Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--February 2005

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Flo met with Ken Wise from the Library at the University of Tennessee to discuss the use of LibQUAL and our experience in analyzing the results.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

Paul, Celia, and Flo met with A.J. Levine, Chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee, about the needed revisions to the Strategic Plan. Paul arranged for Elaine Goleski to do an overall rewrite of the plan to make it more cohesive and coherent.

Paul and Flo met with the Provost, Dennis Hall, and Nancy Falls to follow-up and answer questions on the proposed new model for budget allocation. The Provost gave his approval to the idea and asked that Paul work with the deans to implement it. The Library was able to then complete its budget proposal and distribute the Library's IDS allocations to the schools. Norman and Flo attended the February meeting of the Associate Deans where they distributed library budget information to each of the school budget officers.

The Library submitted its proposal for Reassessment funding for the year. Included initiatives are 'pay for printing', significant new shelving for the Annex, purchase of a substantial number of replacement desktop workstations, various infrastructure projects, purchase of a portion of the e-version of the U.S. Serial Set, additional public use laptops, membership in the LOCKSS Alliance, and Baker refurbishing and server room upgrades.

Lisa coordinated two brown bag sessions; a Web cast on marketing libraries and a discussion of issues discussed at the most recent OCLC Members' Council meeting, such as Google/Open WorldCat replacing our SIRSI catalog. Paul led the OCLC Member's Council discussion.

Celia is working with Suellen Stringer-Hye to redesign the Library access page. Celia also worked with the Card Office and Bill Longwell to create a form for scholars and others who have been appointed to work at Vanderbilt but are not employed by the University. The form will be used to arrange for VUNet Ids, cards, and borrowing privileges for these patrons before they come to campus.

Administration and Staff

Deb Sommer was able to return to work full-time in the Management Library, and Flo completed her term of providing administrative support there in Deb's absence.

Julie Loder began work in LITS in February as the new systems librarian. Mills Bell announced his resignation effective the end of March.

Norman worked with Pat Johnson on the space inventory.

Personnel

As Chairperson of the Performance Evaluation Review Committee, Lisa took the final recommendations to LMC on January 31. LMC approved the PERC recommendations, with minor revisions. As part of the recommendations, Lisa developed and conducted four performance evaluation training sessions for supervisors in February and early March.

As part of the search committee for a Reference Librarian in the Law Library, Lisa met with a candidate in February. The search committee also met to make their recommendation on best-qualified candidate.

Public Relations/Communication

Berna Heyman, Associate Dean of the Library at the College of William and Mary, visited Vanderbilt and toured several of the libraries with Paul.

Paul and Celia attended the Vanderbilt Women's Club meeting held at Special Collections. OUL was a host of the event.

Posters and tent cards for print conservation were distributed to all of the libraries. Mills Bell and Paul met with the Graduate Student Council to discuss the pay for print policy and show them the Website.

Development

Celia worked with Suellen Stringer-Hye to create a webpage for the DORAL group, a national association for development officers of research and academic libraries. The group's homepage will be housed at Vanderbilt.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

Paul, Juanita Murray and Karin Sack met with ARTstor representatives about working with them on the Contini-Volterra collection in Special Collections.

MetaLib Development:

Our contract with ExLibris for MetaLib, their broadcast searching tool, permits us to test the software for thirty days without obligation to lease it. The MetaLib Team, (John Haar, chair; Janice Adlington; Chris Benda; Marshall Breeding; Ann Ercelawn; Bill Hook; Dale Poulter; Michael Scott; Rick Stringer-Hye; Suellen Stringer-Hye; Linda Tesar; Rachel Vacek) has developed a tentative schedule for our thirty-day "trial," and we are working with ExLibris to set installation and training dates, which will likely be in late April.

We will create five sets of databases for metasearching: a set of general resources and subject-specific sets in engineering, history, philosophy and religion, and psychology. Each set will include at least five databases plus Acorn. We expect to use two weeks to conduct usability tests with undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty and are attempting to recruit persons who will be on campus for Maymester. The trial will also be open to staff, and we will probably host a staff open house. ExLibris has agreed to extend the trial by two weeks to give the team time to gather feedback and make a recommendation to retain or discontinue development of MetaLib.

Collaborative Collection Development:

Last fall, the Information Alliance held a seminar to discuss collaborative collection development projects. Participants, including bibliographers from all three IA libraries, agreed on the need to better coordinate firm orders for materials that are so specialized that they would be very infrequently used. In these cases, one book might be sufficient for all of the Alliance members, and we might use the extra funds to buy other resources. Since we give priority to each other's ILL requests, we can do this. LMC approved a draft policy to initiate such a program.

When placing orders, bibliographers will identify certain titles as "low use." Order Services staff will check catalog listings of the other two libraries. If UTK or UK has it, we will not place an order for it. CDAG met in March to develop procedures. Collection development officers of the Alliance will meet in March to consider how to better coordinate the three libraries' approval profiles.

