Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--April 2005

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Paul attended a NALA board meeting.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

Lisa coordinated two Web casts as brown bag sessions and one brown bag presented by Melinda Brown and Janice Adlington.

Flo and Lisa attended the April meeting of the Associate Deans where they heard a presentation by Rick Wood, Project Manager for Student Systems Planning & Implementation regarding a budget system assessment for the Academic Enterprise. This will identify opportunities for improving current process, specifically as it related to the ways in which budgets are developed, approved, maintained, and used. Additional 2005/2006 budget information was also discussed with the group.

Administration and Staff

Paul, Flo, and Norman met with Provost Zeppos, Dennis Hall, and Nancy Falls to talk about the Library's 2005/2006 budget, which was approved as submitted. Our work with the schools, in advance of the hearing, was considerably more interactive this year than in earlier years.

Members of CAG and Flo met with MaryAnn Dicks from the Vanderbilt Card Office. MaryAnn wanted to address changes in the Card Office and the services that they provide. More information was needed on several issues, and it was decided to have MaryAnn come to a future CAG meeting to address particular concerns and plans.

Pat completed work with Accounting on a five-year audit of the SOLINET prepayment account.

Public Relations and Communications

A gazillion cookies were distributed to Library staff and to key University administrators to recognize and celebrate National Library Workers' Day. Bookmarks for National Library Week were distributed to circulation desks.

On recommendation from the Training Coordinators, we decided to renew, for another year, the New Horizon training for desktop applications. The training opportunities continue to be well used.

Work began on the Spring Staff Outing with a staff survey about location, time and food preferences. Many good ideas came out of the responses, chief among which was the desire for the event to be catered and for working staff to be given the opportunity to attend. The Volunteer Committee includes: Merry Balthrop, Mary Colosia Conn, Molly Dohrman, Pat Johnson, and Celia.

Celia attended an informational lunch meeting held by the Vanderbilt bookstore.

Rahn Huber invited Celia to attend a meeting with Betsy Fisher, Marsha Lanier, and others at the Nashville Public Library to explore ways that we can collaborate on programming, staff development, and publicity.

Development

Paul and Celia met with some Heard Society members to discuss ways to increase participation in the Heard Society, the highest donor level of the library.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

MetaLib Trial

Dale Poulter worked with ExLibris to install MetaLib on our server on April 26. The Implementation Team received training from ExLibris staff on April 29. Library staff will be invited to participate in the MetaLib trial during May, and we have scheduled a staff open house to review MetaLib with the Implementation Team on May 19.

VUFinder Update

We converted to version 3 of SFX (VUFinder). Dale Poulter encountered some significant problems with the first attempt to download the new version, but after consulting with ExLibris, a second attempt was successful. Version 3 looks and works much like version 2. The most noticeable change is the addition of the Citation Capture tool, which enables users to format periodical citations in databases to APA, MLA, and other standard styles. The SFX Team is considering employing the A-Z ejournal list in version 3 as a replacement for our current list.

Homepage Development

Rick Stringer-Hye and Chris Benda created a "Computers in the Libraries" page linked from the Heard homepage (in the Library Services section). Based on a survey of all our libraries, the page includes a library-by-library inventory of public workstation locations, software loaded on workstations, laptops, printers, wireless access, network ports, and other information about computing resources. Development of the page resulted from student government expressions of students' need for computing resources, especially during exams.

Interlibrary Loan Service

April was very busy for ILL borrowing and lending both, as users pushed for end-of-semester needs. Although searching and transmitting requests for Vanderbilt patrons was hampered by continued widespread connectivity problems with the OCLC Resource Sharing System (the replacement for the OCLC ILL Subsystem), a record number of items were requested.

Staff from Austin Peay State University visited to learn about our ILLiad implementation, as APSU plans to have the system installed over the summer.

Copyright Clearance Service

The main focus during April was obtaining clearances for electronic reserves, and Jim Webb also worked on revised signage for the GLB.

