Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--August 2003
Library Outreach and Campus Interaction
The Television News
Archive celebrated its 35th anniversary with a presentation by Marshall
Breeding to library staff, an open house at the TV News, and a recognition
dinner for the TV News staff and their guests.
The actual anniversary date also represented the day on which the TV
News began digital capture of the evening news, instead of recording it on
videotape.
The University
Printing Task Force continued its work with each of the representatives
checking with the appropriate schools' or library's administration. Flo Wilson gathered comment and began
drafting a summary document of the Task Force findings.
During the spring
and summer, some questions arose concerning the cooperative library agreement
with Fisk. We had run into issues with
Fisk students having outstanding obligations, student arrivals without a
card, and summer use that we had not anticipated. Flo consulted with Fisk and clarified some concerns. She also discussed in some detail the
limitations of hours of availability for the Management and Law libraries
because of building closures evenings and weekends. At the end of each of Fisk's semesters, we will run a report to
determine if there are outstanding fines and/or books checked out so that we
can resolve these issues before the students are gone for the summer or have
graduated.
Library-wide Efforts
OUL and the University Librarian's Advisory Group discussed possible projects for funding from our Reassessment funds. We will submit a request in September, and this request will include a large number of workstation replacements, since we were unable to undertake that effort last year.
The Library focus on enhanced customer service continued with Dennis Clark and Sharon Weiner offering another round of their Service Quality 101 workshop. OUL will continue to promote development of programs for the improvement of customer service.
A
committee was formed to take a look at the Library's Staffweb. Celia Walker will chair this effort with
help from Lisa Shipman and Suellen Stringer-Hye.
Administration and Staff
Norman Nash began
modeling activities for the preparation of the FY 2004/05 budget.
The
Library's Copy Service will be replacing many of the library's
photocopiers. Norman and Dewey James
worked with Bill Hook, Chair, and Sherre Harrington on a committee to recommend
replacements. A vendor was selected,
and the machines have been ordered.
Susan
Smith is making good progress on the Library's developing Policy and Procedure
Manual. Flo, Lisa, Norman and Susan met
to review its content and organization.
Deb
Sommer joined the library staff as the new director of the Walker Management
Library. Flo was able to orient her on
her arrival and hand off those director responsibilities. Katrina King was hired as an Administrative
Assistant in the Law Library.
Librarian
searches are underway in Law, Management (2), and Science &
Engineering. A candidate for the Law
position interviewed in August, and a couple of interviews for the Management
Electronic Resources Librarian will be scheduled in September. Lisa is involved in each of these searches
as an ex officio member.
A new
employee welcome session was convened and four relatively new staff attended.
Paul
Gherman and Celia completed their library tours as part of Celia's orientation
to the Library system by visiting Technical Services and the Annex.
In
other OUL staff news, Robert Richmond resigned his messenger position. Pat Johnson and Susan attended the Staples
Fair.
Public Relations/Communication
Celia met with Bonnie Ertelt to help plan the next issue of the Acorn Chronicle. She met with Creative Services and Chris Skinker regarding the Library holiday card. Other activities included designing bookplates for Mr. Poindexter and Dr. Calhoun, and editing and preparing the State of the Library report planned for fall publication. The various celebrations surrounding the TV News anniversary were arranged through Celia.
Library Access
The beginning of the school year always generates a flurry of activity relating to library access as new students and faculty must get their ID cards. This year was more challenging than many. The University Card Office has implemented a new generation ID card and access system, and the library's internal assignment of responsibility for card issues was tested under the new system. Members of CAG, Celia, Susan, Pat and Flo met with representatives from the Card Office to clarify concerns and seek resolution to problems.
The Card Office is still working on providing the annual statistics we need from the access system; they have run into a number of problems in extracting these. For a period of time, all new Management students were not coded to have library access, although that is the default; the Card Office was able to run a global program to ensure that all students were coded for library access. The Library has had one access point directly into the card system, and Elaine Goleski used to manage that. With the new system, the Card Office has provided us with two access points for now and maybe others in the future. One is in the Biomedical Library and it is now working well. Pat had the other until her workstation died. After consultation with Central, the decision was to reactivate the second connection at the Central Information Desk; Divinity will also come upstairs to use this on occasion.
Celia retains the responsibility for providing and arranging for courtesy library cards, and she had several to deal with this month in addition to participating in the many Card Office discussions.
Development
Celia is well into the planning for the Friends of the Library Fall Membership Meeting; she has been working with the university's Special Events staff as the specifics get underway. Celia and Susan began work on updating the information we have available about endowment fund centers; Celia also began creating a record of donors of book collections.
Inter-Library Loan
The Library brought
up the new online ILL request system (ILLiad) on August 11th, included are the
OUL ILL operation, Law Interlibrary Services and Biomedical Document Delivery
Service. Jim Toplon led the committee
that put the system in place. During
the first weeks, ILL staff were learning all the ins and outs of the system in
production, and modifications and adjustments continued to be made as needed.