Annex

Peg, Flo and Juanita met to discuss the shelving needs for Special Collections at the Annex; Peg and Flo met with Doug Kraeger, representative from Spacesaver, to go over the various shelving projects needed at the Annex. Reassessment funding is expected to cover the first three of the projects in the queue; we'll get price estimates for a couple of other possibilities as well. During February we initiated eighteen separate facilities related mini-projects in preparation for our construction to occur.

Our usual faculty, scholars, library colleagues, tenants, and service representatives made an abundance of visits during February. A particular hi-light for us was the Feb.17th visit by Dr. Mary Ann Cawes and Dr. Patricia Ward to work with the rare Pascal Pia materials and to view the Wachs Collection. Their overwhelming enthusiasm for the collection was a delight to behold.

212 shelves of new stacks transfers arrived from our campus libraries. Patrons requested 991 Annex items this month. This was the highest number of requests received for this fiscal year; and was 249 more than last year at this time. 61 ILL patrons requested 437 pages to be photocopied.

The Peabody/Collections Development-University of Tennessee at Knoxville "Z" classification project was completed. Government Information staff and Jean Wright, from Cataloging, continued to help us with mini-projects to resolve collections questions and Acorn editing concerns.

Along with Kurt Eger, all Annex staff provided additional assistance to Professor Helguera for the Dr. Robert Davis gift collection. Also, The Collier gift project and its resulting duplicates are gaining activity. Additional newly cataloged Wachs items were added to the Annex.

Technology Projects and Activities

Paul Gherman, Roberta Winjum, and Jody Combs met with Andy Stricker, Office of Innovation through Technology (OIT), to discuss a potential project involving the OIT and the Library's VU e-Archive project.

Jody Combs and Julie Loder held several training sessions with Center for the Americas (CFA) staff on use of the Open Journal Systems software. This software is used to publish the official journal of the center (AmeriQuests). Eventually, CFA staff will take over all tasks associated with the normal publishing workflow of the journal.

Over the past few years, we have experienced several HVAC outages both at the GLB server room (406a) and at the Baker building, where several library servers are housed. We recently acquired three "Move-n-Cool" portable AC units that will provide us with temporary cooling for critical server hardware should we experience similar HVAC outages in the future.

Recently, the library began hosting the web site for the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Summer Research Program. Suellen Stringer-Hye and Craig Smith (the faculty sponsor) have completed the initial redesign of the site. It looks great! See: VUSRP.

Jason Battles, Julie Loder, and Rachel Vacek joined Dale and Jody at the Baker building Sunday night at 11:45 p.m. to observe the upgrade process. The upgrade to Acorn generally went according to plan. We had a glitch the next morning, when we found that the new Workflows installer was not showing up in NAL windows. This was quickly resolved.

Post-upgrade we see that an older issue has been reintroduced with the upgrade. This issue results in slow response times when searching by ISBN for items that do not have the ISBN. We are working with SIRSI to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.

Nancy Boggess-Korekach and Julie Loder will soon begin training for Tier 1 plus support of OAK. Jody Combs will be moving to a stand-by role (backing up Julie and Nancy as needed).

Library Technology Officer Activities

Marshall continued the work of building the new digital off-air recording system. With the arrival of the hardware at the end of January, the next major task involves assembling each of the individual rack-mount computers that will serve as recording units.

With the increasing load on the TV News Web site, plans are underway to migrate it to a faster server. The TV News Web site has been running on Library14, a server acquired to serve as a hot spare for Library11 that serves as the database server for many of the Heard Library Database applications. Library22, one of the servers in the TV News media server cluster, will be configured to perform this function. Marshall began the preliminary work to make this move.

Television News Archive

NEH Project

The NEH-funded digitizing project progressed at full speed with a full staff. At the end of February, the collection had been digitized from 1968 - Sept 1989.

Subscriptions

In February 2005 Felician College Library in New Jersey became a subscriber to the Archive.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

Celia defended her thesis and completed requirements for her MS in Information Science at the University of Tennessee. Her topic was a survey of artists' papers in Tennessee.

Several LITS staff members attended the SIRSI Super Conference, held at the OpryLand Hotel. LITS staff attending were: Jason Battles, Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Jody Combs, Julie Loder, Dale Poulter, and Suellen Stringer-Hye. Also attending this year: Mary Charles Lasater (for CAAG), Janet Thomason (for CAG), Mary Ellen Wilson (for Acquisitions), and Marshall Breeding (for OUL).

Celia attended the African American History Conference at Tennessee State University with Juanita Murray and Kathy Smith. Mrs. Kelly Miller Smith and other participants spoke on their experiences in the Civil Rights Movement. The late Mr. Smith's papers are housed in Special Collections.

Flo, Roberta, Marshall and Celia attended Malcolm Getz's lecture on Open Access, arranged by staff of the Science and Engineering Library.

Paul attended the OCLC Members' Council meeting in Columbus, Ohio, and presented a Brown Bag to Library staff on the discussions.

Pat Johnson, Ava Wilson and Kurt Eger attended the Corporate Time training through ITS.

Marshall attended portions of the Sirsi Annual SuperConference. He convened the meeting of the Sirsi Large Sites Interest Group, which was devoted to Electronic Resource Management.

Marshall's regular Systems Librarian column was published in Computers in Libraries and he also contributed to the February 2005 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.

10 March 2005