GobiWorks

A GobiWorks Profile




Northwestern University Library
Evanston, Illinois

July 2003

Contact:
Rebecca Routh, Head of Monographic Acquisitions and Rapid Cataloging (r-routh@northwestern.edu)

 
Northwestern University Library.
Library Organization:  The University Library is the central collection and service point for the libraries at Northwestern University. Several distinct collections are housed within the University Library itself, among them two which handle much of their own technical services work, the Music Library, and the Transportation Library-one of only a few libraries anywhere specializing in that field. The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, among the world's leading Africana collections, is also housed in the University Library. The University Library also administers three branch libraries on the Evanston campus, Geology, Mathematics, and Science and Engineering. A member of the Association of Research Libraries, Northwestern libraries hold about 4 million volumes.

ILS System:  Endeavor's Voyager System

Regular GOBI Users:  25

Services Profiled:
  • GOBI Edition 2
  • Online selection
  • Online ordering
  • Electronic order confirmation records
  • GobiSmart
  • PromptCat cataloging records
  • EDIFACT invoicing

 
The Plaza Cafe at Northwestern University Library.
It wouldn't be easy to name a library which learned the meaning of "electronic innovation" before Northwestern University. Northwestern, located in Evanston, Illinois, on Chicago's northern edge, entered the electronic era thirty-five years ago, in 1968, when programming began on a project conceived several years before that, a computerized library support system. In 1970 the library had its first result, automated circulation. In 1971, full support of technical services operations began. Five years later, in 1976, the system was officially named the Northwestern Online Total Integrated System, or NOTIS. In 1980, the year library users began to find books through an online public access catalog, the university first marketed the system to other libraries. NOTIS, of course, became one of the most popular systems of its generation among research libraries the world over

Today, within sight of Lake Michigan, centered in a futuristic Main Library building made up of three interconnected towers, and described in an orientation booklet for students as resembling the Starship Enterprise, Northwestern's library system remains a pioneer in the online migration of paper-based workflows. Within the past year and a half, according to Rebecca Routh, who is Head of Monographic Acquisitions and Rapid Cataloging, or the "MARC" department, the library "revolutionized the workflow" for most monographs.

The workflow was ready for a revolution, she recalls, since the library had reached a point where "we couldn't keep up. It was all we could do to get the approvals and firm orders in the door and get them paid for. Cataloging had to take a backseat." Backlogs were the order of the day. "Or," recalls acquisitions specialist David Cipris, "what we called a frontlog." Clever renaming of the undone work was of course not a longterm answer. Instead, from 2000 to 2002, after the library had become one of the first to migrate to Endeavor's Voyager system in 1998, automation of several steps in the Northwestern workflow enabled MARC staff to complete the ordering and processing of books so effortlessly that cataloging could be done at the same time, in a single workflow, thus eliminating the buildup of frontlogs, backlogs, and all synonyms.

 
David Cipris (Acquistions Specialist) loads batchfiles of EOCR and PromptCat records and electronic invoices into the local Voyager system.
The library, first, began to place online YBP orders in GOBI. Northwestern was a longtime customer of Lindsay & Howes, and once L&H became YBP's office in the UK in 1998, after the two companies' separate systems were merged the library could place L&H orders too in GOBI, where the interface supports UK and domestic orders alike. Northwestern customized the GOBI interface, through YBP's "GobiSmart" service, making account number, fund code, user initials, and location required fields, suppressing several unneeded fields, and creating a "local note" field to carry information about added copies and other exceptional situations. Northwestern did not, at first, control these orders locally, but instead relied upon GOBI itself to alert staff to duplicates and to maintain information about open orders.

A year later, in 2001, the library began to receive Electronic Order Confirmation Records (EOCRs), brief MARC-formatted bibliographic records with tags for the local data added by Northwestern staff to the GOBI orders. Batches of EOCRS, retrieved regularly by the library from YBP's ftp server, loaded into Voyager to create bibliographic and order records, while also encumbering funds. Putting all of this data into Voyager required virtually no keystrokes other than those few needed to add local data to bibliographic records in GOBI, where a batch ordering function often saved time. The new online ordering routine replaced a workflow where each order was entirely built in Voyager, and the printing, sorting, and mailing of paper orders the final steps.

