Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report—February/March 2003
Library Outreach and Campus Interaction
Paul Gherman joined John Haar who had arranged two lunches with faculty groups to talk about library issues. Another lunch was held with another group of faculty to explore how information literacy could be taught on campus.
Paul, John, Sherre Harrington, and Flo Wilson hosted a
faculty lunch group for those Vanderbilt faculty who
had signed the Public Library of Science pledge. The pledge committed signers to retain copyright to their
publications and to work toward the wider dissemination of scientific
publications without cost.
Unfortunately only one faculty member attended, indicating that we have
work to do in raising faculty consciousness about issues of intellectual
property and serials cost inflation.
Paul, John and Sherre spoke at a workshop to discuss interdisciplinary collaboration on campus, attended by over 50 people.
Provost Nick Zeppos has added Paul to the Dean’s Council and the meetings of the Provost’s staff. Paul serves on two of the campus technology committees—the faculty academic computing group and the senior school leaders group. Paul met with the University Press Board on which he serves.
Library-wide Efforts
The Library continued its investigation of the improvement of service quality. The small group of staff who visited Emory met with others to discuss what they had learned. A follow-up survey of faculty was conducted in order to try to learn more about their electronic resources concerns, as evidenced by the LibQUAL results; only a few responses were received. LMC continued its discussions about how to improve customer service and how to transform the library into an organization with that as a major focus. Dennis Clark will lead further consideration of this, and he and Sharon Weiner will offer the Customer Service workshop again, hoping to train other division directors to conduct additional ones after that.
Several conversations were held to try to determine how to improve the organizational structure for our continuing deliberations. It was decided to restructure and rename the Strategic Planning Group and have it become the University Librarian’s Advisory Group with rotating division director representation joining the University Librarian and associates.
Administration and Staff
Recruitment for the Director of
the Walker Management Library is underway, and Dean Bill Christie, Paul, and
Flo met with the Walker staff to talk about the process.
Elaine Goleski's job was
redefined and the position posted.
Elaine met with one prospective candidate for the position. She continued to update a list of job
responsibilities and to write/revise procedures for the OUL procedures
folder. She began to organize material
in her network folder --deleting some files, moving others to shared folders,
etc. This process will be ongoing
through May.
Susan Smith was out of the
library for about three weeks on medical leave; other OUL staff filled in;
Elaine, Ava, Pat, and Kurt worked hard to keep things moving.
Along with everyone else in the
library, OUL staff worked on annual reviews.
In the Staff Development area,
Elaine worked with Sue Davis to design materials and offer program suggestions
for the library's Preservation Week activities. She also agreed to work with Lisa to do the final edit of the
Technology Training Coordinators report on online training.
February was an eventful month
with approval of the budget for 2003/04 being the most significant event. To meet budget requirements established by
the university, the library’s managers worked hard to identify savings and
position cuts. After submission and
in appeal to the Provost, some funds were restored to the materials budget for
the Science and Engineering Library, two of the eight positions targeted for
elimination were restored, and a new ILL position was approved from special
research funding. Because several
layoffs were necessary, careful plans were made for transitions and
communications.
In the building/plant area, the
Plant Operations On-line Space Survey was completed. A GMC 3500 van was purchased to replace the Ford van that was
retired as a result of an accident. New
high wattage lights were installed in the GLB loading dock for enhanced safety
and security.
Paul and John met with Tiffani
Conner, a student in the University of Tennessee information science program,
who will spend much of May and June working on an administrative practicum with
the Heard Library. We are still
developing her list of activities, but we expect it to include attending LMC
and other selected administrative meetings, spending time with division
directors and other administrators, and working on special research projects.
Library Access
Elaine met with a candidate for the
position of Manager of the Card Office; that person was subsequently hired and
began work later in February. Elaine
and Flo attended the annual Card Office Users’ Group meeting. Elaine met with Marie Swearingen and Anne
Martin to discuss turnstile operations, the Gen6 database, and Acorn patron
database issues.
