Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--December 2004

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Flo and Norman attended the Associate Dean's meeting; the 2006 budgeting process was discussed, and capital projects in each school and unit were reviewed. In future budget development, there will be increases in set asides for depreciation of buildings and equipment.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

LMC reviewed and approved one of the recommendations from the Library's strategic plan that calls for the establishment of the Vanderbilt Digital Library. The Steering Committee refined the full draft of the strategic plan, preparing to present the document to the Faculty Library Committee for review in January.

As Chairperson of the Performance Evaluation Review Committee, Lisa and committee members Mary Beth Blalock, Zora Breeding, Lorelei Crockett, Nancy Dolinger, Stephen Jordan, Robert Rich and Kathy Smith met regularly in December. The committee is focusing its efforts on re-vamping the self-evaluation and supervisor evaluation form, with final recommendations to LMC by January 2005. Lisa met with the Division Directors in December to give an update on the Committee's progress and for feedback on a draft of a new self-evaluation form.

Administration and Staff

Flo and Paul met with Dennis Hall to talk about the Library's proposed change to the historical budget allocation model. Review now moves on to the Provost. Eliminating the complex allocation scheme for overhead and other centralized support operations should make the Library's budget development process much easier.

Paul met with Dennis Hall about our budget for next year.

Norman updated the Budget Model to reflect the new University budget parameters.

Celia worked with Jean Wright and a group of volunteers on the Holiday Staff Party, which was held in the GLB Staff Lounge on December 16. Kurt Eger brought his guitar and entertained the group. Everyone pitched in with potluck food and the party was a great success.

Personnel

As part of the search committee for two Computer Systems Administrator II/Systems Librarian positions in LITS, Lisa met with 3 candidates in November and December. Two librarians were hired to fill the vacancies in Library Information Technology Services. Jason Battles begins work in January; Julie Loder in February. The search committee for the Reference Librarian in the Law Library also interviewed one candidate for that position.

Lisa conducted exit interviews with David Anderson and a Library orientation with a new staff member, Stephanie Fuson.

Development

Celia, Juanita Murray and Kathy Smith of Special Collections collected papers from the estate of George A. Sloan, a gift of Peggy and John Warner. Sloan graduated from Vanderbilt Law School in 1915 and served as a trustee of the University. He was assistant to the chairman of the Red Cross in WWI and later served on Herbert Hoover's Committee on Unemployment in the early 1930s. In 1940 he served as Commissioner of Commerce of New York City under Mayor La Guardia and later elected chair of the Metropolitan Opera Association

Celia met with Jim Squires, who established a Special Collections fund for the processing of his papers. Squires, a Peabody graduate, served as Washington Bureau Chief Correspondent for the Chicago Tribune between 1972 and 1977, covering the Watergate hearings and other significant national events, then served as editor of the paper in the 1980s. He currently lives in Versailles, Kentucky, where he raises thoroughbred horses, among them the 2001 winner of the Kentucky Derby, Monarchos.

Celia attended a tour of Special Collections for Development and Alumni Relations' regional managers. Kathy Smith and Juanita Murray gave the group an inspiring tour.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

In the fall we hosted a trial of SCOPUS, Elsevier's new citation database designed to compete with ISI's Web of Knowledge. The Biomedical, Central, Peabody, and Science & Engineering Libraries were primarily interested. After consideration and review of faculty evaluations of the database, we decided not to purchase it at this time. While the price of the database was attractive for the first three years, the regular price was likely to exceed $80,000. We did not feel that we could afford both SCOPUS and Web of Knowledge. While some faculty members found SCOPUS easier to use, it is clear that many faculty still depend on the ISI citation databases heavily. The lack of back files in SCOPUS also greatly limited its utility in comparison to ISI.

Interlibrary Loan Service

David Anderson left Vanderbilt in December to take up his new position in Arkansas. We miss him dearly, but wish him all the best and are happy for him. The search to fill David's position yielded an exceptionally good pool of candidates, and we are delighted that Rachael Bankes accepted our offer for the position, starting on January 4th. Welcome, Rachael!

The VUFinder interlibrary loan request option was implemented for FirstSearch (WorldCat, etc.) databases, replacing the previous ILL form with a more direct login. We hope to make the same improvement for the Kudzu and Athena catalogs soon.

Copyright Clearance Service

Jim Webb spent most of December working to clear permissions for Spring Class Paks.

Annex

During December 2004, only 95 shelves of new stacks transfers arrived from our campus libraries. (This is a 55 percent reduction from the amount received last month.) These transfers arrived from the Baudelaire Center's rare Wachs Collection, Central stacks, Divinity, Law, Management, Music, PColl, Peabody, Science, and VColl. LITS sent us additional electronic dissertations. We created separate shelves to hold the beginning of the Music Library's cd collection. A project to transfer a number of these to the Annex by January 12th was begun in mid-month.

704 Annex items were requested during this month. 15% of our items retrieved were from Storage shelving stacks. Of our holdings that can be sent to patron-specified service desks, 27% of our circulation was patron-specified deliveries. (Example: rare Pascal Pia and all Special Collections requests can only be sent to those Service Desks.) As with most Decembers at the Annex, we experienced the usual "last minute" late afternoon urgent patron requests.

We also had another 31 requests from Inter-Library loan for the photocopying of 331 journal pages. Local patrons asked us to fax 16 pages for them. We had one international request we were unable to fill, but Jim Toplon helped us refer the patron to University Microfilms instead.

Stacks compression projects continued on our 2nd floor, the normal Periodical bar coding projects were accomplished as time permitted, and we continued to assist our resident on-site faculty members.

Technology Projects and Activities

Jody and Flo joined the Pay for Printing task force, led by Bill Hook, in concluding that moving forward with a Diebold implementation for the campus is a good idea.

Library Technology Officer Activities

Marshall continued the development of the new back-up digital off-air digital recording system for TV News Archive. Once implemented, this system will replace the current U-Matic and VHS videotape equipment used to back-up the current digital off-air recording system and to provide 24-hour monitoring and recording capabilities for special news broadcasts that occur outside of the regularly scheduled evening news programs.

Television News Archive

NEH Project

This month we were finally able to fill the fifth and final position for the NEH funded digitizing project. Nick Purvis was hired to assist in the quality control part of the project. With this position filled, the quality assurance process will be more able to keep up with the encoding operation.

Subscriptions

In December 2004 Emory University and Western Kentucky University became subscribers to the Archive. Trial accounts were established for Middlebury College and Troy University.

Videotape Loan Order Processing

With the resignation of Susan Smith, Pat Johnson has taken over primary responsibility for processing the credit card authorizations and deposits related to the income received for videotape loan orders. Kurt Eger was trained to serve as Pat's backup for this operation.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

Paul and Marshall attended the Coalition for Networked Information fall task force meeting in Portland, OR, and Marshall gave a break-out session on the recent accomplishments of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive.

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

11 January 2005