Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--April 2004

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Susan Barge, Associate Provost for Residential Colleges, reviewed the planning for residential colleges and especially the Freshman Commons on the Peabody Campus for Library staff at a 'brown bag' coordinated by Lisa. She has done similar presentations in a number of venues, including for Peabody and for the Associate Deans meeting, which Norman Nash and Flo Wilson attended. Despite the distant implementation date, planning is becoming more detailed; the Library will be providing input on how the library might help to support this development.

The Vanderbilt and Sewanee, University of the South agreement pledging cooperation between the two institutions was signed by our Chancellor and the President of Sewanee in a ceremony at the University of the South. Reciprocal library privileges are included in the agreement, and Flo and Celia attended on behalf of the Vanderbilt Library.

The new Assistant Vice Chancellor for Information Technology Services, Matt Hall, arrived on campus in April. Paul, Marshall, Jody, and Flo met with him to discuss information concerns and library interests.

Lisa helped coordinated the Library's USAC representatives who volunteered to be 2004 Community Survey Ambassadors in an effort to help library staff with the survey. The satisfaction survey was conducted April 26 - May 7.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

The annual Spring Staff Event was held April 27 at Percy Warner Park. All who were able to attend enjoyed a cookout and potluck dinner. Committee members included Patricia Johnson, Susan Smith, Debra Stephens and Celia Walker. Special thanks go to Norman Nash for transporting all of the grills.

Approximately 250 book-shaped cookies were distributed to Library staff and a number of University administrators for National Library Worker Day. Helping with the project were Kurt Eger, Paul Gherman, Lisa Shipman, Susan Smith and Celia Walker.

All of the work groups for the strategic planning process met and held interviews with relevant members of the Vanderbilt and Nashville communities. For more information about all of the groups' activities, visit: http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/strategicplan/

Administration and Staff

Norman, Flo, Lisa, and Susan met at various times to discuss the status of this year's library budget, preparation of new reports to share with the rest of OUL, and the transition of the TV News budget.

Flo met with the Technical Services TechForce team to review the budget development and allocation process. She and Roberta also met with Juanita to do the same. Flo generated a couple of reports from previous time/cost study results to estimate binding and marking costs per item and original cataloging costs per item. A TS task force requested the binding and marking data, and Juanita needed the cataloging data for possible future grant proposals.

Public Relations/Communication

'Wallpaper' showing a clear-cut forest and urging conservation was created for display on public workstations for Earth Week. The task force met as a group and with student representatives from Vanderbilt Recycles.

Development

Renewal letters were sent to Heard Society members.

A reception was held in the W.T. Bandy Center to announce the acquisition of the Morris Wachs Collection. Yvonne Boyer and Celia Walker organized the event.

Two new bookplates were completed: The Library Acquisition Fund for Shakespeare Studies Honoring Ann Jeannalie Cook and the John W. Poindexter Book Acquisition Fund.

Inter-Library Loan

The demand for interlibrary loan borrowing and lending continued at high levels in April. Year-to-date (July-April) we had filled over 12% more requests for Vanderbilt users this year than last. During April, we provided Vanderbilt users an average turnaround time of just under 12 days (from patron's submission of the request to notice of delivery).

Copyright Clearance

Clearance requests for electronic reserves and ClassPaks slowed in April, and Jim Webb focused on revising the database system used to track copyright clearance requests, permissions, and costs.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

The Implementation Team devoted most of its attention to configuring the SFX menu. When users click the SFX button, they will link to a menu that will list one or more options (such as links to full text from each of several vendors). The team has approved a tentative design for the menu. We are now determining the menu structure, which entails issues such as

* the order in which various services (such as full text, abstracts, an ILL request form link, holdings, etc.) will display
* which "targets" will be suppressed in the presence of others (the ILL link need not display if we have the full text of an article available, for instance)
* the sequence in which targets will display (if an article is accessible from multiple vendors, which should we offer first?)
* the text that will describe each service

We expect that we will be ready for library staff to test SFX very soon. To track our progress, please see http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/WebTaskForce/SFXimplementation.htm .