Elaine continued to work with
Ava Wilson regarding outstanding issues as she processes the daily ACORN record
creation report.
The Fisk/Vanderbilt reciprocal
borrowing arrangement was finalized, as Flo, Elaine, Anne Martin, and Janet
Thomason met to complete planning for project.
Development
Elaine met with Bob Lyon,
Associate Vice-Chancellor in Development, and Paul regarding the Library
Development Officer position. It was
agreed that the position would continue to be a library position, that
Development would continue to fund the part-time Development Assistant
position, and that the new person to be hired would spend about half their time
on development activities. Bob
indicated he would be willing to meet with prospective candidates and provide
feedback to Paul about their suitability as development officers.
Elaine met with John and Susan
Smith to go over a list of restricted funds, mainly book funds, so that Susan
would have more information about these funds when she prepares quarterly
budget reports and projections. She met
with Professor Helguera and Paul to discuss Helguera's plans to create an
endowed book fund that will fund ongoing purchases of material in his area of
scholarly interest. She worked with
Creative Services to discuss a redesign of Helguera’s current bookplate for
this new fund and to develop designs for the Watts and Farris bookplates.
Elaine met with Paul and
Elizabeth Rapisarda to discuss possible foundation funding sources for the
Television News Archive and to get Elizabeth's reactions to our drafts of
inquiry letters to the foundations.
The spring Friends of the
Library event planned for April 15 required substantial effort with Elaine
providing the coordination. She met
several times with staff in Special Events to work on menu, decorations, and
other details; she finalized invitation design with the Print Production Office
and coordinated mailing of 1200 invitations.
Pat Johnson and Ava provided invaluable assistance to Kurt Eger with the
actual mailing. Elaine and Paul
attended a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Library.
Additional development
activities included planning for the upcoming Gallery Talk; reviewing, writing,
editing copy for the next Acorn Chronicle; and working with Gift Records on
details of a gift-in-kind from a Vanderbilt professor.
Inter-Library Loan
The volume of requests from
Vanderbilt users and from other institutions grew again in February, and
despite Spring Break, the volume of interlibrary borrowing and lending activity
remained very high in March.
Vanderbilt is participating in
the current ARL study on Assessing ILL/DD Services, and the ILL Office
collected the first data to report and began gathering data to measure
turnaround time and outcome for the second phase of the study. The project will continue in phases through
May.
Mark Cabus, who was assisting
part-time in ILL, resigned his term position.
Paul announced that an additional staff position has been requested for
ILL and that was approved in March. The
ILL staff are very grateful to all the liaisons in the campus libraries who
retrieved and copied materials for ILL while student assistants were away in
March. The purchase of ILLiad was initiated,
and installation/training is expected in early June for this automation support
package for ILL. Jim Toplon and Dale
Poulter participated in a conference call with counterparts at Virginia
Commonwealth University, who wanted to learn more about our use of OCLC's
Direct Request service in conjunction with the Kudzu catalog.
Copyright Clearance
Jim Webb spent most of his time
processing permissions for Electronic Reserves, and he also worked to finalize
billing for Class Paks after the Printing Service inventory.
Homepage Development
The Heard Library Web Task Force
introduced a revised e-journal site on the Heard homepage. The new site differs from the old in that
clicking on a letter of the alphabet will now display multiple pages, each
containing up to 100 titles. Included
on each page are links to every page in a letter list as well as
"previous" and "next" links.
We made this change because of
the rapid growth in the number of e-journal titles on the list. We now link to over 12,000 e-journals, and
the introduction of Serials Solutions data will expand the list even
further. Lists for some letters
containing large numbers of journals, such as "J", were taking an
inordinately long time to load and display.
