LCCN, September 12, 2012
*Part 2: A day in the work life of Bob Dardano, Acquisitions Librarian*
*By Bob Dardano*
*Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate*
*African, Latin American and Western European Division***
*Benelux, France and Italy Section*
A colleague of mine is undertaking a project to evaluate whether or not
we should change vendors for his country, or at least take on a new,
second vendor. The new vendor vying for our business has sent us a list
of their available titles. We need to search the titles, find out from
the recommending officers which ones we'd like to receive, and then
place orders for them as a sort of test. We need to determine if what
they offer is what we want, and if they can deliver it. I am helping my
colleague search the list of titles, so this morning I searched 40 more
in the ILS.
After lunch I worked on some shelf ready books which we had received a
week or so ago. The process here is much simpler than the one dealing
with non-shelf ready books. Here I simply check off the books on the
invoice to indicate they've been received, check the call number label
to be sure it's properly affixed to the book, and note that the invoice
of books has been reviewed. If there is a problem with one of these
shelf ready books, it is difficult to send it back to Casalini since
it's already been cataloged and prepared for the shelf. This happens
very rarely as we have a solid workflow for this project. I then give
the books to a technician for further processing and inform my
supervisor that she can pay for the cataloging and preparation work for
the books from that invoice. There were no problems with any of the
books I processed today.
We had a section meeting this afternoon to discuss seating assignments
in an area where we are to be relocated temporarily while our own space
is being renovated.
After the meeting I spent some time ordering books from Casalini. Our
recommending officers have access to Casalini's Web site, and they check
the site for titles which they feel we should have in our collections.
They then note their recommendations on the Web pages and I follow up
and check to be sure the titles conform to our collections policy
statements, are current, and are not already in the collections.
Non-current titles, as well as serials and multi-part monographs,
require a purchase order which I create as necessary. I then order the
books via the Web site or via e-mail.
There are other aspects of my job that I didn't get to today. These
include opening packages from our exchange partners and gift donors,
processing the exchange and gift material, sending acknowledgment
letters, checking to see if our exchange partners are sending us what
they committed to send, and claiming issues of serials and monographic
series which may be missing. I also didn't get to follow up on those
e-mails I read this morning. Maybe tomorrow.
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Melanie Polutta
Library of Congress
ALAWE:Iberia/Rio
Librarian cataloger