Paul, John, Roberta and Flo met to discuss the ARL proposal to digitize government documents. We agreed that the Library would agree to participate by funding the project at the level of $15,000 per year for 7 years, if the project is approved by the general ARL membership. It is hoped that by doing so with a commitment to making these publicly available that the commercialization of retrospective collections can be forestalled and/or provide pressure for making them more cost affordable.

Annex

165 shelves of new stacks transfers arrived from our campus libraries. More electronic dissertations arrived from LITS and were shelved. 13 boxes of new Latin American Collection gifts arrived from Iowa's Professor Robert Davis. Meanwhile, Collections Development requested boxes of Robinson and Collier gifts be sent to campus. Only ten Robinson gift boxes now remain in the Annex.

345 Annex Web requests were received during April 2004. 588 items were retrieved for campus requests. 14% of these 588 items were requested by the patron to be sent to other than the owning library. The largest number of items pulled was owned by the Central Library. The second highest requests were for items owned by Owen Management Library. The entire aggregate of Pascal Pia miniatures was requested by the Bandy Center.

81 volumes were sent for Inter-Library patrons. 25 items requested for Inter-Library loan were denied for lending, due to the fragility of the material. Thus, during April 2004 only 69% of ILL requests for Library Annex materials could be honored. Only 21 Inter-Library loan patrons asked for photocopies of articles, of which 226 pages were reproduced.

Technology Projects and Activities

John Haar, Jody Combs, and Flo met to talk about further use of LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe). We have been testing this approach to archiving e-journals, begun at Stanford and including a number of institutions, for a year or so, and it is now ready to go live with libraries archiving a select number of titles that they will be responsible for. John will be helping to identify the titles and date ranges; Jody will continue to monitor the software and the operations (largely automatic).

Television News Archive

With the notification last month of the award of the grant from the NEH to digitize the retrospective videotape collection of evening news, much effort this month was devoted to preparing the physical space and technical infrastructure needed for that project.

John Lynch organized and carried out a plan to reorganize the physical facilities of the Archive to make way for both the NEH grant and the upcoming expansion of the Archive to record and abstract Fox News. George Anglin and Mills Bell did most of the work installing and configuring new hardware and setting up the RAID containers and formatting the drives. Once their work was complete, Marshall configured the network shares and began moving the MPEG files onto them.

A record number of 70 loan requests were submitted this month. Digitization increased from past months with 357.5 hours directed toward digitization in April, 255.5 of which was for retrospective material. A total of 10 colleges and universities became subscribers in April: Auburn University, Berea College, Bethany College. Boston University, Iowa State University, Maryville College, Trinity University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Richmond, and University of Texas at Austin. Trial subscriptions were activated for 16 institutions.

Meetings, activities and professional development

Paul testified before the House Judiciary Committee concerning the SuperDMCA bill. An amendment was successfully added to protect libraries from prosecution under this bill.

Paul attended the CNI meeting in Washington.

Paul attended the CRL meeting in Chicago.

The Library hosted a series of SOLINET workshops April 27 through April 29 in the Electronic Classroom. Special thanks go to Susan Smith for her help.

Flo and Paul met by telephone with Dilys Morris, and the Director of the library at Notre Dame, Jennifer Younger, to review the presentation Jennifer will be making at the upcoming ARL meeting on the Staff Time Allocation Study. Comparative data was reviewed, and decisions to continue with another week this year and four sample weeks next year were confirmed. All Vanderbilt libraries except Law and Biomedical will be participating to make the cross institutional comparisons as equivalent as possible. Vanderbilt hopes to gain useful information to inform the Strategic Planning and ongoing implementation efforts.

Marshall attended the Spring Task Force Meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Arlington, VA. (April 14 - 15). He convened the meeting of the Sirsi Large Sites Special Interest Group at the Sirsi Super Conference in St. Louis (April 19th).

Marshall taught three full-day SOLINET workshops sponsored by the North Carolina State Library in Ashville, NC. Marshall's regular "Systems Librarian" was published in Computers in Libraries. Marshall also contributed to the May 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.

15 May 2004