Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--February 2006
Library
Outreach and Campus Interaction
Marshall Breeding met with Jane Landers and Frank Robinson on Feb 10th to talk about the finding aid that we have developed for the Ecclesiastical Sources for Slave Societies collection.
Library-wide
Efforts and Events
Administration
and Staff
Flo Wilson met with David Carpenter to discuss the search for a new library director for the Management Library. A search committee will get underway soon.
Paul Gherman, Flo, John Haar, Roberta Winjum, Jody Combs, and Celia Walker attended a New Employee meeting organized by Lisa Shipman and Ava Wilson.
Administrative Services
Communications
Library
staff were asked to respond to a communication survey, which included questions
about the news feed, the watercooler, homepages, and open discussion sessions.
Sixty-five staff members responded with suggestions for improving these communication
channels.
Gifts in kind were finalized in Latin American and Special Collections.
Staff Development
Celia and other members of the Staff Development Committee met with Peabody professor, Mark Cannon, to discuss organizational learning and the creation of a system-wide journal club in the library.
We held a drawing to give away four VIP tickets to the sold-out Maya Angelou lecture, which the library co-sponsored.
Twenty-seven staff members attend an ACRL Web cast on Reference Interviewing Strategies.
Public Services
The Faculty Delivery Proposal project team began its work, and Flo met with Mandy Henk, its chair, to discuss organization and progress of the team. The final recommendation is expected in May/June.
Annex
Flo met with Juanita Murray to discuss the staging of the various Annex shelving projects this spring. She also met with Peg, John, Janet, Mary Beth and Bill Hook to discuss the various building and related Annex transfer projects that are underway. Peg also met with Management Library staff to discuss the implications of the possible renovation project there.
102.5 shelves of new campus transfers arrived during the month. Libraries transferring materials here this month were Central, Divinity, Government Information, Law, Management, Music, Science and Special Collections.
The Ray Poggenburg gift collection, which was donated to the Central Library's Collections Development department, was sent to the Annex in February. 32 boxes were received.
Clint Grantham assisted with sending of the 20 latest boxes of the Helguera Gift Collection to Paula Covington and staff.
Joe Collins assisted the Latin American graduate student in Collections Development with the weekly routing of Davis Gift Collection materials. Joe sends the new materials to them; and they in turn, send the duplicates back to Joe for safe-keeping. When the entire collection is finished, Paula Covington will contact us about the aggregate of duplicates. Joe also assisted Yvonne Boyer with the Leakey Collection, stored with the other rare French materials, here at the Annex.
1011 items were retrieved for patrons out of the 1,026 items actually requested. This was the 2nd highest month for circulation requests this fiscal year, with Oct. 2005 being the highest by only 2 more items! Of the items sent to the circulation and service desks, or to the Office of Inter-Library Loan - 27% were from our storage shelving arrangement stacks. 11% of our materials sent to Circulation Desks were Patron Specified delivery requests.
In addition to all of the above, we faxed 167 periodical pages to Vanderbilt community fax machines. This was the highest amount this fiscal year. Interestingly, our ILL photocopy statistics were the lowest of the year, only 139.
Library Messenger Service & GLB Mailroom
James McCullough was formally designated "Lead Messenger", effective Monday, February 27th. Congratulations to James!
Our newest staff member, Barry Bennett, participated in the New Employee Welcoming Session led by Lisa Shipman, and the various Directors.
Greg Weldy's transfer to the Library Annex was made public; and the announcement about Greg Collins being hired as Messenger, via VTS was sent to the Mailroom/Messenger Liaison list members. Both Gregs will begin their new assignments on Monday, March 13th.
Copier and Printing Services
We have ordered three new copiers and will rotate three renovated canon 3300's to other locations to retire the last of the Royal copiers. Copier volume continues to drop at about 10% per year, so we will retire two copiers without replacement as demand decreases. New copiers will be installed in Central (4th floor), Resource Services and Management. Music will get a refurbished Canon 3300 shortly, as CCS will strip it down and rebuild it before returning it to Music.
We also purchased four new HP 4250 printers for VUprint. Several older printers were retired, and we will now require fewer different types of toner as we move toward a more standardized deployment across most of the libraries. One of the new printers purchased was a duplex printer, the rest single sided printers.
Printing volume in February showed an expected upturn,
though we were surprised volume in January was still low. VUprint volume in
February was 309,000 pages, which is 160% of January volume. This is the largest
monthly volume since we instituted pay-for-print, though still dramatically
below the 534,000 pages printed in September, the last month we gave away
prints. Based on print volume since October, we project annual volume of about
2.5 million pages - roughly half of the 5 million pages printed in 04/05 before
charging.
Technology
Projects and Activities
Television
News Archive
NEH Project
Meetings,
Activities and Professional Development
Paul spoke at WebWise in Los Angeles about the Television News Archive. He also spoke on the hill at Legislative Day on Project Athena. He participated on a conference call with the CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) Preservation Committee.