Recording and slides are now available for the Core Technical Services Workflow Efficiency Interest Group (TSWEIG) session at 2025 ALA Core IG Week.
If you missed the Core Technical Services Workflow Efficiency Interest Group (TSWEIG) meeting at the 2024 ALA Core IG Week or you just didn't get enough, a link to the program recording is below and the slides from the program are attached. Enjoy!
Recording
Lessons Learned (and Still Learning) in Creating a Technical Services Department Annual Report
Associate Professor Eric Willey will discuss the creation of an annual report for the Technical Services Department of Milner Library, Illinois State University. Growing out of a desire to increase awareness of Technical Services work, the first annual report was highly granular and attempted to capture the entire work of the department. A second report was much briefer, more general, and of much more use to administrators. Lessons learned and ongoing refinements will all be discussed with the goal that attendees will have a starting point to creating a similar annual report.
Presenter: Eric Willey, Head of Technical Services, Illinois State University.
Improving and increasing assessment during a time of reduced activity
At the University of Southern California (USC) Libraries, we have had a difficult fiscal year-significant budgetary restrictions mean that our acquisitions and cataloging activities have been significantly limited. At the same time, we have been making more of an effort to record statistics and to share those out to the wider libraries community. Now that we're being better about sharing, what do we talk about when there's less to say? This presentation will address what we've started to do in the past year, and what we're hoping to do this year due to the reduced Technical Services activities. It will cover some of the tools we use (include Alma and Alma Analytics) and will include discussion of two specific uses of assessment and statistics gathering: (1) benchmarking our bibliographic record quality before and after turning on OCLC record synchronization; and (2) monitoring acquisitions activity on a monthly basis using Analytics reports. Is it useful to have increased assessment with less to assess?
Presenters: Josh Hutchinson, Director of Technical Services, University of Southern California and Minyoung Chung, Monographs and Special Projects Cataloger, University of Southern California.
An assembly line workflow for backlog reduction
Our department currently has a large backlog of physical audiovisual resources. As part of an effort to reduce processing time and make materials available more quickly, a student worker was hired, reporting to the Metadata Librarian for Audiovisual Resources and working solely on MARC corrections for existing records. This addressed the backlog of materials whose records only required minimal corrections, but it became clear that a different approach was needed for materials in need of original cataloging, some of which had been in the backlog since 2021. To address this distinct backlog and split the cataloging work between full-time staff and the student worker, we developed the so-called "assembly line workflow."
After initial record creation and addition of some core fields, the records are saved to the online file in OCLC Connexion and passed to the student worker, who then builds out the MARC record with all remaining fields except 65x fields (this stage is further expedited by use of macros and text strings). Once the librarian completes subject analysis, the process returns to the student worker a final time to produce the record & update holdings, export the record to Alma, and update work order statuses as needed. Because it allows for both streamlining and quality control, I anticipate that due to this workflow the backlog reduction will soon be noticeable for original records as well.
Presenter: Chelsea L. Gizzi, Metadata Librarian for Audiovisual Resources, New York University Division of Libraries
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Susan Howell
Cataloging and Metadata Librarian
Southern Illinois University Morris Library
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