Saint+Martin's+University+O'Grady+Library

===The O'Grady Library at Saint Martin's University in Lacey, Washington just celebrated its 10th anniversary. It is a very beautiful library in a very beautiful setting. I have been wanting to visit this library for ten years now! All this time, it's just been minutes away from where I live. I was not disappointed. Not only was the library very nice inside and out, but the librarian I met with was a very nice and extremely helpful. ===

**Mission**
=== O’Grady Library’s mission is to actively support the educational goals of Saint Martin’s University by providing instruction, services, resources, facilities, and technologies that facilitate access to information and in order to foster inquiry, creativity, discovery and the acquisition of knowledge. ===

**Guiding principles**
===The O’Grady Library is a haven for intellectual freedom and academic exploration. The Library encourages faculty and student scholarship by supporting excellence in teaching, building collections to support the curriculum, and providing systems for the delivery of information. The Library faculty and staff provide skilled guidance in finding, using and interpreting information to meet the needs of scholars in an environment of service inspired by the Benedictine tradition (Saint). ===

**Library Visit**
===I met with Kirsti Thomas, a librarian at the O'Grady Library, to learn about the process of acquiring and processing library materials. Kirsti has been at O'Grady Library since 2000 and one of her many charges is Technical Services. We spent an afternoon together talking about many library related things. ===

**Library Teaching Faculty Committee and Budget**
===A Library committee made up of teaching faculty, from each academic discipline, meets to approve budgets and policies for the O'Grady Library. The budget is split somewhat evenly into three pots ... Ongoing orders such as subscriptions; Reference materials; and one time monograph orders such as books and dvds. It starts with having faculty requests to the librarians. There is no materials request form. Instead, there is a journal called '[|Choice]' that exists. This journal is either routed around or the faculty visits a website to view it online. It lists recommendations for each discipline and tells a bit about each recommendation and the faculty then checks a box to choose material(s) or makes a copy or emails their choices to the librarians (ALA). ===

Here is what the ALA/ACRL website says about '[|Choice]'
===//Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries// is the premier source for reviews of academic books, electronic media, and Internet resources of interest to those in higher education. More than 35,000 librarians, faculty, and key decision makers rely on //Choice// magazine and //Choice Reviews Online// for collection development and scholarly research. //Choice// reaches almost every undergraduate college and university library in the United States. ===

===Of course, the librarians also get the usual email and copies of book reviews asking for those items to be ordered, They don't only use the //Choice// method. I asked Kirsti if patrons ever make requests and was told very rarely and there didn't seem to be any push for it. I also asked if, since this was a private college, there were any censorship issues with collection development and was told no. I was very glad to hear that. This also answers the question of what the library collects that is unique to its parent University. The library collection spans all across all disciplines for all academic courses. The University, while private and Catholic, teaches the subjects taught at other colleges and offers a few highly regard Masters Programs (Engineering, Professional Counseling, Education and more). Here is the University's mission statement. ===

Saint Martin's University mission
===Saint Martin’s University is a Catholic Benedictine institution of higher education that empowers students to pursue a lifetime of learning and accomplishment in all arenas of human endeavor. === ===Saint Martin’s students learn to make a positive difference in their lives and in the lives of others through the interaction of faith, reason, and service. ===

**O'Grady Librarians**
===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">There are four librarians at O'Grady Library who share the university's academic categories. According to a brochure I picked up at the library, Scot Harrison does Engineering, English, Foreign Languges and Religious Studies; Karen Jaskar does Community Service, Criminal Justice, First Year Seminar, MAC, Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology; Alita Pierson does Business, Education, History, Political Science and Women's Studies and Kirsti Thomas does Biology, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, ESL, Math and Physics, Music,and Theater (O'Grady). === ===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #594d4d; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;"> ===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">**Yankee Book Peddler and Shelf Ready Cataloging**
===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">Anyway, this teaching faculty committee meets and selects materials to order. Then student workers search and verify the materials information to make sure the library does not already have that item(s). The O'Grady Library choice of vendor is Yankee Book Peddler, from here on known as YBP. Not only does the library get most of their orders from YBP, they also purchase something called 'Shelf Ready Cataloging'. Because, you see, this library has very little staff for the size of their collection and students. Due to several situations, staff has dwindled from having three full time paraprofessionals to half that. They used to have a full time periodicals associate, a full time acquisitions associate and a full time cataloging associate. They lost the (copy) cataloging position years ago and Kirsti had to take on those tasks. Only recently have they begun hiring for a new position that combines the cataloging position with the acquisitions position (that would have been perfect for me). This will be one full time position now where years ago it was two. The other associate is a half time serials associate. The O'Grady Library is completely tuition funded, no state funds here. So, this has taken a toll on what can be done in house and one way to get more done with less staff is to pay YBP for ready made cataloging for each item ordered. I'm not sure I've ever seen a library cut down this much to 1.5 paraprofessional type positions for this size college. They really have to rely on student workers to help get stuff done. ===

===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">I don't have a good segue into this and I'm not sure I'm retelling this very well, but the use of a credit card to pay for library purchases will now create a rebate that the University will apply towards staff training, a long lost practice. Kirsti is very happy about this. I agree that staff training seems to be a thing of the past too often and having formal training for staff is such a delight! As another aside, rush orders, out of print orders and rare book orders are done using Amazon.com. ===



