GobiWorks

George Crafts, the Librarian for Classics, French, European History and Religious Studies, reviews on-line slips.

UVa. Library's approval plan profiles also generate notification slips, of course, and it is here that the library has used GOBI to depart most sharply from workflows of the past.

Until 1998 selectors worked with paper notification slips and it took anywhere from 30 to 90 days to put books onto shelves. Today UVa. Library selectors not only review their slips online, but also use GOBI to place immediate online orders for the titles they select. Like approval titles, these books arrive shelf-ready. Often, drawing upon YBP's own inventory, they are available to users a week or two after the order.

Some 30 selectors at UVa. Library access slips online each week, retrieving titles associated with the funds they control. GOBI mounts a new week's slips each Tuesday, for titles profiled at YBP the prior week. Selectors call up pertinent new titles with a simple search consisting of LC class codes and date. Selectors themselves then place immediate online orders for the titles they want, using a customized "GobiSmart" screen. The plan account assigned to the order is carried over from the original "slip" itself, and selectors add the fund code and any other local details or messages with a few keystrokes. Orders are placed in a matter of seconds.

GOBI-loaded confirmation record, as it appears in the online staff module, and the library webcat.

Conspicuously absent, at UVa. Library, are the traditional steps of pre-order searching and of keying orders into the local ILS system.

Belinda Putnam, Monograph Receipt Technician, manages shelf-ready book plan distribution to libraries. Books become available to users within two days of their arrival at UVa.

While some UVa. Library selectors search the local system before placing an order, many do not, bypassing that step in favor of GOBI's automatic duplication alerts and, locally, what UVa. Library calls "post-order searching." GOBI orders do enter the local Sirsi system, but through daily loads of "order confirmation records," which are retrieved from YBP's ftp server. These loads create order records and brief bibliographic records, so that OPAC users can view them, while updating encumbrances, and generating reports identifying potential duplicate orders. Duplicates may then be cancelled with YBP (although few duplicates turn up). Books shipped against these orders arrive shelf-ready, again, with cataloging records, which include upgrades of CIP-level records, to overlay the brief bibliographic records in Sirsi.

Software written by UVa. Library's Chris Hoebeke, one of a community of Sirsi programmers around the country, controls these local batch processes.

Student Assistant Tawnya Bruce opens YBP approval shipments

UVa. Library's Acquisitions Department devotes 2.5 fte positions to an order staff that processes batch loads, while handling the firm orders and serials orders sent to YBP and other vendors. Four receivers, responsible for handling receipt of all materials types, also perform copy cataloging for some 40% of all titles purchased from all vendors.

The library's streamlining of acquisitions, cataloging, and collection development has allowed UVa. Library staff to re-focus their work toward direct service to users. Staff go to great lengths, for example, to fill and even deliver rush orders, under a service known as "Purchase Express," to fill orders for out-of-print titles, and to honor other complex requests.

Books ordered on GOBI shelved (briefly) in acquisitions.