Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--August 2005
Library
Outreach and Campus Interaction
Paul went on this year's Roads Scholars Tour.
Flo attended the Vanderbilt Card Office Annual Users Meeting.
Student Life hosted a demo of the Events Management System currently used in a couple of university settings. The demo was for an enterprise level system, and the hope was to identify other offices within the university that might be interested in participating. While the Library might be able to use it for scheduling activities for meeting rooms, equipment, and carrels, it was not clear that participation would be cost effective. We have asked to be included in future communications about further developments.
Library-wide
Efforts and Events
A
donuts and coffee discussion was held on August 8 in the GLB Staff Lounge.
Paul, Flo and Lisa answered questions about librarians' salary comparisons
and the employee performance review process.
Administration
and Staff
Lisa, Pat and Flo attended the information session held to explain the new e-procurement process which we can begin using later this fall.
Personnel
Paul, Flo, Celia, Peg and Sue Davis met with Juanita to discuss her plans to develop a grant proposal to NEH for shelving and housing of humanities library collections. Juanita will develop the proposal further with Peg's and Sue's help on describing appropriate housing and shelving. The draft of what is needed will be done around the end of August so that we have time to meet the Oct. 3 submission deadline.
Staff Development
Two brown bag programs
were offered in August:
Electronic
Resources and Collection Development
Web Development
The SFX Task Force changed the label on our SFX button from VUFinder to Findit@VU. While the former name was clever, public service staff reported that it sometimes confused patrons. Staff found the new name to be more illustrative of the button's purpose and potentially clearer to users.
The Team also changed the name of our ejournal A-Z list, now powered through the ExLibris knowledgebase, to E-Journal Locator.
The Virtual Career Library team completed work on a suite of library pages intended to assist students in locating information on careers, educational opportunities, job listings, and job application techniques. Suellen Stringer-Hye is reformatting the pages before we link them from the Heard homepage.
Collection Development
We implemented a new procedure previously approved by the Collection Development Advisory Group and LMC that enables bibliographers to identify potential low-use monographs and other items when they send purchase order requests to Order Services. Order Services will check these requests on both Acorn and the catalogs of the Universities of Tennessee and Kentucky, our Information Alliance partner libraries. If one or both of the other libraries holds or has ordered the item, Order Services will not order it and return the request to the bibliographer. Bibliographers can batch paper orders and identify them with a label such as "low use" or "check IA catalogs", and Order Services has added a "low use" check-off to the online order form. The new procedure is intended to reduce duplication of low-use items across the Alliance so that each Alliance library can acquire more unique items.
Public Services
Preparation for VUPrint consumed a great deal of time for a number of staff across the system. An open house was held to allow staff to understand how the basic interface would work for library patrons. Many issues must be resolved for non-Vanderbilt library users and for Vanderbilt people without funds on their ID cards. This prompted reconsideration of several library access categories, resulting in a decision to change the paid access Library Use Card from $20 per month to $20 per year. The four day use pass will be discontinued. Other categories may still need to be reviewed.
Sharon, Paul and Flo met to discuss moving forward with a proposed plan for system-wide Census Information, GIS and data services. To date funded by Peabody, the interest is more broadly based. A special task force created to make a recommendation in this area met again and has been asked to further develop their earlier recommendations so that we can include such a program in next year's budget proposal.
Interlibrary Loan Service
We clarified on the ILL main Web page that the spouses or domestic partners of Vanderbilt faculty, current students and staff are eligible for ILL borrowing service.
Copyright Clearance Service
The primary focus in August was
on permissions for ClassPaks.
Annex
Only 9 months remain of available Annex shelves before we exhaust all of our currently installed shelving for campus library transfers. In light of this development, we held meetings with our compact shelving vendor.
909 items
were requested for retrieval this month. Local patrons requested 132 faxed
pages to be sent. 25 ILL patrons requested 201 pages to be reproduced. 217
items were requested from Cataloging staff from the Inventory ranges.
Library Messenger Service & GLB Mailroom
Greg Weldy and Alex Esom literally did the work of four men, while James was on vacation and Michael was on leave. Kudos for their extraordinary fine-tuning which maintained normalcy for the remainder of VUL staff and patrons' mail and messenger needs.
Technology
Projects and Activities
Television
News Archive
Baker
Suite Remodeling
The
rennovation project for the TV News space in the Baker is now almost complete.
With new carpet and paint throught the Archive, the space is much more attractive.
The hazards due to the older carpet are now gone, making for a safer work
environment. The new air conditioning units and the enclosing of the off-air
media room will give us much needed improvement in the providing adequate
temperature control for our equipment. The new doorway and the improvements
to the hallway provide a nicer entry-way into the Archive for staff and
visitors. Although the project turned out to be much more disruptive than
planned, all the staff seem to be pleased with the results.
Meetings,
Activities and Professional Development
Flo attended an OAK training session offered for faculty by the College of Arts and Science.
Marshall
was invited again to provide a brief article for latest edition of SirsiDynix
Upstream publication. This issue of Upstream focuses on network security
issues and will appear in late September 2005. His other publications this
month include his Systems Librarian column in Computers in Libraries magazine
and contributions to ALA's Smart Libraries Newsletter.
Marshall
taught full-day workshops on Wireless Networks for three different regional
libraries in Tennessee.