===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">In a nutshell, the way shelf ready cataloging works is that when YBP gets an order from the O'Grady Library, they send the books and notified OCLC. OCLC then creates a batch of bib records for book delivery and notifies Kirsti that the file is ready. Kirsti then downloads the OCLC file into the Connexion Client and prints out the accessions list and gives that to the staff person who is in charge of receiving orders. When the books are unpacked, each title is checked off on the accessions list and the packing slip. When the books are received in ILS, they note the date on the cataloging workflow slip and start the cataloging/processing. The accessions list printout looks like this: ===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">**Connexion Accessions List**
===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">I'm having trouble attaching the real files for you to see, so I'm having to type them out as follows: ===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">PZ 7 .K8673 Ann 2007
===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">Kraus, Jeanne R., 1950-. Annie's plan : taking charge of schoolwork and homework / written by Jeanne Kraus ; illustrated by Charles Beyl. Washington, D.C. : Magination Press, c2007. ===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">LC 311 .R34 2009
===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">Ragsdale, Susan. Building character from the start : 201 activities to foster creativity, literacy, and play in K-3 / Susan Ragsdale and Ann Saylor. Minneapolis, MN : Search Institute Press, c2009. ===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">BF 199 .T638 2009
===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">Toates, F. M. (Frederick M.). Burrhus F. Skinner : the shaping of behaviour / Frederick Toates. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 (Thomas). ===

===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">You get the drift ... there are several more titles on the list to check against the received box items. ===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">**YBP Cataloging Workflow**
===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">The above Connexion Accession List name example is YBP-0307 and the following is the workflow slip (also mentioned above) that is attached to it. It is color coded as to what staff person is allowed to process what part. Red is a big reminder to the cataloger to do an important task; black is for the associate and green is done by student workers. The students also process the books with a due date slip, slap a barcode on the outside of the item, stamp the library name on the pages for quick visual identification of ownership, and put security tags inside to prevent theft. This workflow slip was one of the best check off lists I've ever seen. I love check off slips like this! Again, I am having trouble showing you the real forms, but here is one that I took all the spacing out to save space that shows the workflow of all the computerized parts of the processing: ===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">**ILS - Millenium**
===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">The O'Grady Library uses Millenium as its ILS. Kirsti and I spoke honestly a bit about the problems that can arise from the use of YBP, OCLC, being part of ILIAD, being part of ORBIS and some of the problems it has created for their workflow. It sounds like a nightmare and I don't even know if I can recount it correctly. But, like UW Library, O'Grady Library also has to maintain two OPACS. Something about ORBIS requiring III for summit renewals and the soaring costs. So they migrated Summit to OCLC and became Beta Testers, which turned out to be part of the nightmare. The server is located at the University of Oregon. I asked if this slowed things down and Kirsti said no. === ===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: left;">In any case, having to maintain two OPACS has got to create extra work at each step and there doesn't seem to be a way out of this for awhile. Everything is very complicated and confusing (especially to me). Sounds to me like the databases are all in their own little cliques and don't want to work together, making for a lot of work to get it done anyway. That's probably way to simplified a way to put it. But no matter what OCLC promises to get the best (DLC) cataloging record to the O'Grady Library, it just doesn't happen automatically as promised. Kirsti has to continually keep on top of having the best bib records there are and requests DLC records. If she doesn't get them, she finds good records and modifies them. ===

===<span style="color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The above graph shows a peculiar situation Kirsti faces almost every year. The library orders between 2500 and 3000 items each year. If you look at the graph, you'll see that most of the ordering is done in the last quarter of each year. I remarked that the orange line looked strange and Kirsti said that is the line they would prefer because it's ordering items equally throughout the year as opposed to the other lines where it sharply goes up. Those are the years that they find themselves spending the majority of their budget in the last month of the fiscal year. This causes problems for several reasons. First, this happens right before summer, when there is less staff to handle all this incoming material. Folks are not on campus, they have vacations, student workers are gone and frequently, the books ordered don't come in time and so they aren't paid for and those items get charged in the next budget year, which totally negates the reason for buying them in the last minute. So in 2008/2009, the ordering was nice and steady and resulted in manageable processing. Whereas the other years, they encountered staffing, processing and budgetary problems due to last minute orders to spend the budget. I bet this is a common problem in all businesses and offices. ===

===<span style="color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">In the end, after the ordering, receiving, cataloging, processing and paying the invoice is done, the book ends up on a shelf with the necessary components of O'Grady Library ownership. "Ownership marks show that the item is the property of the library. In books, this mark may be made in several places--usually on the verso of the title page and on other designated pages throughout the book" (Anderson). It's a total group effort, from the instructors, librarians, associates and student workers, to get new materials up and ready to access by the students. ===

===<span style="color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">The following picture of the catalog is our end result of this whole process. The OPAC Computer, there for students to access information. ===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">//ALA American Library Association.// About Choice Magazine, 2012. Web. 13 March 2012.
===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Anderson, Elaine. //Learn Basic Skills//. Friendswood, TX : Total Recall Pub., Inc., 2007. ebrary. Web. 5 March 2012. ===

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">//Thomas, Kirsti.// Personal Interview. 8 March 2012.
===<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #808080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">//Library visit at O'Grady Library, Lacey, WA//. 8 March 2012. Personal photographs by author. JPEG file. <span style="display: block; height: 1px; left: -40px; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; top: -25px; width: 1px;">I'm not sure I'm retelling this very well, but the use of a credit card to pay for library purchases will now create a rebate that the University will apply towards staff training, a long lost practice. Kirsti is very happy about this. I agree that staff training seems to be a thing of the past too often and having formal training for staff is such a delight! As another aside, rush orders, out of print orders and rare book orders are done using Amazon.com. ===