Reviews, analyzes and evaluates personal, unit, division, and Library-wide policies, procedures, practices, and services and proposes and implements new alternatives (including streamlining, consolidation, expansion, or elimination of existing policies, procedures, and services), as appropriate
Most United Nations microfiche are shelved using the UN system, however there are some exceptions and these are either filed by Title or by Agency. Andrea James approached me to write procedures to clarify which Agencies should be filed by the Agency name or Title.
In September 2013, after I became government information librarian, I had a discussion with Jill Thornton, Head of the Copy Center, to take over training and supervising student employees who would shelve and maintain the government documents collection. Prior to this, Copy Center student employees would shelve the government documents material and Copy Center staff supervisors would hire, train, and supervise these students. In order to free up Copy Center student employees for Copy Center-related tasks and to cope with Copy Center staff changes, it was decided that I would hire, train, and supervise three student employees.
Acceptance of decision-making responsibilities and decisiveness
In April 2013, I was reassigned by choice to the position of U.S. and international documents librarian with liaison responsibilities to James Madison College. In addition to taking on more responsibilities with this reassignment, the Library was also on the cusp of a massive federal documents weeding project. This multifaceted project began with the decision to send federal government documents that we owned, but our regional depository library (at the University of Minnesota) lacked, to our regional for storage. In addition, our copies of the Serial Set would be sent to Remote Storage, we would discard our print Congressional Record (and its predecessors) volumes, we would send volumes to be destructively digitized, and we would remove most of our Congressional Hearings. The ultimate goal for all of these weeding projects is to allow for more patron seating on 3 West.
The first step was to send government documents to the University of Minnesota (UMN), which they lacked but we owned, to ensure that we did not accidentally dispose of an item that our regional library did not have a copy of. Our holdings were compared against that of UMN and I was given the list to review. Not everything on the list was sent. For example, I did not send any of our Census volumes, since these are heavily used by our researchers and they are too valuable as reference tools to lose.
I had initially decided to keep our Serial Set volumes in Remote Storage and keep the Congressional Record Indices in Government Documents Reference. However due to lack of use for these two sets and the continued collection moves and space constraints, both of these were ultimately sent to Surplus.
After Google was done destructively digitizing the government documents that we sent them, they returned 33 boxes of documents that could not be scanned for whatever reason. Many of these already had their bindings removed or were otherwise in disrepair. Rather than fixing these items and re-adding them to the collection, I sent these to Surplus even though we did not have access electronically. The rationale for this is that it would cost too much staff time and repair money to get these items back to the stacks and they might never be used despite the effort. These items are available through InterLibrary Services.
In addition, Kathleen Weessies, the Maps Librarian, requested permission to remove some older maps of interest (such as maps of the Great Lakes) and place these in the Map Library. I decided that it would be acceptable for Kathleen to remove these maps, have the record updated to indicate that the maps are housed in Maps, and keep these items in the Map Library. The rationale behind this is that if these maps are in fact helpful to our researchers, we should make them as easily accessible as possible. This will hopefully prevent staff that pull items from Remote from being overly taxed with requests to retrieve Serial Set volumes.
My rationale for the disposal of the Congressional Record volumes in lieu of storage is that the print volumes are much harder to use than the electronic versions, which are full-text searchable PDFs.
I did decide to keep 164 Congressional Record Indexes in the government documents collection, however. These items were moved from the general government documents and placed in the government documents reference collection. I made the decision to keep these particular volumes because they can be very useful reference sources, for example in the event that a patron knows the Congressperson’s name and they would like to see all of the bills that they were attached to during a particular Congressional session.
Another facet of this weeding project is the Google government documents destructive scanning project. When I received the list of 4641 items that Google was requesting, I decided that I alone should not be the only one reviewing the list, deciding what items should be kept in print and what items should be sent to be digitized and destroyed. The scope of this project reached beyond just me and would affect many other subject specialists. I sent out an email and the list from Google to all librarians so that they could review the requested items. With administrative approval, I set a rather tight deadline for review (10 days) to ensure that this project did not get stalled.
I received feedback from librarians and marked the requested items in the list to be kept. In addition, I also reviewed all of the items and compiled their circulation statistics (number of check outs, renewals, last check in date, and additional location codes) to aid in my decision making. Items that were checked in during the past year or were checked out more than 5 times in the past 4 years were selected to be kept in print. Approximately 550 items will be kept in print from the list that Google requested, so we will be able to send over 4000 items for this destructive scanning project which is currently ongoing.
The final phase of weeding government documents in the near future will be weeding our print Congressional Hearings. Similar to the Google destructive scanning project, I have asked librarians to suggest Hearings that have archival/historic value to be preserved in print. Since we already have access to these Hearings electronically, our researchers will have access to the full-text, but there are historic volumes that we will want to keep in a physical format, for exhibits and other reasons. Depending on the number of volumes that will be kept, they may end up in Special Collections to ensure that they are not lost or damaged because of their historic/artifactual value. This project will began in mid-July 2014.
The number of government documents that have been removed from the Main Library’s building is:
- 3,149 volumes were sent to the University of Minnesota
- 5,344 Serial Set volumes disposed of.
- 2,224 Congressional Record volumes were disposed of.
- Total: 10,717 volumes
Additionally, I disposed of many government documents items that were housed in Remote Storage during the Summer of 2016. I do not have an official count because that would have been too time consuming and not an efficient use of my time, but it was a lot. Remaining documents were removed from Remote Storage and transferred to Main for incorporation into the rest of the government documents collection.
Since International Documents are for the most part cataloged and classed in Library of Congress, I had been trying to get them out of their own area on 3 West and interfiled with the general collection. I felt that a browsing user in the general collection is missing out on international documents of interest and vice versa. However, since much of the collection is moving out to high density storage, it was agreed that this would be best for the international documents collection. About 80% of that collection has been removed from 3 West so far.
The work of the cataloger requires strong decision making abilities. While there are clearly written policies, the pieces being cataloged might not fall nicely into these policies, thus requiring “cataloger’s judgment.” Grand Theft Auto VI is an example of a video game and its components that I created an original record for. I had to decide which parts of the game should be cataloged (keys, various paper inserts, book, etc.), what subject headings to use, and what genres to use.
As Assistant Copyright Librarian, I was presented with situations primarily by faculty and staff, asking if they could use something such as an image or text excerpt under the fair use exemption or if they needed to request copyright permission. In copyright law, the fair use exception is intentionally vague so one must weigh four factors (purpose, nature of use, amount used, and effect on the market) to determine one can make a strong argument for fair use in that case. These decisions are not always clear, so I would have to make a recommendation based on the four factor analysis, as well as a risk assessment of the situation (how likely is it that this person would be caught and that the copyright holder might sue for infringement?). People want a clear answer (yes, this appears to be a fair use or no, this is not a fair use, please request copyright permission) so it was important to provide a clear decision and rationale in writing, as evidence of good faith in the event of a lawsuit (see pages B33 and B36 for email response examples).