The Web Task force added a
revised ‘Search Tips’ page to the Research Databases and Electronic Journals
lists. The revised page provides a more
detailed explanation of how the search function works. It also clarifies that Boolean operators are
implied and need not be used in a search, explains how truncation works, and
addresses how the search engine treats punctuation marks. It provides sample searches.
Paul Gherman charged the Task
Force to gather information about three categories of online products in
preparation for a library wide vendor review process. The types of products are reference-linking tools (such as SFX or
Sirsi Resolver), broadcast searching tools (such as WebFeat or Sirsi
SingleSearch), and context managers (such as Sirsi Rooms) that include the
other two tools. We plan to present
major vendors of these products a set of questions about system architecture,
public interface, implementation and maintenance, and cost. We will also inquire about trials or demos.
Collection Development
Flo, John, and Leslie Reynolds
met with Tommie Smith, our Ebsco representative, to discuss options for making
the Management Library’s subscription to Business Source Premier
campus-wide. Presently access is
available only in the Owen School. The
Peabody and Science & Engineering Libraries had expressed concern at the
cancellation of ABI Inform, previously accessible on a campus-wide basis. Ebsco offered a package deal for campus-wide
access to both Business Source Premier and Academic Source Premier, a database
that competes with ProQuest Research Library.
We plan to have a small group of representatives from interested
libraries compare the value of Academic Source Premier and ProQuest before
making a decision on the package.
Based on a recommendation from
the Central Library, we will change vendors for our subscription to Who’s Who
online, which is paid on the Heard Library shared database fund. We currently subscribe through
Ovid/SilverPlatter, but we will replace this subscription with access through
Marquis, the publisher of the Who’s Who directories. This decision should save us over $3,000.
Technology Projects and Activities
Several staff discussed the use of
D-Space from MIT as a software platform to develop a pilot of an Institutional
Repository for VIPPS materials. Roberta
Winjum will be putting together a proposal and working with LITS on a prototype
for the pilot.
Flo served on an Email Task Force that was considering changing to VUMail from Pegasus, using the Mulberry and VUWebmail clients. The Task Force completed its work, presented its recommendation to LMC to make the change, and the recommendation was approved. The Task Force work involved using Mulberry exclusively for several months, and most of the task force members found it a preferred email product.
A special meeting was called to discuss the Special Collections Photo Archive project and the Creative Services photographic database and their relationship to each other. Special Collections will be reviewing the Creative Services metadata schema to determine whether it will be useful in the Archive, and Special Collections will determine any additional requirements with which Creative Services might be able to assist. Marshall did some work on a preliminary assessment on the transfer of digital images from Creative Services to the library's photographic archives. Key issues include transfer of metadata, assessment of the levels of metadata available, standard image formats, storage requirements, ability to make archived images available back to Creative Services, and digital preservation issues. Marshall met with Lynn Craddick to discuss these issues; Flo and Jody convened the meeting that included interested individuals from Creative Services and the library regarding this project.
In order to move along the selection and implementation of a printing management system on campus, Flo called together a task force consisting of representatives from the libraries and school labs. The group is working expeditiously with hopes of having something implemented by sometime this fall.
The Digital Collections Committee is moving slowly to gather information on how other libraries have developed support for digital collection creation and development efforts and to educate members of the committee on the technical considerations that must be included in any such project.
Along with Jody and Dale, Flo participated in a SIRSI Rooms Content Management telephone meeting with SIRSI to discuss the SIRSI products that include Single Search and Resolver.
Marshall worked with Anne Womack relating to planning for future development work for the ATLA Religious Iconography Database. The grant for this project has been extended to a second year. We plan to implement enhancements to the system to include support for the thesauri from the ICONCLASS system, which is widely used in the field of religious iconography.
