Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--February 2004

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Paul presented a copy of Stanley W. Wells' Shakespeare for All Time to Charles Davis for the yearly Bring a Book drive, which took place at the Vanderbilt women's basketball game against Mississippi State. The drive brought in over 1,000 books for the Charles Davis Learning Center.

Flo submitted a proposal on behalf of Vanderbilt, offering to host Fisk University's Library catalog and circulation system on our SIRSI system. Discussions were held with staff in Information Technology Services to determine what the network connection needs might be. Flo also provided some system support information to the Biomedical Library for their use in meetings with Meharry Medical College Library.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

Paul gave a presentation on the upcoming strategic planning process at a kick off meeting in the Frist Nursing School. The steering committee, chaired by Paul, includes Flo, John, Roberta, Marshall and Celia. A Website has been created for the project that contains resources and minutes of the work groups. Paul is chairing the group for External Relations (Peg, Celia and Jim Toplon are members of that group); Roberta is directing the Intellectual Property group (Marshall is a member of the group); John chairs the Faculty Services group (Jim Webb is on the group); and Flo directs the Digital Library Programs group. The organization group includes Lisa and Norman.

Administration and Staff

Norman, Paul, John, and Flo worked on and finalized the 2004/2005 budget proposal; it was reviewed with Tivis Nelson and Linda Costello in the Provost's Office. In addition, the TV News budget proposal was prepared and submitted by Marshall and Norman. Meetings were held with budget officers in various schools to go over the detail of the Library's proposal and to discuss the possibility of the schools entertaining exception requests.

Budget officers in the Provost's area met with the University budget staff to discuss rearrangement of various accounts used in the university's accounting system. Some controversy about the timing and aggregation groups surfaced. One continuing controversy that will be worked on with accounting is the inclusion of library materials as a part of the new Supplies and Services aggregation.

Norman, Lisa, Susan and Flo worked on completing the Library's final response to last year's Internal Audit review and recommendations. Lisa and Norman will be calling an Administrative Operations Group meeting to go over some of the procedural details with the Library's administrative assistants.

The Electronic Resources/Information Services Librarian and Business Information Services (BIS) Librarian positions in the Management Library were opened for recruitment. Lisa met with the search committees several times and will be contacting references on selected candidates.

Personnel

Lisa (Chair) of Task Force on Privacy and Retention of Records coordinated the completion of the Task Force's final report. This will be sent to Paul Gherman for review. Members of the Task Force are: Bill Hook, Jody Combs, and Juanita Murray.

Lisa coordinated a library-wide meeting for the new Short Term Disability benefit offered through Human Resources on 02/26/04.

Public Relations/Communication

Celia met with the Print Conservation group to plan ways to reduce printing in the Library. Others on the committee are Flo Wilson, Mills Bell, Melinda Brown, Stacy Owens, and Cammey Warnecke. Celia and Paul met with Bonnie Ertelt and Lew Harris to plan the next Acorn Chronicle.

Celia arranged for courtesy cards for several visiting scholars.

Development

Celia began work on the Friends and Heard Library Society renewals. She drafted a series of library talking points for the A&S Development team to use in their presentations and worked with Kurt to create information packets for prospective donors. She worked with Yvonne Boyer on the Morris Wachs bookplate design and met with the Friends of the Library Board (with Paul).

Inter-Library Loan

Both borrowing and lending requests continued to increase, as is usual for the middle of spring semester.

Copyright Clearance

Jim Webb finished spring E-reserves permissions and clearances for other projects, and resumed work on building signage (new signs are up on the 4th and 6th floors).

Collections

The Collection Development Advisory Group approved a draft gift policy [http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/cdag/GiftPolicy.html]. The policy has gone forward to LMC for its approval. If approved, we will post it on the Heard website as a set of general guidelines for potential donors.

Web Page Development

Celia worked with Teresa Gray on the History of the Library Web page.

Celia, Suellen Stringer-Hye, and Lisa Shipman unveiled the new Staff Web at an open house for the staff.

Annex

334 Web patrons requested materials. 691 items were retrieved for campus requests, 54 of which were sent to other than the owning library as patron specified deliveries. The highest category of campus patron retrievals, 198, came from the Central Library volumes stored here. The next highest retrievals were 115 Science holdings. 110 volumes were sent for Inter-Library Loan patrons.

Another 30 Inter-Library loan patrons asked for article photocopies, of which we prepared 310 pages. 9 campus patrons requested articles faxed be sent to their homes or offices. We sent 161 pages of faxed articles.

96 new shelves of transfers arrived from our campus libraries during February 2004. New materials arrived from the Nashville Peace and Justice Center and from the Riley Civil War Collection. The Chaplain's Office sent 10 cartons of Kadar Collection catalogs for tenant storage.

Technology Projects and Activities

Candice Sterckx of ExLibris trained the SFX Implementation Team in managing the SFX administrative module and knowledgebase in two full-day sessions on Feb. 25 and 26. All Library staff was invited to the opening session, which covered how SFX will work in our Web environment.

LITS installed our SFX server, and ExLibris loaded SFX software. Dale Poulter is coordinating server setup and maintenance, including arranging the Team's access to the administrative module. Rick Stringer-Hye is heading a small group configuring "targets" (sites to which the SFX button will point) in the knowledgebase. Our next tasks are to draft designs of the button and SFX menu page that we can share with representatives of the libraries.

Television News Archive

The National Science Foundation grant was completed. The grant focused on developing technologies and methodologies that can be used by the Archive for transforming its off-air recording process from a videotape-based operation to one that produces digital content and to design a process for converting the existing videotape collection to digital format.

Loan requests for videotapes continued to increase dramatically from previous totals. New subscribers to the Archive included American University (Washington, D.C.), Louisiana State University, and the University of Michigan. Four trial subscriptions were initiated in February.

Marshall implemented an enhancement to the Library staff directories that presents e-mail addresses in a way that makes them much less likely to be susceptible to future spam mailings. He also implemented substantial programming enhancements to the TV News Archive system used for managing academic requirements. For more information on the TV News Archive, visit http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/breeding/reports/2004-02-February-report.html.

Meetings, activities and professional development

Paul, Roberta, Jody and Celia attended the Institutional Repository Policy Board meeting.

Celia attended a New Horizons Powerpoint class.

Paul attended 2 meetings of the University Press board.

Marshall's regular column, "Systems Librarian," was published in Computers in Libraries and he taught a series of 3 full-day workshops for the State Library of North Carolina sponsored by SOLINET.

15 March 2004