Documents Cataloging Processes around the Northwest
. . . and Beyond

NGIN Meeting Monday, November 3, 2014 King County Library System Bellevue Regional Library 9 am - 3:30 pm King County Library System Bellevue Regional Library 1111 110th Avenue NE Bellevue, WA 98004 Contact: Barbara Massey phone:(425) 452-2106 Registration Form

Bellevue: City of Bellevue Maps of Bellevue Map of Downtown Bellevue (shows location of the library) Visit Bellevue Washington Request Visitor Guide Directions to KCLS-Bellevue Directions to KCLS-Bellevue from your home (via Google Maps) Restaurants near KCLS-Bellevue Nearby Dining to KCLS-Bellevue (via mapquest.com) Best Restaurants in Bellevue (via TripAdvisor) LocalEats.com UrbanSpoon.com Gluten-Free Restaurants

Lodging near KCLS-Bellevue HotelGuides.com Hotels.com (hotels in Bellevue) Hotels & Motels (via Mapquest.com) Events in Bellevue Bellevue Gazette, The Bellevue Reporter Downtown Bellevue Events Experience Washington Events Calendar, City of Bellevue King County Events Watchdog, The (Bellevue College student newspaper)

Present: In Bellevue: NGIN President Peggy Jarrett (University of Washington Law Library), Barbara Massey (King County Library System), Kent Milunovich (Seattle University Law Library) Rami Attebury (University of Idaho Library), Ruth Funabiki (University of Idaho College of Law), Cass Hartnett & Karen Highum (University of Washington Libraries), Crystal Lentz (Washington State Library), Marilyn von Seggern (Washington State University Library), Amanda Pirog (guest).

Via GoToMeeting: Justin Otto (Eastern Washington University)

We had a fantastic tour of the beautiful, modern Bellevue Regional Library, complete with the excitement of a fire drill. Highlights were the high-tech book handling equipment and the outstanding and whimsical children’s section.

The morning program featured a discussion of loading bibliographic records for federal documents into your library’s online catalog. Rami Attebury spoke first, reviewing two brief polls she conducted with Alliance libraries. Karen Highum covered the steps that she took in preparing for, executing, and cleaning up the regular loads of MARCIVE records into the UW Libraries Ex Libris system, with implications for the Alliance environment as well. Ruth Funabiki talked about the Alliance group formed to consider the bibliographic records for gov docs in general. Many questions and comments were exchanged and it was a productive meeting. Slides will be shared.

• Marilyn Von Seggern: (WSU) Janet Feldner (from technical services), the primary staff person processing tangible documents, is retiring in December. Scientific federal documents microfiche, previously housed in the Science Library, is now coming to Tyrell, as well as a huge set of NTIS fiche (now in a locked basement area, along with ERIC fiche). Two big runs of federal fiche are now inter-filed. All relabeled, maps relabeled, the collection looks better. WSU is picking up some staff positions, but losing serial budget.
  
  
• Justin Otto: (EWU) Sue Anderson going to be retiring at the end of the year. Justin will be fully depository coordinator, taking over Sue’s technical services responsibilities. Sue is training him. EWU is practicing “what would we cut?” in anticipation of budget cuts. [Aside: we talked about tax forms distribution through IRS. 9% of the population uses paper forms.]
  
  
• Rami Attebury (University of Idaho): The complete renovation of the library’s 1st fl includes a coffee shop. The curriculum collection is moved across campus, waiting for new Education building to be built. Ben Hunter, part-time Associate Dean of Library. Christine Grey retiring in February.
  
  
• Kent Milunovich: (Seattle University Law School) Time of transition: 18 library staff pared down to 13 thru natural attrition (all long term employees). Kent is learning, reviewing item selections. Been there since 2001.
  
  
• Barb Massey: (King County Library System) KCLS is trying to do more outreach, go out into the community. They are working to reach out to the King County poor who don’t have access to a library or come into the library, reach diverse non-library users. Children and retired people are their big library users. More outreach to community centers.
  
