Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--April 2006
Public Relations/Communication
Celia Walker and Paul Gherman met with Professor Cecelia Tichi about her papers. Dr. Tichi agreed to speak to a group of Friends on her book, Exposés and Excess: Muckraking in America, 1900-2000.
Celia and Kathy Smith met with Professor Helguera and Celia picked up papers from Louise LeQuire. Ms. LeQuire was the art editor for the Nashville Banner before it closed. She is also an art critic, teacher and artist based in Nashville. Her papers contain information about the Nashville art scene in the 1940s-1960s, in particular.
Staff Development
We celebrated National Library Worker's Day on April 4th. Pat Johnson, Julie Blagojevich and Celia Walker packaged chocolate bars and Heard logo pins for all staff.
Bill Hook conducted a brown bag on the Divinity renovation for 15 staff members on April 6.
On April 18 we held a Webcast on Archiving and Preserving Web Content for 15 attendees.
Members of the first response team, including Bill, Celia, Flo, George Anglin, Lisa Shipman, John Haar, Sue Davis and Kathy Smith attended an all-day SOLINET training session on Disaster Preparedness.
Electronic
Resources and Collection Development
Collection Development
The Information Alliance negotiated a three-year renewal of its contract with Springer Science & Business Media for electronic access to all Springer journals, including those formerly published by Kluwer. Because the new deal is structured differently from our former separate deals with Springer and Kluwer, we expect 2006-07 costs for each participating VU library to be slightly lower than 2005-06 costs.
We acquired the JSTOR Arts and Sciences IV collection, which will ultimately include over 100 titles. Despite the collection's name, most of the inclusive journals are in law, education, and business. Peabody agreed to pay the $12,000 one-time Archive Capital Fee, while Peabody, Law, Management, and Central will share the $7,125 annual fee. Management will no longer need to purchase the JSTOR Business Collection because all titles in that collection are incorporated into A&S IV.
Law has decided to cancel its subscription to Westlaw Campus. Central, Science & Engineering, Music, and Divinity have expressed interest in continuing the subscription. John continued to negotiate with Thomson, Westlaw's corporate parent, for pricing terms acceptable to the group.
Public Services
Since budget funding has been approved for the GIS program development, Flo Wilson met with Rick Stringer-Hye to pursue licensing and training alternatives. Both of them also met with Sharon Weiner, Sue Erickson, Rahn Huber, Rachel Vacek, and Lisa Shipman to discuss the search, which Sharon will chair, and how further development of the program will proceed. Sue and Rick will serve on the search committee, and Sue, Rick and Amy Stewart-Mailhiot are interested in pursuing the GIS training. Flo met with Brian Christens to get a better feel for the kind of work done in the Census Information Center.
Interviews were completed for the Music Library director position. Tracy Primich began her new position as director of the Science and Engineering Library. Flo began working with Tracy to get her oriented.
Flo met with Mandy Henk to discuss the Faculty Book Delivery Project Team's final report; it should be submitted in early May. They also discussed the Reserve Task Force's work on workflow revision and documentation.
Flo attended the first meeting of the Reference Forum, an informal gathering of staff involved in doing reference work across the system.
Annex
158 shelves of new campus transfers arrived during the month. We continued "catch-up" with microfilm transfers from previous months which had been queued. Our Phase II, Spacesaver shelving installation was completed on March 4th for the University Archives.
Library Messenger Service & GLB Mailroom
ames McCullough, Barry Bennett, and Greg Collins each had large roles in the success of the New Orleans Public Library book drive. Without their daily pick ups and Barry's storage of the many boxes, donations could have been over-flowing. James and Greg also worked with Jody Combs to move a portable air-conditioning unit to the GLB server room.
Copier/Printer Services
VUprint volume rose in April, not unexpected as the semester comes to a close. We had a brief outage where VUprint was placed in free mode when authentication via VUNet ID's failed, but the outage lasted only an hour. Copier volume continues to fall gradually. All three new photocopiers were installed, and three old copiers have been removed from service, reducing the number of public copiers.
Building issues were highlighted by the failure of the A/C unit for the 4th floor server room. Heroic efforts by LITS staff and Dewey got all three emergency portable A/C units in the server room to keep the temperature down to a low broil, while Plant Ops fixed the roof top unit in between the heavy thunderstorms during that two day interval.
Interlibrary Loan Service
Although statistics are not available from OCLC yet for April, it was a busy month, and indications are that we borrowed and loaned more materials than last year at this time. We were pleased that Rachel Adams's position was reclassified to Library Assistant IV.
Copyright Clearing Service
With work on Spring electronic reserves and ClassPak permissions finished, Jim Webb started back on GLB signage and worked on a project for ILL.
Technology
Projects and Activities
Television
News Archive
Subscriptions
Meetings,
Activities and Professional Development
Celia met with Wayne Moore at the TN State Library and Archives to discuss the middle Tennessee Volunteer Voices project.