The Rare Book Team of the Catalog Department met or exceeded all of the goals we set for ourselves in last year's action plan except the goal of having the Beinecke Cataloging Manual fully revised and available on the World Wide Web. We made progress in achieving that goal and now have working drafts of several important portions of the manual available on the web in a password protected directory. Our success in achieving our other goals is summarized in the Annual Report.

The Rare Book Team has set the following goals for the coming year.

1) The Rare Book Team librarians and cataloging assistant will continue to work effectively as a team, performing at a high level of quality and quantity, so that we can achieve the goal of cataloging current Beinecke acquisitions and completing the Beinecke backlog project by Feb. 2001.

Specifically, our quantitative team goal for cataloging (including transfers) is 10,000 titles for 1998/99; this figure is the same as we set as our goal last year. Given that we actually cataloged last year 13,322 monographs (including 473 recon) and 506 serials and given that a highly productive cataloger, Sara Piasecki, will be leaving us Aug. 25, and recognizing that even if it is decided to refill her position or even add yet another cataloger this year, it will be months before a position is filled and new catalogers will require training, we think that we can still reach the goal of 10,000 titles. This goal of 10,000 titles includes:

• 500 serial titles;
• ca. 2500 pamphlets (half the estimated total of 5000) to be recataloged or reconned as part of a pamphlet project to create records in Orbis for pamphlets for which there were no cards in the Beinecke catalogs and which Retro Link Associates (RLA) was unable to convert as part of its recon of the Beinecke main card catalog;
• ca. 418 recon records for Cyrillic titles for which RLA had not completed the recon;
• ca. 268 recon records for Greek titles for which RLA had not completed the recon.

In addition to the 10,000 titles , we plan to work with the Hebraica Team to complete the recon of ca. 730 Hebrew and Yiddish titles which RLA had not completed; work with the Catalog Librarian of the Near Eastern Collection to complete the recon of ca. 47 Near Eastern titles not completed by RLA; work with the East Asian Collection to complete the recon of ca. 306 East Asian titles not completed by RLA.

2) The librarians will continue to make appropriate contributions to the library and profession, balancing our need to do more cataloging with sometimes pressing and often conflicting demands.

3) Effective use will be made of our student workers so that substantial progress is achieved with the Hebraica recon and pamphlet recataloging projects.

4) Good cataloging workflow and effective use of the Rare Book Team workstations in the Beinecke Library will be maintained.

5) The Beinecke Cataloging Manual will be fully revised and made available on the World Wide Web.

6) The Rare Book Team will maintain its own web page on the World Wide Web.

7) All members of the team will have Excel on their workstations and use it to keep track of individual and team statistics.


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