Technical Services Work From Home Projects

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about significant changes in the work of librarians. This started with statewide (and nationwide) shelter in place orders that required people to work from home, and many people continue to work from home to various degrees. The work of Technical Services librarians lends itself to work from home projects.

The CARLI Technical Services Committee identified a widespread need and desire to collect ideas for work from home projects in an accessible clearinghouse style format that can provide CARLI constituents with potential projects and workflows for those that work in Technical Services areas. 

This page is loosely organized into groups that serve as suggestions for a variety of work areas, including weeding, bib maintenance, and ideas particular to Special Collections and Archives. Where possible, links to more specific documentation related to workflows are provided. The Technical Services Committee would like to note that any documentation could potentially be dated, and is primarily intended to serve as guidelines to help get started on any given work from home project. The Committee welcomes ideas to add to this page which can be submitted via email to the Technical Services interest group list using techserv-ig@carli.illinois.edu.

Updated 5/19/2021

Work From Home Projects

Bib Maintenance

• Find IZ bibs that are not linked to NZ and share (probable merge task)
  • Merging Network Zone Records
  • I-Share Network Zone Cataloging Recommendations
• Bound with clean-up

Holdings/Item Maintenance

• Reduce duplicate holdings in the same location/move items to a single holding.
  • moving item records between holdings

Item Maintenance

• Review and correct enumeration/chronology for migrated serials records
• Move items to retain history or delete serials items for issues no longer in inventory
  • How-to: Withdrawing Inventory and Deleting Records
• Standardize enumeration/chronology and description to make serials items sortable (and requestable)
• Review and update item record material types
• Review item record with status "Technical-migration"

Weeding 

• Identify titles that need weeding
• Print sheets for staff to search online from home
• Online searching includes - OCLC, ABE, CARLI catalog, for holdings and value.
• Review physical titles in question, when in house.
• Develop new lists for withdrawal from home.

Special Collections/Archives

• Create MARC records for finding aids
• While at the library, take pictures of single sheet/small items (posters, manuscript letters, fragments, etc.) create catalog records while working from home, complete next day in the library. 
• If able, bring home small collections of similar materials (pamphlets, sheet music, etc.).
•  Add citation/reference notes (510s) and/or exhibition notes (585s) to records. 

Work From Home Sources

• Harvard Remote Work Project Ideas for TS
• Shana L. McDanold’s Cataloging/Metadata Remote Work List
• Randall, Ryan P. and Jennifer LC Burke. “Library, Archives Workers Share Work-From-Home Ideas.” Library Journal, April, 23, 2020. 
• District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC Cataloging remote work project list