Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--December 2007
Library
Outreach and Campus Interaction
Paul Gherman talked with Betsy Phillips of the University Press about digital publishing and attended a University Press Board meeting.
Jody Combs met with Lou Outlaw, Susie Archer, Doug Christiansen and others to discuss a proposal to expand the OAK environment to include the Community and Content systems. They will form a needs assessment group with expectations that assessment will finish by March, 2008, and implementation of the new systems will be complete by August, 2008, if funding is secured.
Sue Erickson organized an information-sharing meeting for interested librarians and Writing Studio Center staff.
Annex
Development
Celia Walker and Kathy Smith collected more papers from journalist Clara Hieronymus.
Electronic Resources and Collection Development
Jody Combs met with MIS to discuss library use of CAS (single sign-on authentication service) in DiscoverLibrary, Acorn, ILLiad, and OAK. Testing will begin early in 2008 .
Jody had a conference call with Ex Libris to discuss the next phases of the Primo development project. Ex Libris is particularly interested in developing specifications for initial integration with the Blackboard environment.
Jody worked with Ted Payne in Arts and Sciences to get an agreement from the College to pay an extended service plan for an Art/Art History storage unit for the coming year.
Public Relations/Communication
A total of 55 articles were posted to the Staffnews.
Jody met with Judy Orr of Creative Services and Celia Walker to discuss development of a logo for the DiscoverLibrary (Primo) service.
Public Services
Interlibrary Loan
The demand for ILL lending and borrowing dropped with the end of the semester and the holiday break. ILL filled slightly fewer requests than it did in December, 2006, both for Vanderbilt users (467 loans and 464 copies) and for other institutions (411 loans and 282 copies).
Faculty Delivery
Faculty Delivery business remained brisk through the holidays. The unit filled 395 requests (221 loans and 174 scanned articles), and 118 interlibrary loans were delivered to faculty offices.
Copyright Clearance
Processing ClassPak orders for spring semester and Owen Mod 2 classes reached its peak in December, and the quarterly billing to Campus Copy was completed.
GIS and Numeric Data Services
Jacob conducted a presentation for a ‘Systematic Inquiry' (HOD) class in which he helped students get started with GIS. He assisted them with creating maps specific to their research and then guided them through performing an analysis based on the results.
Sue showed Julie Blagojevich how to pull together the ICPSR usage statistics.
Jacob and Sue began using the LibStats open source software to track their data consultations and data reference. They are happy with it, and here are their December statistics:
- Jacob conducted 2 GIS consultations, one for a VU faculty member and one for a VU staff member. He also had 2 equipment-related consultations. Jacob had 6 reference transactions (one walk-up and the rest by email).
- Sue had 3 data reference transactions by email and 2 by phone.
Staff Development
Three brown bags were held in December: a webcast on fair use (12/11), a travelogue by Marshall and Zora Breeding on their recent trip to Eastern Europe (12/13), and a webcast on the challenges of film and video preservation (12/18).
Technology Projects and Activities
In December, Marshall , with assistance from Jodie Gambill, migrated the Art in the Christian Tradition resource from the db/TextWorks to MySQL, and as a result, they added a number of new features to the resource.
Television
News Archive
Interest in institutional subscriptions continues to grow. The Archive set up trial subscriptions for the following institutions in December: Chatham University , Grove City College , Long Island University , and Jefferson College Library.
Marshall made some improvements in the way the TV News OpenWeb pages are generated in order to provide better metadata in the page headers and to increase the frequency. He also added the records for the specials to the OpenWeb process hoping to generate more loan requests for them.
Marshall continues to update various aspects of the TV News Web infrastructure. This month he migrated the bibliographic database of citations of scholarly works that reference the Archive and implemented some minor interface changes.
Meetings,
Activities and Professional Development
Paul Gherman met with the Trevecca advisory board for their library school.
Paul attended the Coalition for Networked Information meeting in Washington , DC . He also attended the CLIR meeting at the Cosmos Club on digital assets that contribute to course design.
Paul took part in a conference call with CRL's Membership Committee.
Marshall Breeding conducted an all-day SOLINET workshop on “Wireless Network in Libraries” in Rocky Mount , North Carolina .
Marshall gave two presentations to the staff of Library and Archives Canada (formerly the National Library of Canada). The first was “Open Source Software for Libraries: Issues for Large-Scale Libraries” and the second was “The Library Automation Landscape: Companies and Products.”
Marshall wrote several short articles for the June issues of ALA TechSource Smart Libraries Newsletter . His regular column in Computers in Libraries was titled “It's Time to Break the Mold of the Original ILS.”
Sue Erickson attended the Reverend James Lawson talk sponsored by the Vanderbilt Center for Nashville Studies.