Marshall has been working on the Investigation of large-scale storage options. One of the main concerns involves how to accommodate the amount of online storage needed for the video delivery system. Initial thinking involved using Storage Area Network (SAN) technology to create a single large and scaleable storage system that would be used for this project and other library projects that require large-scale storage. However, we are finding the SAN to be very expensive, with questionable returns on the investment. The model that we are currently investigating for the streaming video delivery system involves creating a cluster comprised of a large number of mid-sized servers, each with its own storage. This cluster approach gives the overall system a large number of processors, network connections, and provides a large amount of aggregate storage without the need for a monolithic storage system. We continue to model pricing for the servers, storage, and software for this conceptualization of the streaming video delivery system.
Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Website activity continued to be heavy in February and March. In February alone 1,300 new customers registered--the second largest number since the launch of the new website.
With the beginning of the war in Iraq on March 21, the Television News Archive began 24-hour per day recording of news coverage of the war. For this event, the Archive has added Fox News to its recording of news from ABC, CBC, NBC, and CNN. Cataloging for the ‘war in Iraq’ coverage will be deferred. From March 21 through the end of the month, the Archive taped over 1,200 hours of war coverage.
Michael Sims who will write articles on the Archive for Vanderbilt Magazine and the Acorn Chronicle interviewed Marshall Breeding and John Lynch. These articles will focus on the history of the archive, its current status, and on our plans for digitizing the collection.
WSMV, the local NBC affiliate, broadcast a story on March 25 featuring the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, contrasting the changes in news coverage from the Vietnam War in the 1960's, the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and the current War in Iraq. Interviews with John Lynch and Mike Schoenfeld were shown as part of the story.
In garnering support for the
Archive and exploring future Archive approaches, Paul talked to Larry Lessig,
Professor of Law from Stanford and a leading expert on Internet IP law, about
helping the TVNA; he agreed to offer pro bono support. Paul met with past contributors and wrote to
a number of foundations requesting support for the TVNA. He had lunch with Senator Frist's chief of
staff and head legislative aid.
Cheryl Carpenter completed her internship with the Archive in March. Steve Davis continues work on a project to digitize the Senate Watergate Hearings. The majority of Marshall's time was devoted to technical work related to designing a methodology for the digital recording of news programming. One of the main problems that needed to be solved before the Archive could start recording news digitally involves finding a way to produce the Network-Time-Date Stamp on the recorded material.
Marshall met with representatives of the Library of Congress to discuss technical issues regarding the transfer of digital files from the Archive to LC. They also talked about the general relationship between the Archive and LC, and whether there are new organizational opportunities that may arise with these changes in technologies.
Marshall met with two individuals from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, regarding their archive of BBC radio newscasts and to explore possible collaboration in the future. They have digitized their 8,000 hours of content, but do not have abstracts or transcripts.
External meetings, activities and professional development
Paul conducted several
interviews with systems staff at ARL concerning their development of portals,
as part of the ARL Portal Committee on which he serves. He also attended the OCLC Members Council
and chaired their Digital Library Interest Group. He attended the Tennessee Electronic Library planning group
meeting.
John represented the Heard
Library at the spring meeting of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries
in Charleston, SC, March 1-3.
Flo met for two days in Chicago with the Executive Committee of the Library Information and Technology Association (ALA); she serves as Past President and Chair of the Budget Review Committee which is a subset of this group.
Marshall taught a workshop on virtual reference technologies for SOLINET at Western Kentucky University in February. In March he attended the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington, DC, where he taught a session on Tools and Technologies for an all-day workshop titled "Web Managers Academy", gave a presentation on "The Wireless Library" and presented a "Security Primer". He participated in the Sirsi SuperConference in St. Louis, convening the Sirsi Large Sites Interest Group and giving a presentation on "OpenURL". Marshall's regular "Systems Librarian" column was published in the February and March 2003 issues of Computers In Libraries; he was the co-author of the “Automated System Marketplace 2003: The Competition Heats Up” feature which appeared in the April 1 issue of Library Journal.
Elaine consulted with a person
interested in establishing a Friends' group at Athens State University in
Athens, AL.