Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--February 2007
Library
Outreach and Campus Interaction
Paul attended a University Press Editorial Board meeting.
Marshall met with Bill Hook and Prof Jack Sasson to discuss the creation
of a new resource called Electronic Translations of Akkadian Cuneiform Texts
(eTACT). This will be a relatively simple text database that provides access
to translations of Akkadian texts. This project will be an additional component
of the ETANA initiative.
Administration
and Staff
Public Relations/Communication
A
total of 79 articles were posted to the Staffnews. 25% were minutes and agendas;
22% were about events in the library and the remainder were news about staff
accomplishments, general news articles, monthly reports, or personnel articles.
Celia and Kathy Smith picked up more materials from Clara Hieronymus and met with Leah Marcus from the English Department regarding a gift of six volumes signed by Booker T. Washington.
Staff Development
We held three brown bag sessions in February: On February 6 we held the Webcast: Discussing the Disconnects between Library Culture and Millennial Generation Values. On February 15, we held the Webcast: Information Commons and the Future of Innovation, Scholarship, and Creativity. And on February 21, Peabody staff conducted a brown bag introduction to Camtasia, screenshot recording and editing video software, that was attended by 20 staff members.
The Reference and Instruction Forum held an information/discussion session on information literacy efforts in the libraries.
Electronic
Resources and Collection Development
Collection Development
The Music and Central Libraries will share the cost of a new subscription to the International Index to Music Periodicals Full Text online. Music considers it a core database, and Central librarians feel it will be an asset in answering music-related reference questions.
Janice Adlington and John Haar developed a format for a spreadsheet to convey license information about electronic resources, focusing on collections of electronic journals. Members of the Committee on Collections reviewed and commented on the proposed format. John will populate the spreadsheet, and the data will be posted to a secure directory. We will also scan licenses and link them to the spreadsheet.
A subcommittee of the Collections Committee received several comments from collection development staff about its proposed system-wide collection development staffweb page. The subcommittee will make final revisions in March and add the page to the Heard staffweb.
Public Services
Jacob Thornton presented 'Understanding the US Census' for the Peabody LPO class 'The Social Context of Education' and began a hands-on GIS help class for a group of Peabody HOD GIS users. Jacob also met with Greg March, Map/GIS Librarian at UTK to discuss future collaboration and for a tour of the UTK Map Library.
The Committee on Undergraduate Information Literacy continued its work on a proposal for a session as part of next year's Vanderbilt Visions programming. Flo Wilson participates in the work of this committee, chaired by Melinda Brown.
The Seating Sweep project team, led by Julie Blagojevich, continued working on plans for its effort to tally physical system-wide library use in April. Flo met with the project team to clarify expectations and answer questions.
Interlibrary Loan Service and Copyright Clearing Service
We are delighted that Marymae Jansson accepted the Copyright Clearance Assistant position and started work with us in February. Welcome, Marymae!
Joell Smith-Borne, Steven Nordstrom, and Holling Smith-Borne visited for a tour and orientation to ILL and Copyright Clearance.
Vanderbilt
Television News Archive
Annex
Meetings,
Activities and Professional Development
Paul attended a Solinet focus group on the future of Solinet at the Nashville Public Library.
Marshall's regular column appeared in Computers in Libraries
and he wrote several short articles for the December issues of ALA TechSource
Smart Libraries Newsletter.