be transferred to the Annex. In addition to her past work at Cornell, Sandy 's experience includes 13 years in technical services at SUNY at Stony Brook and New York Institute of Technology.

Zoe Stewart-Marshall transferred from Database Management Services to the Electronic Resources and Serials Management (ERSM) unit in July to become electronic resources librarian in that group. Zoe continues as the LTS liaison for Annex related work, but now spends about 50% of her time supporting electronic resources. Her focus is on workflow improvements through application of various quality control measures such as automated link checking. Zoe’s experience with automated and batch solutions is helping ERSM meet its goal of preemptively addressing user access problems. Zoe is also examining issues related to our e-book collections and workflow.

Joseph Thomas is the new Electronic Resources Librarian in the ERSM unit. Joseph comes to Cornell from Eastern Carolina University in Greenville, NC. Besides adjusting to the Ithaca weather, Joseph will be working on e-resource problem resolution, vendor relations, and other matters relating to our licensed electronic materials.

Ken Tiddick began work as the Senior Annex Projects Assistant in Database Management Services in April. He also works part time in Collection Maintenance as a Public Services Assistant working on the Annex Move.

Masayo Uchiyama, our new Japanese Searcher/Receiver in the Order Unit, comes to us from Boston via Japan. She attended junior college in Niigata, Japan with her primary focus being English. She worked at the Daishi Bank as a teller until she moved to the U.S. Masayo previously worked as a secretary for the Greater Japanese Association of Boston.

Glen Wiley began working as metadata librarian in Metadata Services in June. He came to CUL from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY where he was the Digital Resources and Metadata Librarian. A graduate of Syracuse University, Glen is already busy contributing to a number of committees and projects, including the Institutional Repository Team, Documentation Committee, Steering Committee of the Metadata Working Group, and serving as the department's Standards Officer and documentarian. He’s also contributed many ideas and new content to the updated Metadata Services website.

Yael Zucker is the new Hebrew Searcher/Receiver in LTS Orders Unit. Prior to coming to Cornell she worked for El-Al, Israel ’s primary airline, as a flight attendant. She has a B.A. in History and Sociology from Haifa University in Israel .

Professionally Speaking

Here’s a sample of what CUL technical services staff have been writing, presenting, or doing in the broader world in 2007:

Jim Alberts was appointed to the Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA)’s subcommittee on Communication and Outreach at the ALA Midwinter meeting in Seattle in January.

David Banush has been elected to the Policy Committee of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) for a three-year term that began October 1. David is slated to become chair of the PCC for 2008-2009. This latest appointment continues David’s past PCC service; from 2003-2005, he was chair of the PCC Standing Committee on Training.

Ali Houissa is the author of the chapter “ Impact of Technology on the Middle Eastern Collections and Services in the United States,” part of the monograph Impact of technology on Asian, African, and Middle Eastern library collections, published by Scarecrow Press in late 2006.

Bill Kara presented "It's No Longer Just the Tip of the Iceberg: Navigating Change in Technical Services” with Anna Korhonen at The Acquisitions Institute at Timberline Lodge (Oregon) on May 21. Bill is also serving on the NASIG Program Planning Committee.

Anna Korhonen is in the second year of her term on the ALA ALCTS Acquisitions Section Committee on Research and Statistics. The group identifies research needs in acquisitions and promotes the development of research and statistics skills among acquisitions librarians. At the ALA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, the committee organized a half-day program on how to get published. At CUL, Anna chaired the Committee of Professional Development in 2006-2007 and in July was elected as a member to the Academic Assembly Steering Committee. She also chaired the CUL Government Documents Task Force that submitted its report this past summer.

Anna's presentations this year include a panel on navigating the change in the era of digital government documents during the Spring Federal Depository Council Meeting in Denver, Colorado, in April, and the Timberline presentation with Bill Kara (see above) in May.

Jim LeBlanc gave a presentation entitled “An Operational Model for Metadata Management” at the ALCTS CCS Catalog Management Discussion Group at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle last January. Marty Kurth was a co-presenter. Jim also presented a paper entitled "Mrs. Kearney’s Spite: Risking One’s Life in ‘A Mother’" at the North American James Joyce Conference in Austin, Texas in June. At the Joyce Conference, Jim moderated a three-session Finnegans Wake reading group and participated in a round table discussion on the theory and mechanics of what makes such groups work. Finally, Jim’s review of Willi Erzgräber's James Joyce: Oral and Written Discourse as Mirrored in Experimental Narrative Art appeared in James Joyce Quarterly 44:1 (2006), pp. 186-189.

Teresa Mei was invited by OCLC to make a presentation during the annual CEAL meeting in March. The title of her talk was "The Switch from RLIN to OCLC: Different Workflows and Different Practices." Since July, Teresa has been a name authority record reviewer for the CJK NACO Project, a collective effort by East Asia librarians to establish authoritative forms of names for use in library catalogs worldwide.

Margaret Nichols gave a talk on special collections tech services units at the RBMS Preconference before ALA Annual last June. Margaret has also been appointed to chair the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee's Manuscripts Working Group. The group is charged with developing rules for cataloging individual manuscripts.

Zoe Stewart-Marshall was co-presenter of a presentation entitled “Social Software Applications in a Technical Services Environment” at the ER&L Conference in Atlanta in February. She also served as a member of an E-books panel discussion at the Mid-Atlantic Ex Libris Regional User Group Meeting in Lawrenceville, NJ in October. Zoe continues her long involvement with the Library Information Technology Association (LITA); this year, she is serving as chair of a joint LITA/ALCTS Electronic Resources Management Interest Group.

Scott Wicks celebrated the culmination of his two-year stint as a Cornell student, graduating with a Master’s of Business Administration degree. While at ALA in June, he joined Deb Schmidle in a panel presentation and demonstration of WorldCat Selection, the OCLC selecting and ordering tool co-developed with CUL (and formerly known as ITSO CUL).