Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--January 2005
Library
Outreach and Campus Interaction
Paul attended the Chancellor's 2-day Strategic Planning Retreat with about 80 other key administrators and professors from across the University.
Paul and Celia met with the Faculty Library Committee to discuss the draft Library Strategic Plan. They gave tours of divisional libraries to seven of the members, who were impressed with the specialized services being offered in our libraries.
Library-wide
Efforts and Events
Administration
and Staff
Public Relations
A press release for the Pay for Print policy was distributed to Vanderbilt
media. Paul and Mills Bell spoke
to the Student Government Association and the IT Student Advisory Board on
the new policy. A Web site on paper conservation was developed by Mills, Melinda
Brown, Suellen Stringer-Hye and Celia and added to the Heard home page.
A press release for the donation of Jim Squires' papers was sent to media outlets.
Kathy Smith and Celia attended a reception for writer and alumnus James Patterson to discuss the possible donation of his papers to Special Collections.
Juanita Murray, Kathy Smith and Celia met with teacher, activist and poet, Dr. Susan Wiltshire, professor in the Classics department at Vanderbilt, to ask her for her papers on her research and her work with the women's movement and other equal rights issues at Vanderbilt and across the state.
Personnel
Pat Johnson was promoted to Administrative Assistant II in the Office of the University Librarian.
Electronic
Resources and Collection Development
Homepage Development
A committee [Sherre Harrington (before leaving), Celia Walker, John Haar] completed adapting a Georgetown University Medical Center Library Webpage on journal costs for the Heard homepage. The page is designed to inform patrons about what the library pays for journals and offers a list of relevant readings on financial issues in scholarly communication. It features a quiz on journal costs that compares the subscription costs of several well-known journals to the prices of consumer products such as computers, TVs, and jewelry. The page is posted to the Heard homepage news ticker and will soon reside at the Heard ejournal page.
Interlibrary Loan Service
January was busy with the usual influx of post-holiday requests, but the big news was that Rachael Bankes started in her new position in ILL - an excellent start for the semester.
Copyright Clearance Service
Jim Webb worked on clearances for electronic reserves, and also typeset the forthcoming issue of Bulletin Baudelairien for the Bandy Center.
Annex
January's new transfers were nearly twice our average monthly growth rate. A critical junction has been reached in regards to empty shelves still available.
Of our holdings that can be permitted to be sent to patron-specified service desks, 24% of our circulation was such patron-specified deliveries. (Example: rare Pascal Pia and all Special Collections requests can only be sent to those departmental service desks.)
As with many Januarys at the Annex, we helped to quickly retrieve articles and monographs needed for Spring Reserve at several of our campus libraries. It seemed to us that more materials were requested for Reserve this spring than at this time last year.
We also had another thirty-seven requests from Inter-Library loan for the photocopying of 329 journal pages. Ten local patrons asked us to fax 96 pages for them. We only fax articles to local telephone numbers.
Government Information staff helped us resolve collections questions including several database issues in regards to our Folio SuDocs materials stored on our 1st Floor. They also helped us with our 2nd Floor SuDocs Copyright serials.
The last group of boxed Wachs gifts were requested by Yvonne and sent to Order Services. Collier boxed gifts are being requested by Collection Development at a steady pace.
Our normal Periodical bar coding projects were on target and we continued to assist our resident on-site faculty members. Other on-site guests this month included faculty from Geology, Law, Physics, and a local state university.
Technology
Projects and Activities
Flo and Jody met with representatives from Information Technology Services to discuss their support of the library automation systems and the charges for that for the year to come.
The Library sponsored an ARL webcast on Geographic Information Systems. Members of the ad hoc GIS group attended along with a number of other interested library staff.
The Library's Electronic Theses and Dissertations service now 'houses' more than 100 ETD's.
Two new staff joined the Library Information Technology Services team-Jason Battles and Julie Loder.
The Library offered to host the website for the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Summer Research project.
LITS continues to try to seek improvements in the performance of VUMail through discussions with ITS.
Library
Technology Officer Activities
Television
News Archive
Meetings,
Activities and Professional Development
Paul attended the ALA Conference in Boston, where he was one of three speakers at Elsevier's Digital Library Symposium. He also spoke at the Nelinet reception about the TVNA, and was on a panel to talk about Last Copy Repositories. Paul also held a meeting to talk about Virtual Storage Collections with OCLC at their suite; other attendees included Flo, Amy Stewart-Mailhiot, and representatives from the CIC libraries, the Library of Congress, and.the Washington Research Library Consortium.
Flo attended the ALA Midwinter Conference, continuing her service on the LITA Board of Directors. She is also a member of the ACRL Statistics Committee and chair of the LITA/Larew Scholarship Committee. She volunteered at the resume reviewing desk in the Placement Center.
Paul initiated a discussion of the recent Chronicle article on information literacy efforts in libraries at a Brown Bag-type meeting. Lisa organized the meeting, which most of the OUL administrators attended, along with a full room of interested staff..
Marshall attended the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Boston, MA. At the conference he taught a full-day LITA Regional Institute on Wireless Technology in Libraries, was a panelist on the LITA Top Technology Trends session, and he convened the meeting of the SIRSI Large Sites Interest Group, as well as other conference sessions and individual meetings with library automation company executives.