  
• Peggy Jarrett: (University of Washington Gallagher Law School) Gallagher Law Library is willing to duplicate primary law sources within the Orbis-Cascade Alliance. Peggy is going through dozens of boxes from the State Law Library, which managed to collect some unique materials that Gallagher didn’t have. The library lost more shelving space, this time to a student journal. Newly reduced hours for the Reference Office: 9-6 M-Th. Peggy will put something on govdoc-l about last Wednesday’s proposed rule on the publishing of the Federal Register, which places the publication of the index and finding tools at the discretion of the director. This would affect the parallel table of authorities, both the FR and CFR indexes, and the List of CFR Sections Affected. Gallagher collected stories from users over the summer to demonstrate why users would still want to access materials in hard copy.
  
  
• Cass Hartnett: (University of Washington) In September, Government Publications ceased to exist as a separate unit within the UW Libraries. Happily, the collections, depository processing, cataloging (both current and retrospective), and reference service continue on in a new configuration. Four staff members (Hilary Reinert, Kam Lee, Lorna Aites and Kate Scully) moved as entire work group into the Acquisitions and Rapid Cataloging Services (ARCS) unit. They are now physically co-located with others working in the ordering-receiving-cataloging stream and can more easily tap into Alma/ Ex Libris expertise. The stacks maintenance and circulation functions are now managed 100% by Circulation Services. Reference remains at the combined Government Publications, Maps, Microforms and Newspapers (GovMicMaps) desk, with Dave Maack and Cass now reporting to Glenda Pearson. Cass taught the government publications class Autumn quarter at the iSchool and is working on the second edition of Fundamentals of Government Information.
  
  

The following is an excerpt of Crystal Lentz’s regional report. The full report is posted on the NGIN web site. Crystal Lentz (Washington State Library) -- Shortly after the last NGIN meeting in May, the State Library went through another round of budget cuts and layoffs.  One position was eliminated from Public Services (the group I supervise) and the Head of Technical Services position was eliminated as well.  The Central Library Services Program Manager (my boss, Steve Willis) took on the responsibilities of the Head of Technical Services, and we reduced our service hours to help mitigate the impact of being short another person in Public Services.  On June 16th, our operating hours changed from 8-5, Monday – Friday, for all services to 8-5, M-F for online chat and email and 12-5, M-F for telephone (main building & Reference numbers) and in-person users.  At the same time we eliminated our obituary lookup service, which we had limited to State Library cardholders in the fall of 2013.

More recently, we received word that analysts are predicting a $2.4 million shortfall in the account that funds the State Library during the next biennium.  The account is filled through the payment of filing fees at the county level and revenue is not meeting expectations.  $2.4 million is one quarter of the Library’s operating budget.  We will be asking the Governor and Legislature for backfill funding to fill the projected hole, but if we do not get it a possible outcome is that the Central Library Services Program of the State Library will close.  Central Library Services is comprised of Digital Collections, Technical Services, and Public Services and it is, essentially, the “actual library” part of the State Library.  We will not know anything for sure until the spring when the final budget is passed, but we will get our first indication of how things are going when the Governor’s budget proposal is released in December.  We are hoping that our supplemental funding will be in the Governor’s budget and that it will stay in the versions drafted by the House and Senate.  If we are not in the Governor’s budget, all hope is not lost, but it is usually more difficult to be added into the House and/or the Senate budget.

At this point, I know nothing about what will happen if we close.  We will be getting in touch with GPO to let them know about our situation and to find out what, if anything, we should be doing now, and what we will need to do if the worst happens and we need to close.  One thing to keep in mind, if there is no Regional you cannot discard federal items outside of what can normally be superseded or otherwise replaced.

Other Business: duly noted that longtime NGIN members Sue Anderson, Jean Hartman are both retiring: congratulations and they will be missed.

Depository Library Council and Conference to be convened virtually December 2 - 4. What about April DLC? No plans for an in-person conference yet. The last in-person DLC (hosted at the Government Printing Office building) forced interactions among participants. Perhaps we can plan a group viewing of an FDL webinar as part of a future potluck. We spoke briefly about the demise of the two “send-to-all-depositories” item numbers.

The business meeting adjourned at 3:00 p.m.

Next meeting:
maybe University of Idaho in May? Resolved: hold another government information potluck as our program.

Return to NGIN