Mission Statement

We provide access to Yale’s outstanding collection of Hebrew-script pamphlets, monographs, journals, web sites, databases, microforms, and other media, in order to support teaching and advance the education and research objectives of Yale students and scholars. Moreover, by helping to develop Yale’s online catalog and through our contributions to international bibliographic databases, we support the work of students and scholars at institutions around the world.

Specifically, we maintain descriptive metadata and subject analysis for some 75,000 Hebraica items, with approximately 1,400 new items added each year. This requires continuous creation of new bibliographic records and intensive revision of older ones (e.g., those identified as substandard or obsolete).

We are committed to timely and accurate representation of Yale’s holdings

We cultivate expert knowledge of local and national cataloging standards in order to maximize consistency and usability of bibliographic data.

We create documentation for Team policies and procedures in order to preserve institutional memory and ensure that team practices are in alignment with the department and university. All team members are encouraged to cotribute to knowledge base via our wiki pages.

Values

We embrace the values that have been articulated for the Library as a whole, namely:

• Integrity
• Respect
• Excellence
• Creativity and Flexibility
• Open Communication

Specific Goals, Subgoals, and Action Items

1. Support Unlocking Collections Initiative and Reader Services (and, generally, ongoing research and educational needs of Yale faculty and students)

• Fulfill Rush and ILL requests within 24 hours of receipt

• Catalog new items as received from Judaica Curator, Acquisitions, and other sources, giving highest priority to items of high value (e.g., AOB and rare books), of current scholarly interest (e.g., university press publications), and those easily (and therefore most efficiently) processed.

• Reduce backlog of 6,000 uncataloged volumes.

  Action: Hire student to assist with LC copy cataloging.

2. Ensure accuracy and integrity of catalog data

• Review items cataloged by students and those cataloged-on-receipt by curatorial staff before routing to Preparations

  Action: Review within 2 months of receipt (use tracking form)

• Resolve outstanding RECON errors and problems

  Action: Bring access points into alignment with current established headings as discovered or requested

3. Maintain Team Best Practices and Accountability

• Improve documentation

  Action: use wiki to document changing workflows, suggested enhancements, innovations, etc.

• Keep accurate statistics

• Identify “expert user”

• Facilitate training and support

4. Support library and university-wide activities through collaboration, support, committee work, etc.

   • Support Judaica curatorial staff on-receipt cataloging, retrieval of items they need from backlog, workstation troubleshooting, etc.

   • Serve on library and university committees as needed

   • Test new software releases and train members of other units as needed

5. Support international programs and services

   • Test and help implement Unicode applications in order to provide optimal multi-lingual research environment.

   • Contribute to International Associates program as appropriate or needed.

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