The volume of borrowing and lending requests remained high, so we all got
plenty of practice right away, but experienced remarkably few problems.
Copyright Clearance
Jim Webb concentrated
almost entirely on completing all permissions processing for fall ClassPaks, as
usual for the hectic month leading up to the new academic year.
Web Page Development
The Web Task Force
hosted an open staff meeting to demonstrate how broadcast searching and
reference linking services work. The
meeting was well attended. Marshall
demonstrated the features of the system in place at the Boston College Library,
and John Haar described our review process.
ISAG and the Electronic Resources Task Force will join the Web Task
Force in reviewing vendor proposals. We
expect to schedule on-site visits and demonstrations from vendors in later
September or early October. All three groups will make a purchase
recommendation to LMC. The target date
for the recommendation is mid-October.
Electronic Resources and Collection Development
The Collection
Development Advisory Group received responses to its request for pricing
information for our core databases from Ebsco, FirstSearch, and Cambridge
Scientific Abstracts. Ovid-SilverPlatter, our current vendor for these
databases, also submitted a proposal significantly reducing its current prices.
CDAG will meet in September to decide how to proceed.
Our license for
Wiley Interscience is part of a deal negotiated by TENN-SHARE. The license is to be renewed for 2004. John and Linda Phillips, University of
Tennessee, are discussing renewal terms with Wiley for the license, which
provides electronic access to all Wiley journals. Including our Wiley print subscriptions; the contract has a total
value of over $300,000. When Wiley structures a proposal acceptable to
TENN-SHARE, all participating VU libraries will have an opportunity to comment
and recommend changes.
Annex
The Annex staff, Clint Grantham, Joe Collins, and Leonor van
Cotthem attended Mulberry pre-migration training on August 27th as
they prepared to migrate to Mulberry on Wednesday, September 3rd.
Faculty gift collections were delivered directly to the Annex by the
family of a local Civil War collector who has donated his collection to Special
Collections. Boxes of gift materials
for both Central Collections Development and for Music Collection Development
were sent weekly from the Annex. Sue
Davis accompanied Kathy Smith to the Annex to open sequestered boxes of newly
received books, inspecting and separating books, which had had prior bug
infestation.
The weekly Divinity Library “Reduction in Inventory” cataloging project continues, as does the Music Robinson cataloging project. Yet another project found the Annex staff at work with Lee Ann Lannom, Mary Beth Blalock, Kathy Smith, and Pete Wilson as they review the Education Z's, “awaiting collections decisions”.
Peg Earheart resumed customized Annex tours. Two such orientations were held this
month. More tours are planned for
September.
Statistics: 663
linear feet of new transfers arrived; 642 items were requested for circulation;
forty-four of which were sent to other than the owning campus libraries. Another 259 pages were photocopied for 35
ILL requests; and 48 pages were photocopied, and then faxed for 6 campus
patrons who needed articles.
Technology Projects and Activities
The Digital Collections Committee has compiled a status report and placed it on the committee website. The committee was asked by LMC to review a SQIT proposal for a 'just in time' digitization service. We reported back to LMC, and the conclusion, as well as the recommendation, was to consider this as one among many tools for preservation of fragile materials, but a number of other steps might also be taken to clarify preservation issues within the Library. Several of these latter questions were turned over to CDAG.
The Committee is developing a pre-planning/planning preparation document that we hope will be useful for potential projects as they are brought to the Digital Collections Committee. Several of the committee members will be testing the usability and usefulness of this document by responding to it related to projects that they have underway.
Television News Archive
As noted above, the TV News celebrated its 35th year of
existence. The Archive made the cut-over to digital recording of new
broadcasts on the anniversary date. So
far, over 1000 hours of material have been digitized.
Marshall met with staff at the Library of Congress to discuss issues related to the change to digital recording and to discuss increased payments for the Library of Congress for the work that we do.
External meetings, activities and professional
development
Paul traveled to
OCLC to attend the Office of Research Advisory Committee meeting. He participated in interviews for the new
director of the Nashville Public Library main branch, and attended a meeting of
the search committee for the new Information Technology Services director.
Marshall gave the keynote
speech for the Virginia SOLINET Users Meeting at George Mason University in
Fairfax, VA on August 22nd. He spoke on "Current Trends in Library
Automation: the ILS and Beyond." Marshall's regular "Systems
Librarian" was published in Computers in Libraries and he authored
contributions to the October 2003 issue of "Smart Libraries
Newsletter" published by the American Library Association.
Celia completed the online course offered by the Association of Research Libraries "Library Fund Development". She also attended the book signing by Michael Sims at Davis Kidd. Michael used to work in Special Collections, and is becoming a well-known author; his latest book is Adam's Navel: a natural and cultural history of the human form.
9/16/03