September-November 2002

The project began well underway by the official start up date of September 2. Library holdings, status and call numbers of all volumes available in the greater Chicago area have been added to the private notes field on the corresponding serials records. We began by indexing ATLAS titles, and will continue that policy until all have been finished, probably by the end of the third quarter 2003.

To date, we have finished the RIP indexing for Catholic Biblical Quarterly (1939-1948), Ecumenical Review (1948-1949), Hebrew Union College Annual (1919, 1924-1948), Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology (1947-1948), and Journal of Pastoral Care (1947-1948).

Indexing has begun on American Catholic Sociological Review (1940-1945), Bibliotheca Sacra (1843-1849), Church History (1932), Eastern Buddhist (1921-1922), Journal of Biblical Literature (1881-1913, 1919), and Orate Fratres (1927-1941, with many gaps in coverage due to incomplete holdings at Regenstein Library).

Approved RIP indexing will, presumably, appear in the February 2003 release with the exception of Church History, Eastern Buddhist, and Orate Fratres.

Todd Ferry's training as a RIP indexer is virtually complete. While his accuracy in handling the minutiae of MARC needs improvement, he is competent to deal will virtually all aspects of RIP periodical indexing and approving. His day-to-day output far exceeds my expectation of an indexer-in-training. A NACO training course in late October decidedly honed his skills with MARC, and has given him excellent tools for name authority work, a unique requirement for this project. His intelligent and creative additions to the RIP workflow have materially augmented the efficiency of the workflow and quality of the product. Todd is, quite simply, a project director's dream incarnate, and the overall success of this project will in no small measure be due to his presence on the staff.

No insuperable technical difficulties were encountered during the startup phase of this project. ARDIS, without benefit of a user-friendly global search and change function and chronic systemic sluggishness, imposes it own limitations on our work.

The beginning of January will see the hiring of the second full-time indexer for RIP, Benjamin H. Butler. His training will be the project director's lookout, though Todd will assist in many ways and, it is anticipated the rest of the Index staff will play their roles. If his training goes well, he will join Todd and the director in Hyde Park come July.

At some point in January, Todd will join the project director as a satellite indexer working the Hyde Park libraries, where roughly 80 percent of our title holdings reside. Laptops with Ethernet and modem connections constitution the main tools of our franchise. Most weeks, I suspect that Todd will come in to the Loop office once weekly for editruns, authority work, meetings, timecard legerdemain, and other matters. The project director will visit S. Wacker Drive twice or three times weekly, until Butler's training is complete.

Aside from the difficulty in obtaining pre-WWII periodicals and the dilapidated nature of many, the necessity for establishing names sets RIP apart from the work of the rest of the Index Department. To assist in this enterprise, and to reverse the proliferation of split records in ATLA RDB, we "establish" most RIP names more or less following NACO practices, then enter our data into an Excel file. The Excel file constitutes our first source of authoritative names, allowing us to cut and paste into the ARDIS records, thus avoiding typing errata while maintaining a very high level of consistency. Most names are established by triangulating between ATLA RDB, OCLC and LC, though other on-line sources and hard copy reference works come into limited play. Over the last quarter, we have established just under 1,000 names. While name authority work adds time to indexing, in my view the tradeoff is more than recompensed by the historical accuracy imparted to the project and the ultimate consolidation of the current cancerous growths of proper names in ATLA RDB. A retrospective indexing project that fails to distinguish between articles published by John J. Collins, current Professor of Old Testament studies at Yale University and President of the Society of Biblical Literature, and John J. Collins, d. 1991, a prolific author on Old Testament topics, would fail in its mission to make the scholarly past available to future generations.

Respectfully Submitted,

Steven W. Holloway, RIP Project Director
December 20, 2002