When the library receives books against orders placed with YBP or L&H, cataloging files are likewise retrieved in batch, through OCLC's PromptCat service. Northwestern, in fact, in 2002 became the first L&H customer to activate PromptCat for UK shipments. Since then, YBP transmits a weekly manifest of titles being shipped to Northwestern from the UK by L&H, just as it has for years for its own domestic shipments. OCLC matches records in the YBP/L&H manifest against WorldCat and mounts the resulting cataloging files on its server, where they are ready for library retrieval before YBP and L&H boxes are even being opened. Northwestern finds that PromptCat delivers usable DLC or UKM records for about 90 percent of the titles from L&H. When OCLC does not have a record to deliver, for either L&H or YBP shipments, brief provisional records are mounted in the PromptCat files.

 
Ramona Hernandez (Bibliographic Editor) receives and catalogs Lindsay & Howes firm orders in an uninterrupted work flow.
PromptCat cataloging records match against Voyager bibliographic records via a unique number YBP transmits to Northwestern in the EOCRs and to OCLC in the weekly shipment manifests. Approval plan receipts from YBP and L&H, like receipts for orders, also are matched to a set of PromptCat cataloging files. Northwestern's WorldCat holdings are automatically updated by OCLC every month.

One more batch process, electronic invoicing, completes the monographs cycle. Prior to 2002 a line-by-line manual process, Northwestern now authorizes payment against electronic invoices in the EDIFACT format for YBP and L&H approval and firm order receipts. Once more, staff retrieve these files via ftp and load them into Voyager. Payment lines are linked automatically to individual order records. MARC staff then only have to review, edit, and approve the resulting invoice before cataloging the items during the same session.

Today, all YBP and L&H approval and firm order receipts can be easily handled by five junior support staff, each spending approximately half their time to this work. Books are out of the MARC department and onto the shelf, thanks to the workflow innovations since 2001, within a week. Most senior MARC staff devote their time to difficult orders and to other forms of problem solving. In 2002 Northwestern became an alpha tester of YBP's GOBI Edition 2, and a chief area where the library has seen gains from YBP's redesigned database, which was officially released in January 2003, is in this work. Among the jobs of Reinessa Neuhalfen and Molly Zolnay, for example, is the handling of "taboo orders," those that can't run through routine processes. This means added copy orders, orders for volumes within multi-volume sets or other continuations, and rush orders.

 
Reinessa Neuhalfen (Acquisitions Assistant) retrieves "taboo" order selections in GOBI.
Research and internal communication about rush orders is now in part based upon several of the features introduced by GOBI 2. The YBP stock status, which displays the availability of unallocated copies of a title in YBP and Baker & Taylor warehouses, is the first of these. Another is a more prominent "library history" phrase, showing at a glance Northwestern's title-level activity at both YBP and L&H. Books already invoiced and on the way to Northwestern, on the approval plan perhaps, as well as any "preparing to ship," an example of a welcome GOBI 2 phrase, are useful short circuits to the rush process. Full bibliographic details on a rush order request, along with a text message, can immediately be sent to selectors via GOBI 2's email function.

Northwestern's MARC staff are not the only ones in the library whose work have changed since 2001. Many selectors and support staff in the Collection Management Department likewise have built work online routines, some of them centered on GOBI 2. This group of users includes the "GOBI-obsessed"-his own self-characterization-Jeff Garrett. Garrett's engagement with GOBI began several years before his 2002 promotion to Assistant University Librarian for Collection Management. In 1999, Garrett and fellow selector Tom Mann, with the help of bibliographers' assistant Jeeyuhn Kang, and of Dawn Bastian and David Cipris of the MARC department, formally tested and compared online selection in the original GOBI to traditional selection based on paper bibliographic slips.

