Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report—December 2002
Budget
and Personnel
Norman Nash continued to develop variations of the budget for the 2003/04 fiscal year. Paul Gherman, Flo Wilson, and Norman met with David Tuleen and Tivis Nelson in the Provost's Office for further guidance on accomplishing needed budget savings.
Pat Johnson, administrative assistant for Resource Services, will now be spending most of her time in the OUL office in the GLB. She will be providing support for OUL as well as Technical Services, LITS and the Annex.
Lisa Shipman provided orientation for three new library staff members.
Flo began meeting with Management Library staff as she assumed acting director responsibilities following Brent Mai's resignation.
Library Access
Elaine Goleski continued to work with Ava Wilson regarding patron record reports. The transition to Ava handling these reports is going smoothly.
Elaine and Flo had a meeting with Anne Martin and Janet Thomason regarding the implementation of the Fisk reciprocal borrowing agreement. Loading of Fisk patron records into ACORN has not been resolved, and more details need to be finalized with Fisk and communicated to Vanderbilt Library staff before the program can be fully underway.
Development, Gifts and Donations
Paul finalized the purchase of the Helguera collection from Leon Helguera and a collection of papers on the Fugitives from Walter Sullivan.
Planning for the Spring meeting of the Friends of the Library got underway; it is tentatively scheduled for early to mid-March. Elaine met with the coordinator of the Vanderbilt Call Center to discuss plans for handling Friends of the Library renewals via the phone bank; this calling will be done late in the Spring, probably in May, as the Friends dues year begins in July.
Elaine and Kurt Eger worked to bring thank you letters up to date; as noted in last month's report, the Library had not received the regular monthly report of gifts for some months.
Interlibrary Loan
Vanderbilt patrons continued to request materials steadily through December, and although the volume dropped, the level of urgency increased as the semester neared its end. By mid-month most other libraries shut down their lending functions, so we processed and saved borrowing requests to be transmitted beginning January.
An increase in the fees charged to other libraries for loans of returnable materials and simplification of the criteria for which libraries we charge was announced effective January 2nd. The loan policy was changed to allow consideration of lending videotapes from the Central Library collection (although video titles that were purchased by the Learning Resource Center cannot be considered). For the first time ever, we became temporary "non-suppliers" in OCLC (so that no new requests could be sent to us in OCLC from other libraries) for the weeks of Christmas and New Year's.
Mark Cabus joined the ILL operation part time as a part of his term appointment with the Library - his assistance is proving most valuable.
Copyright Clearance
December was extremely hectic as Jim Webb concentrated on processing permission requests for spring semester ClassPaks. Many new requests were received after the November deadline, leaving little time before the beginning of the new semester.
Heard Web
Pages Development
The Web Task Force simplified access to e-reserves information on the Heard homepage. The reserves link on the homepage now reads "Find Reserves and ERes" to clarify that it is a path to ERes. The "Find Reserves" page now includes less text (much of the explanatory material has moved to a linked page) and prominently displays links to ERes and Acorn.
The Task Force also created a revised Electronic Books page . The new page provides an Acorn search limited to e-books and lists e-book collections in alphabetical order.
The Task Force is working on redesigning the "Find an Article" page based on the results of our usability testing. The tests clearly showed that users have difficulty in navigating the homepage to find articles on specific topics.
Resource Services
Resource Services staff gathered for a brunch to say farewell to this library department as it reorganizes as Technical Services reporting to Roberta Winjum, and LITS and the Annex continuing to report to Flo.
TV News Archive
The Archive experienced decreased activity levels, largely due to the holidays. Onsite visitors included one class of Vanderbilt, four other VU undergraduate, a Ph.D. candidate from Ohio University, and two researchers from South East Missouri
Cheryl Carpenter, a student in the distance education program of the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, began working on a practicum with the Archive.
Joel Covington, owner of a local video distribution company called Sifford Video Service, has offered to donate a significant amount of used videotape equipment to the Archive that will be valuable for the project of digitizing the videotape collection.
Steve Davis began working with the archive in a position funded through the NSF; his activities will be related to working out digitizing.
Marshall completed programming of website improvements for the TV News.
Presidential speeches TV News segments have the fewest complications regarding copyright restrictions. A number of these, starting with the State of the Union addresses, will be digitized. These will then be available on the Archive's website in a streaming video version. Making this video available will give us more experience with streaming video hardware and software as well as add content to the site that may attract additional interest.
Technology Projects
Marshall created an interface to the Art and Architecture Thesaurus from the J. Paul Getty Trust. Acquired for use with the Art & Art History image database, it provides the controlled vocabulary for the Visual Resources Core (VRA) and other metadata schemas related to the arts. The AAT database was made available to other library staff that might benefit from this tool and can be made available to others on campus.
Other OUL
Paul appointed a task force to address staff security in the General Library Building. The group includes John Haar (chair), Roberta Winjum, Bill Hook, Juanita Murray, Norman Nash, Lisa Shipman, and Janet Thomason, each of whom represents units that occupy the building. The group is reviewing major security concerns identified through staff surveys, and it will make recommendations for increasing security in areas such as the loading dock where staff feel unsafe.
Elaine coordinated the addressing and mailing of holiday cards to library staff, retirees, campus administrators, directors of ARL, NALA, ASERL, and other libraries, and to library donors. All the support staff in the office were involved in this effort and did a great job in getting the cards out on time.
OUL began work on preparing the State of the Library 2002 report. Essay contributions from each division director are being compiled for the report. Elaine is working on the editing which will continue in January with a goal of getting the report to the designer sometime in January.
Other University-Related
Staff Activities
The Staff Development Coordinating Committee sponsored two video tape presentations of "Safeguarding our Patrons' Privacy: What Every Librarian Needs to Know about the U.S.A. Patriot Act and Related Anti-Terrorism Measures" on December 13 and 18.
Most OUL staff attended the breakfast with Chancellor Gee. Following the breakfast, Gee's assistants followed up with requests for more information on some of the issues raised.
Marshall attended the Coalition for Networked Information Fall Task Force Meeting in San Antonio, TX on December 5-6.
External Activities
Marshall's regular Systems Librarian column was published in the December 2002 issue of Information Today Volume 19 No. 11: "Monitoring the use of your Web Site". For the last two years Marshall had been writing a monthly column called "Systems Librarian" for Information Today. Beginning with January 2003, the column will be published in Computers in Libraries, a magazine from the same publisher.
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January 2003