Delivery/pick up information: A driver arrived this afternoon to pick up our carts. I told him that we never received confirmation of a Friday pickup and in fact had cancelled our Friday request and asked for Monday instead. He said he had come to campus on Thursday as well. I spoke to Beverly about this. It seems OCA or WB Meyer is not communicating well with the freight company, or with us. After discovering the problems with the picklist (see below) I asked Beverly to cancel all pick ups until we are absolutely sure the shipment is ready to go.
Picklist problems: I am checking the order of the books/barcodes with the order of the picklist. I found 7 volumes on Truck #1 that had barcodes omitted from the picklist. I entered these manually into the picklist. I plan to reorder the "Book order" column when the picklist is complete. My revised version of the picklist (still a working copy) is saved on the wiki as 1b.
On Truck #2 I found 36 volumes with 1-5 missing barcodes each. (I haven't reached the end of the truck yet, so there may be more.) I manually entered the barcodes missing from 6 of these volumes, then realized that there were too many missing to make manual entry a reasonable solution. I then started deleting the volumes that had problems from the picklist. After deleting 30, I realized I was liable to eliminate everything, so I stopped and conferred with Beverly and Bob.
I will contact Christine to see how she generated the picklist. It seems to have missed quite a few records.
Ann Marie, August 15
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Preservation has finished prepping the first batch of books. We have two empty shelves remaining on the Meyer book trucks, and Bob has arranged with Delivery Services to send over approximately 79" worth of additional books. Bob will let Christine know which items should be added to the picklist.
I have updated the master shelf-list with preservation notes -- things that we noticed as we prepped the books that Document Services may want to look at more carefully during QC.
Ann Marie, August 13
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Attached a picklist for the first shipment. It needs to have the first column rotated, and any other adjustments needed as you're preparing the truck.
Christine, August 12.
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Excerpt from email from Bob Kehner:
Our student is packing up the first four book trucks of Sloan working papers this afternoon in preparation for sending them out for digitization. Delivery Services will pick up the boxes at Dewey and deliver them to Preservation Services, possibly on Friday, although I'm still waiting for confirmation on date and time. The four book trucks got us up as far as no. 1499-83 and fill 27 Paige boxes. That's about 1,200 papers, with another 1,000 to go in a second round. The thickness of the binding is a major factor limiting how much will fit on a truck, almost doubling the size of each paper. We've noted on the spreadsheet which numbers were not on the shelf, and I'll upload the updated spreadsheet back to the wiki so there'll be a record of which papers Dewey sent.
Ann Marie, August 7
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The papers are ready to be shipped for digitization. OCA will take four carts at a time. When the work is returned, Doc Services will check it for quality control. The group discussed whether to keep duplicate paper copies of MIT material once it has been digitized. Until the question is decided, duplicate copies will be sent to the LSA.
Dewey selected the Sloan Working Papers as a Dome project because it is their most important series, is OCA friendly, and it contains no color and no photographs. But the difficulties Bob encountered have implications for our more general understanding of workflows. Bob described in detail the difficulties involved in establishing an accurate list of all the Sloan Working Papers. The process is complicated by the sheer number of papers (roughly 5000), the fact that numbers were skipped, that papers were issued in multiple versions (sometimes with the same number) and in multiple series. In many cases we don't have all the versions. Sloan Working Papers include series issued by ten different centers that assigned their own series numbers as well as Sloan Working Paper numbers. Bob found numerous errors and inconsistencies in the Barton records. Because these records are providing the metadata for the collection, cataloging has been involved in correcting records. In some cases Bob has had to look at the actual pieces in order to verify which version(s) we have. Dewey has spent many hours on the project and cataloging has also contributed significant time. This suggests that we may need to reconsider what constitutes an ostensibly simple straight forward-project. Or, we might reconcile ourselves to a more quick and dirty process.
Update on July 22, 2008 at DSG meeting
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Attached a new version of the shelf list for Dewey, after some cleanup work from Bob.
Christine, July 9.
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I have attached a shelf pull list for Dewey. Please see attachments for this page.
The spreadsheet includes the Dewey items from the sloan-all spreadsheet also attached to this page. All records that are already in Dspace or scanned on Comstock were excluded.
The list should be in a decent call number order (except possibly the last few at the end, where the Barton record was classed with another series, but contained a Sloan Working Paper reference.)
Column A in the spreadsheet is meant to be an indicator of the order items are being placed on the book truck. It is important that items on the book truck remain in this order, or else someone will have to re-scan all the barcodes in order to prepare the pick list for OCA. It's OK to skip an item, just don't scan its barcode into the spreadsheet. But if that skipped item is later added to the truck, put it in the order indicated by the spreadsheet.
There are some apparent duplicate items in the spreadsheet. This may be something Bob wants to review, and choose one to include in the shipment. Just exclude the barcode from the spreadsheet for the copy that is not being sent.
If any additional information would help the process, please let me know.
Christine, June 10, 2008