Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--January 2004
Library Outreach and Campus Interaction
Planning efforts continue with the development of an institutional repository pilot project based on the DSpace software from MIT. The policy/advisory board met again in January with Roberta Winjum, Paul Gherman and Celia Walker in attendance.
The Fisk University Library has indicated their interest in pursuing implementing their online catalog and related library functions on our SIRSI Unicorn system. Flo Wilson, working with LITS, is developing an operating agreement for review by the two institutions.
Library-wide Efforts and Events
Celia, Lisa Shipman,
and Suellen Stringer-Hye presented the new Staffweb to a focus group of staff
who had previously made suggestions on the content and appearance. The Staffweb will be finalized and
introduced in February.
A gallery talk was held in Special Collections on Sunday afternoon, January 25. Herschel Gower, Professor Emeritus, English Department, Vanderbilt University spoke on "Getting It Straight from the Archives." His presentation focused on the new Fugitive and Agrarian acquisitions at Vanderbilt.
Division directors
from participating divisions and units met to discuss the results of the
November time allocation study and the plans for the February data-gathering week.
Administration and Staff
The month of January
was spent preparing the proposed budget for FY 2004/05; Norman Nash devoted
most of his time to this activity, joined often by Paul, Flo, John Haar and
Roberta.
Celia worked with
new visiting scholars and faculty to obtain library cards, a regular occurrence
at this time of year.
Jim Webb resumed
ongoing work on GLB signage for the 4th and 6th floors.
Personnel
The quarterly new employee welcome session was held in January with eight new employees attending. As a part of this meeting, Celia talks about the history of the Library; she did some research to add to the content of this presentation and a write-up will be included in the Heard Library web pages.
Resignations in Central and Technical Services resulted in the posting and beginning recruitment efforts for LA III and LA II positions. Many applications were received for the two open librarian positions in the Management Library, and search committee review will begin shortly. One new staff member began work.
Lisa provides notary services for library staff, and the Metro Council renewed her Notary Public commission for another 4-year period.
Public Relations/Communication
Celia worked with
Martha Young and Strawberry Luck regarding installation of photographic
reproductions from Special Collections in the Central hallway. She has also begun work on a 2004 Marketing
Plan for the library.
Development
A Friends of the
Library event is planned for this spring; Celia began work on the
planning. She also worked with the
Kappa Alpha Order to create a book program honoring teachers.
Bookplates are an
important part of the receiving and addition of gift collections. Celia met with donors and got approval for a
design for the bookplates for Ann Jennalie Cook's gift; planning and design
began for the Wachs Collection bookplate.
Inter-Library Loan
The Winter 2004 OCLC
ILLiad Newsletter includes an article written by John Haar and Jim Toplon about
Vanderbilt’s implementation. Atlas
Systems, the company that developed and services ILLiad, was impressed at the
speed of our implementation.
The new year started
at a very high level of borrowing and lending activity, with requests from VU
patrons continuing at record pace. Demand from other institutions picked up
before Vanderbilt's semester started, and we are very grateful to staff in
campus libraries that helped retrieve materials until our student assistants
returned.
Copyright Clearance
Jim Webb finished up clearances for spring semester ClassPaks, and shifted focus to permissions for electronic reserves.
Collections
Electronic
Resources. Vanderbilt and the University of
Tennessee-Knoxville, acting on behalf of TENN-SHARE, have completed negotiation
for a renewal of our contract for access to all Wiley journals. Our new arrangement will enable us to
provide access to all unsubscribed Wiley journals for a flat fee, so we will no
longer have to pay for tokens for each unsubscribed article. This means we will not need to discourage
patrons from browsing the articles and that patrons will no longer be required
to register in order to view the articles.
Collection
Development. Readers of three draft documents prepared by
a Collection Development Advisory Group subcommittee (John, Sue Davis, and
Kathy Smith) responded with their comments.
The documents include a brief checklist for staff in circulation units,
the Annex, and Interlibrary Loan to use in determining whether to circulate
materials and how to treat worn or damaged items after discharge; and a set of
guidelines for collection development staff to assess an item’s condition and
value and determine its preservation treatment and location. The subcommittee sent the documents to CDAG for
approval.
Annex
361 Web patrons requested materials. 754 items were retrieved for campus requests, 48 of which were sent to other than the owning library as patron specified deliveries. Several particularly interesting citation resolutions were accomplished. Another 39 patrons asked for photocopies, of which we prepared 459 pages.
309 linear feet of new transfers arrived from Campus. VIPPS increased their holdings with University Archives, via a large shipment. Space was assigned for the Morris Wachs Collection. Annex staff were notified of the impending receipt of Special Collections’ Native American Books Collection that will be part of the Wills Collection housed here at the Annex.
Technology Projects and Activities
An SFX
Implementation Team has been appointed to oversee the installation and
implementation of our new linking software from ExLibris. John chairs the group, and members are
Janice Adlington (Central), Chris Benda (Peabody), Marshall Breeding (OUL), Ann
Ercelawn (Technical Services), Dale Poulter (LITS), Rick Stringer-Hye (Science
and Engineering), Suellen Stringer-Hye (LITS), and Pauline Todd
(Biomedical). LITS has installed the
SFX-MetaLib server, and we have completed our request for SFX software
installation. An ExLibris trainer will
visit on Feb. 25 and 26 for two full days of training.
Barbara Tsakirgis
from the classics department met with Marshall related to her interest in using
the image management system for one of her classes this spring. She has been working with the Slide Library
of the College of Arts & Sciences to have her images digitized. She will
use the system for one class this semester, and will add additional classes in
the fall.
Television News Archive
TV News continues
its regular activities, daily off-air recording, creating abstracts, and
producing videotapes for loan. The
requests for videotape loans dramatically increased in January from previous
levels.
Subscription access
for academic institutions to the Archive's database with streaming video access
to CNN content began on January 1st. We
currently have about 76 institutional subscriptions. Subscribers viewed only about a thousand video clips during
January. We expect this figure to
increase dramatically as new users discover it at each subscribing institution.
Marshall's technical
work this month involved helping to select new editing software for
manipulating MPEG-2 video files and creating programs to better manage the
statistics related to the activities of the Archive.
Meetings, activities and professional
development
Jim
Toplon serves on the Rapid Delivery of Library Materials Taskforce for
TENN-SHARE's Tennessee Electronic Library Phase II, and attended its first
meeting January 26th.
John, Flo and Marshall attended the ALA Midwinter meeting in
San Diego. John is chair of the
Collection Management and Development section (CMDS( of the Association for
Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS). Flo is serving on the ALA Nominating Committee; she met with the
Time Study group, participated in the resume review service and was invited to
attend the Library Administration and Management Association (LAMA) Committee
on Organization meeting to talk about the interest group and committee
structure of the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA). Marshall
participated in the LITA Top Technology Trends panel, is a member of the
LITA/Endeavor Student Writing Award committee, attended various other LITA
meetings, convened the Sirsi Large Sites meeting, and met with all the major library
automation companies during the conference.
Marshall's regular "Systems Librarian" was published in Computers in Libraries. Marshall also contributed to the current issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource. The current issue of Library Technology Reports published by ALA TechSource on "Integrated library software: a guide to multiuser, multifunction systems" was authored by Marshall.
13 February 2004