Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report—January 2003
Paul
Gherman addressed the library staff, updating all on the State of the Library. The Library will publish this spring a State
of the Library 2002 report. Each division
director has submitted a topical essay that relates to the Library’s focus
or initiatives. Paul will provide
a library-wide perspective. Elaine
Goleski is working on the editing and preparation of the final document.
Lisa
Shipman has been appointed as the chairperson of the Task Force on Privacy
and Retention of Records Committee. Committee
members include Bill Hook, Divinity; Jody Combs, LITS, Frances Lynch, Biomedical;
and Juanita Murray, Special Collections/University Archives. This committee will look into issues surrounding privacy of information
and retention of records, especially as they may relate to the U.S.A.. Patriot
Act signed into law on October 26, 2001. The first meeting was held on January 31.
Budget
Nancy
Falls, a new Assistant Vice Chancellor in the Provost’s Office will be taking
on responsibility for budget and capital project oversight for those operations
within the Provost’s purview. Paul
met twice with her to establish a degree of familiarity with the library and
rapport in working together on future budgets and other projects.
Flo Wilson joined one of these meetings..
A
significant part of the month was directed toward the 2003/2004 budget proposal. Norman Nash worked through numerous adjustments to the budget model
as priorities and directions changed. Divisions
were challenged with identifying budget cuts. Many hours of administrative time were spent
addressing budget issues; Paul, Flo, John Haar, Roberta Winjum, Lisa, Norman
and Elaine were involved. Paul met
with many of the Deans to discuss library budget and building issues. Norman initiated the documentation phase of
the proposed budget for 2003/04.
One
of the Library’s vans was damaged in an auto accident in January.
Norman Nash began the process of requesting bids for a replacement
van for mail operations.
Norman Nash and Susan Smith continued to work with the staff from Internal Audit, coordinating their meetings with library divisional staff and working on overall concerns.
Personnel and Staff Development
The
Staff Development Coordinating Committee sponsored an additional videotape
presentation of "Safeguarding our Patrons' Privacy: What Every Librarian
Needs to Know about the U.S.A. Patriot Act and Related Anti-Terrorism Measures" on January 14.
SDCC
also sponsored a Brown Bag on January 30 presented by Scott McDermott, Divinity
Library. Scott discussed his recently published book,
"Charles Carroll of Carrollton: Faithful Revolutionary." Scott's topic was Charles Carroll and the American
Dream.
SDCC
held a "Name the Electronic Board" contest after announcing the
new Heard Community electronic bulletin board.
Stacy Owens, Peabody Library, submitted the winning entry of "The
Watercooler." Nancy Keeler, Biomedical,
won second place for her entry, "Keeping up with the Heard."
The committee decided to combine both entries to create the board's
name, which will be "The Watercooler--A Place to Keep up with the Heard." The board can be used to post notices of outside meetings, activities
of general interest, items for sale, etc.
Search
Committee activities got underway for the Director position in the Management
Library. Flo will chair the Committee; Leslie Reynolds
and Deborah Brooks will also serve. Barry
Dombro from the Owen School and a faculty member (to be named) will join the
Committee. Lisa Shipman, as usual,
serves ex officio. The ‘first consideration’
application date is February 28.
Elaine
Goleski announced to both the Library and to Development and Alumni Relations
that she would be resigning/retiring as of May 31.
She began drafting a list of job duties, cleaning out files, and doing
other tasks in preparation for her departure.
The intent is to have someone hired by May so that there will be overlap
in staffing the many functions she supports.
Library Access
Elaine
met with representatives of the Provost's Office, Human Resources, and the
Card Office to discuss coding problems with IDs for research associates.
This group of users should receive faculty IDs, but the Card Office
had been issuing staff IDs, resulting in the RA's getting staff-level library
privileges. Problems in the database
download process in the Card Office were identified, and both short-term and
long-term solutions were created. As
part of the short-term solution, Pat Johnson checked the list of current research
associates in Acorn and updated records to reflect faculty status.
Elaine
agreed to meet with candidates for the position of Operations Manager for
the Card Office. The first candidate will be interviewed in
February.
Development, Gifts and Donations
Paul,
along with Juanita Murray and Kathy Smith, met successfully with John Siegenthaler
to get his commitment to give his papers to Vanderbilt.
Elaine,
with Kurt Eger’s assistance, continued planning for the Spring Friends of
the Library meeting, to be held April 15 in the Peabody Rotunda.
The speaker will be Rick Chappell, Research Professor of Physics and
Director of the University's Office of Science and Research Communications.
Elaine
worked with the Athletic Department to coordinate the library's annual "bring
a book" program with the women's basketball team.
The game date is March 2. Anyone
who brings a book for a donation will get in free.
Elaine
finalized designs for three more bookplates for gift collections.
Interlibrary Loan
Vanderbilt
users kept ILL busy both with new requests and with requests held for processing
during the December holidays. ILL
obtained agreement from all of the VU libraries that patrons may return borrowed
ILL materials at any campus library (excepting Law and Biomedical, which have
separate interlibrary loan operations). Other libraries' requests resumed
in January at the same high pre-holiday level.
Following the discontinuation of the ARL German Resources Project Phase
2 (intended to allow participating German libraries to request materials from
U.S. participants, including Vanderbilt), we removed our installation of the
"ILL Manager" software that RLG had donated for the project.
Copyright Clearance
As
soon as the final rush of clearances for spring semester Class Paks cleared
in January, Jim Webb turned his attention to the requests for Electronic Reserves
permissions.
