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Appraising Our Past, Charting Our Future |
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TECHNICAL SERVICESBlackwell's Table of Contents Service
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Some of the notable Technical Services' achievements this year include:
The Library has worked with Blackwell's Book Services to add tables of contents for over 1,700 titles dating back to 1992. Representative publishers of these titles include Aspen, Kluwer, Oryx, and various university presses and smaller publishers. The tables of contents are keyword searchable for more specific search results and are prominently displayed in our online catalog with a detailed description of the book’s contents. We will continue to work with Blackwell's as they add tables of contents and book jacket notes to new titles that we receive. For examples, click on the following titles:
With the Law School’s increased involvement in various foreign-based initiatives, the Library has incorporated more foreign materials into the collection. The addition of Russian and Mexican materials in the vernacular has presented many challenges, the greatest of which is acquiring multilingual capabilities and knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet.
Patrons looking for international materials likely noticed a change in the location of some books in the Library's 3rd and 4th floor treatise collection. The JX Library of Congress call number classification for international treatises no longer exists. At least 80% of the JX titles have been reclassified under the call number KZ (Law of Nations), with most of the remaining 20% reclassified under the call number JZ (International Relations). This sizeable reclassification project took over a year to complete, requiring reclassifying, reprocessing and shifting the materials.
In summer 2004, our catalog received a new look and advanced search features when Seattle University’s main campus Lemieux Library migrated to the Innovative Interfaces system and began sharing a catalog with the Law Library. This time-intensive transition has required greater cooperation between the two libraries, agreement on shared coding and standards for the online catalog, additional staff training, and greater technical expertise. Patrons now have a variety of options when searching the online catalog:
As part of the transition to a shared catalog, both the law and the main campus libraries became members of the Orbis Cascade Alliance consortium of Oregon and Washington libraries. Library patrons can now conduct a single search in the Summit online catalog to see whether local libraries have a given title and submit an interlibrary loan request online. The consortium's daily courier service is expected to expedite access to requested materials.
Many publications that were once routed in print are increasingly available only in electronic form. Responding to this format change, the Technical Services Department has developed a centralized, serials e-mail box to route e-mail alerts electronically to interested faculty. Currently, we distribute Judicial News (daily), Internet Law and Regulation Alert (weekly) and Criminal Law Reporter (weekly). With the proliferation of electronic databases, we expect to be routing more and more materials electronically in the future.
In recent years, the Library has been cataloging electronic resources as well as adding hyperlinks for those titles that the Library has in print, but that are also available via the Internet. Although the latter category is comprised primarily of links for titles that the Library acquires from the federal government depository, there are also links to the Hein Online database for law reviews and law journals to which the Library subscribes. The Library now has Internet links for over 1,000 titles. For examples, click on the following titles:
The process of cataloging electronic resources involves adhering to national electronic cataloging standards, creating and revising a local electronic resource cataloging policy, as well as evaluating resources of potential interest to faculty and students.
Law library staff will continue the painstaking task of conducting an inventory of the collection. The goal is to identify which books are missing, to indicate that status in the catalog, and then determine which books can and should be replaced. This is a long term project!
Aspirations/ChallengesThe greatest challenge to the Technical Services Department in the near future will be the ongoing issues presented by the merger of the catalogs and Innovative system with the Lemieux Library. Among these issues are Innovative Interfaces Inc. (III) product installation and subsequent education and use regarding those products as well as the addition of the Libraries' titles and holdings to the Summit consortium integrated catalog. We feel that these challenges are worthwhile and necessary as we improve public access to our catalog and aspire to remain ahead of the technological curve among law schools. |