Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--August 2004

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Planning continued for policies and procedures to be used between Sewanee and Vanderbilt in our cooperative borrowing effort. Bill Hook assumed the role of leading this effort on our end, and he will be working carefully with CAG on the further development of this relationship.

Norman attended an Associate Deans meeting.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

The Library Management Council held its annual retreat. This year we met at the Nashville Public Library and discussed the recommendations of the Strategic Planning Work Groups. Staff had three opportunities to meet with Paul and the Steering Committee to discuss the recommendations and vote for their favorites. Over 60 staff members attended these events, which were held at Central, Peabody and Law.

Lisa and Celia began work on the Staff Service Awards Reception.

Dewey James installed VU readers to enable use of VU cards for copier usage. While all ports are physically installed, action is continuing to go online with ports at Law, Peabody, and Science.

Administration and Staff

Norman examined various scenarios for an alternate budget model.

Norman and Flo met with Deb Sommer to work further on developing a separate budget for the Business Information Service. They also worked on pulling together documents and data in preparation for a budget planning meeting with staff in the Provost's Office.

Development

Celia attended a class on split interest endowments and met with a Colombian collector with Paula Covington. The Friends of the Library Board held their fall meeting and voted to discontinue the Spring Event.

Personnel

Lisa met with Janet King, Amy Stewart Mailhiot, James Adams and Eli Moody for new employee Library Orientation. She conducted exit interviews with three employees.

Lisa was invited by Human Resources to become a Trainer for the University's new Targeted Selection (TS) interviewing method for hiring managers. This program is designed to ensure managers will have a tool to make accurate hiring decisions. TS is based on key behavioral interviewing skills and gives hiring managers skills to lead to more informed selection decisions. Partnered with Human Resources, Lisa will deliver interviewing workshops to other hiring officials with the University Central and Medical Center. After an intensive 3-day training, she became a certified TS trainer. Her first training is scheduled for October 4 and 5.

Lisa helped coordinated the Library's participation in the 2004/2005 Federal Work Study Job Fair with the Student Employment Office. The FWS Job Fair was held on August 26 and 16 staff members from the Library participated.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

VUFinder Implementation

Patrons clicked on the VUFinder button over 12,000 times in August, its first full month of operation. They clicked through to linked resources over 9,000 times.

Electronic Resources

Four libraries (Biomedical, Management, Peabody, Law, and Science and Engineering) agreed to share the cost of a campus-wide license for Ebsco's Business Source Premier, a database of full text periodical articles in business. The shared electronic database fund will also pay a portion of the cost. The database will be available campus-wide as soon as we complete license negotiations with Ebsco.

Three libraries (Central, Law, and Management) agreed to share the cost of a package of databases from the World Bank, including World Development Indicators Online, Global Development Finance Online, and the World Bank E-Library. The E-Library is a collection of electronic books. Central will acquire the companion set of print volumes.

Interlibrary Loan Service

August brought record demand for both borrowing and lending in ILL, so we were happy that Rachel Adams, Merry Balthrop, and Marilyn Pilley were able to recruit an excellent crew of student assistants at the Work Study Job Fair.

We devised customizations needed for ILL loans to be tracked and circulated in ILLiad to users at the campus libraries. Once client software is installed, the Peabody and Science & Engineering Libraries will test this approach, which will then be offered to the other divisions.

Copyright Clearance Services

Jim Webb survived the final onslaught of Class Pak permissions, and began to deal with incoming fall electronic reserves clearances. We revised the Copyright Web pages to include the new OAK system. Jims attended the Ereserves Working Group meeting, where the issue of Vanderbilt's copyright policy for electronic reserves was revisited.

Annex

In the fall request for Reassessment funding, a proposal for adding a significant amount of shelving to the Annex to cover anticipated growth over the next couple of years. At the current rate of transfer of materials, it looks as if the Annex would be full by next September without any additional shelving. In addition, the rapid growth of the University Archives requires additional shelving for current and future needs.

Technology Projects and Activities

John Haar, Jim Toplon, Dale Poulter, Jody Combs and Flo Wilson met again to discuss options for using ILLIAD in support of document delivery and for allowing divisions to charge and discharge borrowed materials from the ILLIAD system. Library divisions wishing to use the ILLIAD client for local circulation of ILL items will be able to do so; the Peabody and Science libraries will be working out the kinks with ILL. At this point, ILLIAD does not appear to be the best choice for our several different document delivery needs; the Law Library will test out the ILLIAD Odyssey software to learn how it works. The Management and Peabody libraries may wish to make use of Ariel for immediate web-based document delivery; LITS will work with them on this effort.

Flo Wilson met with the Card Office and a representative from Diebold, the company that provides the CSGold Card system. Since the Card is now usable with the photocopiers, it seems desirable to explore the capabilities of the Diebold printing application as we make a choice of software for charging for printing. The Library expects to implement such software within this academic year. Bill Hook has agreed to coordinate the efforts in selecting and implementing such a system.

With the departure of Anne Martin, LITS will be initiating a search for a new staff member; planning for filling this vacancy is underway. Suellen Stringer-Hye will chair the screening committee, and others who will serve include Bill Hook, Chris Benda, Dale Poulter and Mary Ellen Wilson.

The Library has been approached by several faculty members and by the Provost's Office about the interest in supporting e-journals at Vanderbilt. The latter request is for supporting a new undergraduate research journal. The faculty inquiries are for both new and established e-journals. LITS has been exploring open source software that we might use to make such a service possible.

Marshall worked with faculty members in the departments of Art and Art History, History, and Classics to set up access to the image management system for additional courses that will be using this system for classroom use of digital images.

Television News Archive

NEH Project

The NEH project is well underway and digitizing is proceeding at a rapid pace. This month 1034 hours of retrospective material were digitized, exceeding last month's output by 231 hours. By the end of August we had completed the digitization of all evening news programs from August 1968 through May 1974.

Fox News Project

This month we hired Eric Adams who will serve as the primary abstractor for the Fox News collection. For his first month or so, Eric will be working closely with Skip Pfeiffer as he learns our procedures for writing abstracts. The grant that supports our expansion to cover Fox News also included funds to acquire equipment to create an additional two off-air digital recording stations. These two stations are now fully installed, bringing the number of recording stations in our facility to twelve.

Meetings, activities and professional development

Paul and Marshall attended an ETANA planning meeting held at the Library with representatives from Case Western, Virginia Tech, ASOR and Vanderbilt.

Marshall taught two full-day workshops on wireless networking for SOLINET, one at SOLINET's facilities in Atlanta on August 20, and one in Maitland, FL on the 30th.

Marshall's regular Systems Librarian column was published in Computers in Libraries and he also contributed to the September 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.

15 September 2004