Heard Web Pages Development
The
Web Task Force created a new
Theses and Dissertations page for the Heard homepage. A link to the page is located at the Research
Assistance section of the homepage. The
page includes an Acorn search that is configured to locate only Vanderbilt
theses and dissertations. It also
includes links to ProQuest Digital Dissertations (Dissertation Abstracts),
a link to a database of full text theses and dissertations from 150 institutions,
and Interlibrary Loan request forms.
The
Task Force also added a page of library unit phone numbers to the Heard homepage
to compensate for their exclusion from the new university phone directory.
The phone
list is located at a Phone #s link at the top of the homepage.
Collection Development
After
considerable delay, we established full text access to over 700 journals published
by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Our
subscription to the journals is provided though an agreement negotiated by
the Information Alliance libraries with Ovid.
The Biomedical, Central, Divinity, Law, Management, Peabody, and Science
and Engineering Libraries share the cost of this new acquisition.
Building Issues
The
Task force to address staff security in the General Library Building (John
Haar (Chair), Roberta Winjum, Bill Hook, Juanita Murray, Norman Nash, Lisa
Shipman, Janet Thomason) presented its recommendations to Paul Gherman.
The recommendations will be distributed for staff comment in February.
Martha
Young and Janet Thomason met with Mr. Woods, the supervisor of our housekeeping
staff, to present the results of a GLB staff survey on cleaning routines. The housekeeping staff has adjusted its routines to address the
survey’s recommendations. They will
devote more time and attention to cleaning bathrooms, stairwells, and public
workstation areas. In order to free
time for these activities, they will empty office wastebaskets and vacuum
offices less frequently than in the past.
TV News Archive
Following two very slow months, Website activity and videotape requests increased significantly in January. In addition to the increased activity, staff made headway on a variety of projects, and significant progress has been made on the NSF digitizing project.
In
the ongoing search for funding, Elaine edited a series of inquiry letters
to several foundations to determine if they might be interested in a formal
grant proposal for the Television News Archive.
She also researched possible Television News Archive donor prospects
using the University’s development database.
Clearance for Paul to contact identified organizations and individuals
was requested and received.
Special projects underway in the Archive include an effort to catalog some of the backlog of Nightline broadcasts and continued clean-up of entries on the calendar system. Cheryl Carpenter has also been working on helping to develop a database record structure for the presidential state of the union addresses.
Work is proceeding on activities supported by the National Science Foundation Grant. Determining the most effective way of digitizing the thousands of hours of videotape is largely the focus of the grant. Marshall is exploring different methodologies and is being assisted by Steve Davis. Presently, the key issue being worked on is the segmentation of the video into shorter and retrievable segments.
A prototype of the streaming video delivery system has been constructed. At this time the streaming video is available only to authorized staff, while we continue to work with copyright and other legal issue.
Steve Davis continues various activities related to digitization. He is accomplishing some actual digitizing (about 25 hours so far in addition to 31 presidential speeches), and working on benchmarking the MPEG-2 encoding cards that are being tested.
More
technical detail on the investigatory work and statistics for the Archive
are available in Marshall’s monthly
report.
Technology Projects
The Digital Collections Committee held its first meeting to begin its deliberations on how to meet its charge. The Committee has been added to others on the Staffweb; its proceedings will be recorded and available from there. Members include Marshall Breeding, Jody Combs, Sue Davis, Catherine Gick, Teresa Gray, Flo Wilson (Chair), and Anne Womack.
An investigation of VUmail is underway. The taskforce (George Anglin, Judy Carter, Jody Combs (Chair), Gretchen Dodge, Bill Hook, Rick Stringer-Hye and Flo) are working on making a recommendation to LMC on whether changing to VUmail might be desirable in the near future, and if so, when. Flo was among the small group who went through the ITS Mulberry (client software for use with VUmail) training. A recommendation is expected no later than early March.
Other OUL
Eight
new staff members attended the New Employee Welcome Session along with the
OUL administrators on January 22.
John Haar led a small group to visit Emory. Emory’s scores on the LibQUAL survey were quite high, and we wanted to see what we might learn from them about providing even higher levels of service here. The group included Sherre Harrington, David Carpenter, and Janet Thomason. They returned with very positive impressions of Emory, their wonderful building, and the cooperative technology spaces.
Elaine
worked with Mark Cabus and Susan Smith in the process of reformatting and
updating the library telephone directory, expected to be published in February. Given the cost and time involved, we've decided
to print the directory just twice each year.
A
revised version of the laptop loan form was sent to the Office of General
Counsel for review and approval.
Other University/Library-related Staff Activities
Paul, John and Flo joined those staff who are participating in Residential College committee meetings for an update on where these university-wide deliberations stand.
External Activities
Four OUL staff attended the Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association—Paul and John among them.
Marshall was involved in many of his usual activities and responsibilities: the Editorial Board meeting of the LITA publication Technology Electronic Reviews; serving on the LITA Top Technology Trends panel, and convening the SIRSI Large Sites Interest Group. Marshall also attended other LITA meetings and met with representatives of all the major library automation companies.
Flo continued as Past President of LITA and Chair of its Budget Review Committee. A number of LITA Board meetings and divisional leadership meetings are involved as a result of holding office. Flo was also invited by ARL to present a session at the workshop for this year’s LibQUAL participants; the title of this program segment was ‘Tales from Past Participants’; Bowling Green State also presented their experiences.
Ava
Wilson attended a 2-day ACCESS class at the New Horizon Computer Center.
Marshall's regular Systems Librarian column was published in the December 2002 issue of Computers In Libraries.