Garrett, responsible for most library selection in literature, and Mann, whose areas of responsibility include Slavic studies and several of the social sciences, established different ways of working in GOBI. In literature, the electronic slips requiring Garrett's review fell neatly into particular sections of the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal Classification systems (Northwestern libraries are largely organized by Dewey), allowing him to make use of pre-set defaults when assigning funds to his selections. Mann, whose social science interests overlap most subject areas, needed to look at a broader range of slips, including those in areas he shared with other selectors. Online selection, in contrast to the distribution of paper slips, gave him immediate access to all of the library's slips. Mann found fund defaults, due to his wide subject mandate, less efficient than simply keying the appropriate fund into each GOBI selection.

 
Jeeyuhn Kang (Assistant to the bibliographers) retrieves selections made in GOBI 2 by Tom Mann (Social Sciences Bibliographer) and places the orders online.
Another difference was that Garrett did his own pre-order searching in Voyager, and then placed his own online GOBI orders. Mann, instead, put his GOBI selections into the system's "selected but not yet ordered" file. Kang then retrieved these titles, searched them in Voyager, notified Mann of any problematic selections via email, and ordered the rest. Mann, after researching the problematic titles, placed his own orders for some, while forwarding "taboo" orders to the MARC department.

The trial convinced both Garrett and Mann to abandon paper slips in favor of online selection, making Northwestern, once again, an online pioneer. Immediate access to all Northwestern slips, efficiency of the selecting and ordering interfaces, currency of the data, and ease of communication with other library staff all were advantages, in the view of these two selectors, to the online GOBI route. In addition, since online selection and ordering enabled orders to reach YBP/L&H before those resulting from paper-based work, Garrett and Mann found that the titles they wanted were in the library much more quickly than in the past. Over half of their orders, in fact, were received in three weeks or less.

Mann, who has worked in Northwestern's libraries for thirty years, switched his online YBP/L&H work to GOBI 2 months ago, during the system's alpha testing period. He calls the new system "a Cadillac," and has displayed a proselytizing energy and enthusiasm that at times daunts even the staff at YBP who have worked for three years to develop the system. He has even created a web page to help other Northwestern selectors learn about GOBI 2 (http://www.library.northwestern.edu/collections/mann/Gobi-setup.html).

 
Jeff Garrett (AUL for Collection Management) and Rebecca Routh (Head of Monographic Acquisitions and Rapid Cataloging) celebrate implementation of GOBI 2 by tearing up YBP notification slips.
Among the particular advantages he has found in GOBI 2 are slip views, which enable him to call down his newest slips in a given subject with one keystroke; interdisciplinary search categories, essential in the social sciences; tables of contents as a selection aid; his own set of templates of order details corresponding to the subject funds he controls; library notes, which allow him to embed messages about variant editions or other questions within bibliographic records; and GOBI 2's email function, which enables him to communicate easily with Kang, who continues to retrieve Mann's online selections, and with other selectors.

Potential selections in any kind of unresolved state are sometimes kept track of in folders, an especially powerful feature of the new system. GOBI 2 users can create their own set of personal or shared folders where they are able to store titles for later work, opening them whenever needed to review price, status, and library history data that GOBI 2 refreshes as details change. Once a situation is resolved, and a selection decision made, a title can be removed from the folder and an email sent to a library selector, faculty requestor, or member of the MARC staff. Mann has created his own system of folders for different categories of titles.

One of Garrett's goals, as AUL, is for more Northwestern selectors to work online. Not only would the library get its books more quickly, but selectors' work would be strengthened as it became more collaborative. The library would see further benefits as well, as MARC staff were freed for more complex copy cataloging and other work, thus completing the revolution already in progress, if routine keying against paper orders were entirely phased out. Garrett views this as a gradual process, where online and paper-based selection will coexist, perhaps for a long time. Today approximately half of Northwestern's selectors, of which there are about thirty, performed at least some of their selection work online in GOBI 2. Given Northwestern's track record for online innovation, with NOTIS, Voyager, PromptCat, GOBI 1, and GOBI 2, who wouldn't bet that Garrett will one day have the chance to tear up Northwestern's final paper slip?