Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--August 2006

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Library-wide Efforts and Events

Library directors and LibQUAL+2006 project team members attended the annual library management retreat. The morning session focused on the initial results of the LibQUAL survey and possible steps that the library should take to address issues of concern to our users. The afternoon session's topic was the performance evaluation program.

Administrative Services

Many of us attended the new employee orientation program organized by Administrative Services.

Joe Collins transferred from the Library Annex to the Owen Management Library, effective August 28th. Since May of 1998, he has been an integral part of all Annex operations, and will be greatly missed.

Michael Flexsenhauer, a Divinity graduate student began working at the Annex in late August; and he will soon be joined by Daved Schmidt. Sean Hayden will continue with the Annex, but in a reduced role.

The staff of InterLibrary Loan were sad to say goodbye to Rachael Bankes in August, but wish her all the best in her new endeavors. ILL hopes to be able soon to list and recruit for a new position that will include the duties of that position along with responsibilities for document delivery service.

Public Relations/Communication

A total of 60 articles were posted in the Staff News Feed, of which 22% were committee minutes and agendas, 57% were articles of a general nature, and the remaining 21% were monthly reports, strategic planning reports and news about library staff.

Development

Celia Walker and Kathy Smith picked up papers from Clara Hieronymus, former art critic for the Tennessean.

Celia and Paul met with Beth Boord, who is working with the Divinity School and with the Library to solicit major gifts. Beth comes to Vanderbilt from Harpeth Hall Girls School, where she led a development effort to build their new library.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

Collection Development

Central and Law agreed to share the subscription cost of a new database, LexisNexis Congressional Research Digital Collection. We have purchased the prospective segment of the collection, which includes Congressional Research Service reports and Committee Prints from 2004 through the present. Central will pay 75% and Law 25% of the subscription cost.

Under the terms of our contracts with Elsevier and Springer, we can inform the publishers of our intention to convert our periodical subscriptions to electronic-only in the fall prior to the beginning of a subscription year. While we have converted most of our subscriptions, information from the publishers indicated that we continue to receive several in print. Consequently we informed the publishers to convert almost all of the remaining subscriptions to electronic-only. Law is retaining print for its subscriptions, and only a few subscriptions in other VU libraries remain print/electronic.

Annex

Alexander's Mobility Services moved the Management Library's reference collection, career-planning, Index section, and circulating monographs from the Annex back to the Owen School. What had occupied portions of 903 Annex shelves, has now mostly returned to the campus. In addition to the 365 feet of Former Reference titles which permanently remained here, the Annex continues to temporarily house all Management non-book titles. Patrons can continue to request these using the Management Delivery button. All of the periodical and serial volumes that were returned from the Bindery this Summer are also at the Annex. During late September or October, these individual titles will relocate.

188 shelves of new campus transfers arrived during the month from Central, Divinity, Government Information, Law, Science, and Special Collections. Preparations began to transfer a number of Management bound periodicals to the Annex during late September and early October.

1,105 items were retrieved for patrons, 20% of which were from storage shelving. This compares to 786 items retrieved for patrons during July 2006. Of those 786 items, 26% came from "storage shelving" stacks areas. 64 separate Inter-Library Loan patrons needed photocopies from the Annex this month. Another 13 patrons, all of which were local, asked us to fax articles to their Nashville offices.

The massive 2nd floor project to re-assign classification shelving books to storage shelving instead continues. Quite impressive is the better use of cubic space which results in great new gain of linear footage for more books to be housed!

Interlibrary Loan Service

Interlibrary loans remained busy in August, especially once classes began. ILL staff hired an exceptionally good crew of student assistants at the Job Fair. We received 1,468 requests from Vanderbilt patrons in August, nearly 7% more than the same period last year. We received 2,476 requests from other libraries, nearly identical to August of 2005.

Copyright Clearing Service

Jim Webb concentrated on clearing Fall ClassPaks as the semester arrived.

Technology Projects and Activities

Several OUL staff members met with Ex Libris staff at Vanderbilt to discuss Primo. On August 14, as part of the Primo Open House event for library staff, Marshall gave an overview of Primo and its underlying concepts.

Television News Archive

The Archive has begun producing copies of the 6PM Channel 4 News program on DVD. We anticipate being able to use the transcripts produced from the closed caption file as a finding aid for these programs since producing abstracts for these programs is not currently feasible.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

Celia attended a meeting of the Volunteer Voices program at Middle Tennessee State University.

Marshall conducted a day-long SOLINET workshop on Wireless Technologies in Libraries at the Houston County Library in Georgia on Aug 18.

As a contributing editor for ALA TechSource Smart Libraries Newsletter, Marshall wrote articles on the the appointment of a new general manager for NISO, the launch of the Open Source Evergreen ILS for the Georgia Pines consortium, and the acquisition of DiMeMa, producers of CONTENTdm by OCLC.

Marshall's regular column appeared in Computers in Libraries.
14 September 2006