Annex

Peg and Flo meet with David Price, Environmental Health and Safety, at the Annex. We looked at several different issues associated with workplace safety, and David will be providing us with some feedback and suggestions. Peg and Flo also met with Sue Davis and Work Management staff on issues regarding preservation quality lighting for our storage facility. Peg met with the majority of our University tenants and a few of our Library divisions/departments regarding their Annex primary floor space usage. Some reduced their boxed storage.

April 18th we had to suspend weekly transfers from the campus libraries. This was due to the delay in our Spring 2005 Spacesaver Shelving installation. At this writing, our new, but still tentative date for the electronic shelving's rail system to be brought to the Annex is Monday, May 23rd. Once the rails and decking are firmly in place, the work can begin on building the vertical supports. Peg will be contacting each Library with specific transfer resumption details, once we have firm installation dates.

April showered us with a variety of facilities projects. The Stockade Wall removal was a major undertaking, as boxed materials had to be cleared from both in front and in back of these paneled walls for the carpenters to dismantle the paneling, the wall studs, and the floor supports. All Annex staff spent time hoisting hundreds of boxes of books and box of papers to the 2nd Floor, but Joe and Clint did the majority of the hauling. Stationary shelving was dismantled and re-installed in different configurations for our folio collection and for Special Collections' Oversize materials.

Static steel shelving was also reconfigured for long-awaited "off-the-floor" room for University Archives materials. Part of the newly designed 11-foot high UA shelving area has been installed; more will follow next week.

The 2nd Floor Peabody Room received newly positioned lighting. Electricians also installed dedicated circuit boxes for our new electronic shelving.

975 items were retrieved for campus requests. 168 of these items were requested by the patron to be sent to other than the owning library. The Central Library owned the most items pulled. The second highest requests were for items owned by the Science Library. We also faxed 179 pages for campus patrons. 105 volumes were sent for Inter-Library patrons and 305 photocopies of articles sent for ILL.

Technology Projects and Activities

Initial activities have begun for the TV News Archive to collaborate with the Informedia Project in the Computer Science department of Carnegie Mellon University. Vanderbilt is a participant on a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation. Professor Michael Christel, a Senior Systems Scientist at CMU, has submitted a grant proposal to investigate the use of the automatic video indexing technologies developed by the Informedia Project with selected portions of our collection of news programming. The grant proposal was submitted to NSF in early May. For this initial grant opportunity, Vanderbilt will be named as a collaborator and will be reimbursed for any costs associated with our participation.

Television News Archive

NEH Project

The NEH-funded digitizing project progressed at full speed with a full staff. At the end of February, the collection had been digitized from 1968 - May 1995.

Subscriptions

In April 2005, The University of Texas at Dallas converted their trial subscription to a paid subscription and Providence College and Colby College requested trial subscriptions.

Paul and Marshall met with Kevin Davis to review the business agreement with NELINET for their role as exclusive marketing agent for the Vanderbilt Television News Archive.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

Paul gave a talk at ACRL on Virtual Storage.

A number of library staff gave presentations at the Tennessee Library Association's annual conference. John co-presented a program on collaborative collection development; Marshall spoke on the Television News Archive; and Celia spoke on the subject of artists' papers in Tennessee.

Celia served as a judge for the annual Intermuseum Council of Nashville (ICON) exhibition awards.

Celia, Flo, and Paul attended the Special Library Association's Southern Appalachian Chapter meeting held at the Peabody Library.

Jim Toplon met with the TENN-SHARE TEL-II Rapid Delivery Task Force during the TLA Annual Meeting in Nashville.

John Haar attended the annual business meeting of the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago.

Marshall participated in the training session for MetaLib given by Ex Libris on April 29th.

Marshall attended the Coalition for Networked Information spring taskforce meeting in Washington, DC, on April 4-5.

Marshall's publications this month include his Systems Librarian column in Computers in Libraries magazine on "Looking Toward the Future of Library Technology" and contributions to ALA's Smart Libraries Newsletter.

10 May 2005