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UNC-Chapel Hill Stone Center Library: Opening Day Collection
by Betty Meehan-Black, Assistant Head of Acquisitions, UNC at Chapel Hill and Project Manager for Stone Center
and Ann-Marie Breaux, Senior Manager, Academic Services Development, YBP Library Services

The Sonja Haynes Stone Center
for Black Culture and History

The Stone Center Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is located in The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History (http://www.ibiblio.org/shscbch/). The Mission Statement of the Stone Center is to: "encourage and support the critical examination of all dimensions of African American and other African diaspora cultures through sustained and open discussion, dialogue and debate..." Dr. Joseph Jordan, Director of the Stone Center, observes, "The Stone Center Library is one of the key components of the building and provides a central location for researchers interested in the African, African-American, and African diaspora experience. The Library supplements the collections of other libraries in the campus system and simultaneously serves as an entry point for those who are just beginning their studies in these subject areas, and as a ready resource for experienced scholars."

Purchasing an opening day collection is challenging, and at the same time, a bit daunting. The staff in the Davis Library in the Academic Affairs Library (AAL) System at UNC needed to select, search for call numbers, order, receive, process, bind, and shelve an entire new library of approximately 7,300 items in five months. Not only was this going to be the first time we purchased a shelf-ready opening day collection, it was AAL's first new departmental library in approximately 35 years. We had a big task ahead of us, and a lot to learn in the process.

Firm Order Specialist Kathy Jacobs tracked the searching and ordering progress on this thermometer chart, with its miniature GOBI folders marking the completion of each subject area.

First our Humanities and Social Sciences Selectors and the Director of the Stone Center agreed on a focus for the material to be ordered: research-level materials on African-Americans, African Studies, and the Black Diaspora. YBP bibliographers showed they were skilled at identifying many titles that fit the general criteria. In addition, YBP refined the results to set aside any titles that were out of print or otherwise not readily available, so that we would be assured of the quickest possible fulfillment of our orders. That culled the initial 12,000 titles down to about 9,000. Then Davis Library selectors began the process of identifying core titles for topics of high interest in the social sciences and humanities. They researched authors' backgrounds, consulted with departmental selectors, and made the multitude of decisions necessary to select material for this new collection. YBP loaded titles into GOBI folders, sorted by selector and broad subject, to make the review process easier. Selectors deleted unwanted titles from the GOBI folders, and the remainder were ready to be ordered and processed by library staff. After reviewing over 12,000 potential titles, 7,300 were ultimately selected for our new Stone Center Library's opening day collection. This Collection Development work was completed in May.

As the collection development work was wrapping up, the Technical Services staff were ramping up. Acquisitions and Cataloging staff worked with YBP to map out record and processing specifications that would meet UNC's needs. This process was complicated by our separated automated library systems. We use Innovative Interfaces for acquisitions and DRA for cataloging, so the MARC records had to include both the fields and data to allow for electronic ordering and invoicing via Innovative and the call number and barcode number data for DRA. Those specifications took several weeks to complete, and involved a number of conference calls until staff on both sides were satisfied that our requirements were understood.

Tom Rodwell, Approval Plan Specialist, pitched in to help deal with a some of the many boxes that arrived in Acquisitions.

Acquisition staff members are frequent GOBI searchers, yet few of the staff working on this project had authorization to select or to order on GOBI. With some quick training, people found GOBI easy to use for searching, inserting a call number, and ordering. The total time to search and order 7,300 titles took less than four weeks and was completed in mid-June. Because the majority of the titles were added copies of titles owned elsewhere in the University library system, we supplied YBP with the desired call number and copy number via GOBI. We divided our orders so that we would only receive new cataloging records for those titles not already owned by UNC. During this ordering time we often observed excitement and interest from other areas of library. This was especially true during peak ordering and receiving.

Material arrived quickly. We had just barely finished ordering when the books started to appear. Imagine our delight and dismay when 125 boxes were delivered on one day! Once we had our process organized, the material was unpacked and received very quickly with the use of macros. Most of the material arrived and was received in INNOPAC within a six-week time frame.

Christy Allen, Head of Receiving & Invoice Management, receiving in Innopac. The Stone Center invoices were almost a foot high!

Some of the AAL staff who participated in the project (from left to right): Tom Rodwell, Christy Allen, Cameron Mitchell, Ardys Kecham, Julie Roach, Betty Meehan-Black, Kathy Jacobs, Anne Peoples, Chris Wolf, Kent Coyle.

We chose not to enter an order record into INNOPAC until these titles were received; thus they looked much like our approval plan shipments. We used the Innovative extended approval plan interface to load the records, create order records, and process the invoices electronically. The load into INNOPAC was fine. However, when we tried to load the cataloging records into DRA, we did experience some problems that were related to having two systems. Our problems were compounded by some local loading errors. Since we are currently implementing Innovative's Millennium Silver integrated library system, these types of issues would not be part of any future project involving purchasing shelf-ready materials.

The shelf-ready processing was very good quality. In fact our Head of Preservation Services remarked, "It was done nicely and more neatly than our student could do." Once the books were received, we sorted them by call number in a staging area at Davis Library, and then boxed them for the trip across campus to the Stone Center. Library school volunteers and other library staff helped to get the books shelved at Stone. The newly hired librarian for the Stone Center Library arrived and the library opened on Sept. 7, 2004 with 6,000+ books on its shelves.

Delighted by her new position and collection, Stone Center Librarian Raquel Cogell explains, "The opportunity to be the first librarian at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History is quite exciting. I feel fortunate to step into this role with a significant portion of the collection already here and available to the many students and other users who have been to the library. I look forward to building and developing what promises to be an amazing collection."

It took a really great team effort for this challenging goal to be met. Our Firm Order Specialist commented, "The unity and team spirit was great to observe and to experience first hand. There were some local glitches but they were resolved." From selection to shelving, over 50 staff members in the UNC Academic Affairs Library System and 20 staff members at YBP were involved in this project. We could not have estimated the amount of skills development or overall staff development that resulted from this undertaking.

Stone Center Librarian Raquel Cogell and Project Coordinator Betty Meehan-Black in the newly-opened Library.

In summary, the selection and ordering of the Stone Center's opening day collection went extremely well. We started receiving processed materials within a month of ordering. The physical processing was excellent.. The load of order records into INNOPAC was easy, and some of the glitches we had were local. All in all, our goal to have the books on the shelf for opening day was accomplished without blood, sweat (well some sweat), or tears! It was a fabulous experience. This experiment puts us in a better position for future shelf-ready services from YBP. The Stone Project Coordinator adds "We appreciate the professional and skillful assistance we had from the YBP staff who helped to make this project a reality. They were responsive to our many questions and promptly assisted us with problem solving as needed. We felt this project was a true collaboration. At some point in the near future, we hope to explore the possibility of purchasing shelf-ready material for our large approval plans."

Written by Betty Meehan-Black, Assistant Head of Acquisitions, UNC at Chapel Hill and Project Manager for Stone Center (bmblack@email.unc.edu) and Ann-Marie Breaux, Senior Manager for Academic Services Development, YBP (abreaux@ybp.com).

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