Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--April 2007
Library
Outreach and Campus Interaction
Jody Combs attended the Educause Center for Applied Research presentation on the undergraduate use of technology.
Library-wide
Efforts and Events
Jody Combs continued the beta test of Primo and planned the move to GR 1.0 on "staging" platform. He also met with Ex Libris representatives on April 18 and 19 here at Vanderbilt.
The Library celebrated National Library Workers Day on April 17 with candy
bars for all.
Administrative Services
Public Relations/Communication
Kathy Smith and Celia Walker picked up more papers from Clara Hieronymus, former art critic for the Tennessean.
Staff Development
We held a brown bag on May 3 on The Info Island Project and another on April 12 on Tennessee Libraries and Google.
Work began on the Spring Staff Picnic, scheduled for May 18. Volunteers for the project are: Pat Johnson, Kurt Eger, Janet Thomason, Laura Norris, Debra Stephens, Daisy Whitten, Joell Smith-Borne, Ann Ercelawn and Celia Walker.
Project management training was provided to all library directors, committee chairs and to some project team leaders on April 23. The program was directed by the Staff Development Committee's project team with the support of Vanderbilt HR.
Electronic
Resources and Collection Development
Collection Development
Law recommended a library-wide shared subscription to a package of ejournals published by the Berkeley Electronic Press. While Central and Science and Engineering were interested in the package, neither could commit because of uncertain materials budgets for 2007/2008. We have placed the package on the Collections Committee "wish list," and perhaps we can revisit it in the future.
The Collections Committee has directed the Cataloging Team to cease adding physical libraries to Acorn records for electronic resources. In general, the only holding library for eresources will be the Internet Library. Part of our recommendation was that Law will continue to add a Law location for electronic publications and Divinity will continue add a Divinity location for Divinity School theses and dissertations. Any library can request exceptions to the new policy on a case-by-case basis.
The committee will implement a new set of fund codes for electronic resources to better track what we spend on digital collections. We plan to implement the new structure during the 2007-08 fiscal year.
A subcommittee of the Collections Committee (Peter Brush, Carlin Sappenfield, Eileen Crawford, John Haar) completed a revision of the collection development staffweb.
Public Services
The ESRI campus site license took affect and GIS software is now available and being distributed to faculty, staff, and students.
Jacob Thornton completed instruction of the final class of the 'Intro to GIS' mini-course for HOD faculty, staff, and students. The course consisted of 5 classes with about 7 regular attendees.
The Committee on Undergraduate Information Literacy, chaired by Melinda Brown piloted the Project SAILS information literacy tool. Over 100 undergraduates were recruited to take the half hour web-based test that helps to measure information competencies. We will receive the results in June. CUIL will use the results to inform the Committee's planning for future literacy efforts. (We used Facebook flyers very successfully in getting people to sign-up for participating in the assessment. Flo served as a proctor for one of the many hours that the test was available for taking.
During the week of April 9, the Seat Sweep project team, along with other volunteers, counted the number of people in all of the libraries at 10 AM, 3 PM, and 9 PM each day, noting what kind of seating they were using (carrels, tables, workstations) and whether or not they were using a laptop. Preliminary results of the sweep should be available in May. Julie Blagojevich, project team leader is generating summary reports from all the data gathered. The A&S computer labs also took counts during the same times. Though Eskind did not participate, one count was taken during each of the three hours for comparison purposes.
Annex
Meetings,
Activities and Professional Development
Paul Gherman attended the ASERL meeting in Ashville NC on the 4th and 5th. He was at the CNI meeting in Phoenix on the 16th the 17th and the CRL meeting in Chicago on the 20th.