Editorial

I can tell when a new semester has begun at my institution. Suddenly there is double the amount of traffic, it takes me longer to drive to meetings on other campuses, and it is difficult to find a parking spot, particularly when I have afternoon meetings. I can no longer leave fifteen minutes before a meeting, find a parking spot, and be on time for my meeting. My commute to work also takes longer since there are more cars on the road due to faculty and students returning to school, plus there are school buses for the K-12 students from the surrounding areas. The beginning of each semester also leads to rush orders, reserve orders, and rush cataloging. While semesters change, the demand for technical services work remains steady. I am always surprised when people ask if I am employed for twelve months (they may think I get summers off because I have faculty status) or if my work slows down in the summer.

In addition to acquisitions and cataloging, my unit handles database maintenance (error correction, record merges, duplicate record removal), batch loading of large vendor supplied record sets, and participates in numerous projects and other commitments both within our unit and Rutgers University Libraries. We provide the support needed to enable public services, research and instructional services, and interlibrary loan. Without our support, collection development and management would be seriously impaired. Reference service, including chat and Ask a Librarian services, would be compromised.

What is troubling is how technical services operations seem to be shrinking, yet their work has not been eliminated or diminished. Vacant positions are lost through attrition and work is redistributed to others. Some processes are lost in the transition, or are eliminated due to lack of time or competing priorities that are deemed to be more urgent. Technical services professionals are flexible and creative when it comes to resolving such issues. Consortial purchasing and cataloging are two examples. Shared digital repositories are another. Creativity is spurred by need and in some cases, lack of resources.

Creativity and collaboration embody the 2CUL Technical Services Strategic Alliance, which is described by Kate Harcourt and Jim LeBlanc in their paper “Finale and Future: The 2CUL Technical Services Strategic Alliance.” Harcourt and LeBlanc discuss how Columbia and Cornell University Libraries’ partnership (2CUL envisioned a broad integration of library activities, including collection development, acquisitions and cataloging, e-resources and digital management, digital preservation, and reciprocal offsite use of collections. The authors report on the final year of their grant funded initiative and describe their efforts to achieve operational integration in technical services.

This issue of LRTS also includes the following:

• “Perpetual Access Information in Serials Holdings Records” by Andrew R. Grissom, Steven A. Knowlton, and Rachel Elizabeth Scott, which explores the challenge of compiling perpetual access information for electronic journals. The authors leveraged fixed and variable fields to record this information, rather than maintaining a database for it.
• Shared print operations are becoming increasingly common given space limitations in libraries. Evan M. Anderson addresses the need for specific program based marking based on access level stipulated by shared agreements in his paper “A Marking Heuristic for Materials in a Shared Print Agreement.”
• In “Title Change Characteristics of Academic and Nonacademic Serials: Implications for Identifying New Serial Works,” Mavis B. Molto compares the characteristics of academic and nonacademic serials with title changes and found that the two serial subpopulations were similar yet differed in the kinds and proportions of subject and function changes that took place when a title changed.
• Tina Herman Buck and Sara K. Hills discuss e-book short-term loans at St. Edward’s University in their paper “Diminishing Short-Term Loan Returns: a Four-Year View of the Impact of Demand Driven Acquisitions on Collection Development at a Small Academic Library.” Buck and Hills relate how demand driven acquisitions fits into collection building and management in a continually changing environment.
• Book reviews commissioned by LRTS Book Review Editor Elyssa Gould.

I hope you enjoy this issue of LRTS. Please feel free to contact me (mbfecko@libraries.rutgers.edu) with feedback, concerns, or questions.