Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--January 2006

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Celia Walker and Flo Wilson attended the Forum for Campus Web Developers.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

Many of us attended the retirement party for Paul and Leonor van Cotthem that was hosted by Technical Services and the Annex in the Peabody Fireside Reading Room.

Administration and Staff

Flo met with David Carpenter and Dean Bradford in Owen to discuss the 2006/2007 budget and the library renovation project planned for the Management School, including parts of the Management Library.

Lisa and Flo attended the Provost area Budget Officers meeting to learn more about the upcoming submission of the budget.

Personnel

Plans moved forward for the 2006 Staff Satisfaction Survey. Flo, Lisa and Janet Hirt consulted with various other managers about the best way to break the Library into groups for receiving the results of the survey.

Public Relations

A press release was sent to the Hustler and the Register regarding the end date for Vendacard refunds.

Development

Kathy Smith and Celia met with former Chancellor and Mrs. Alexander Heard and with Mrs. Emmett Fields to acquire additional papers for Chancellor Heard's and Dr. Field's collections.

Juanita Murray and Paul were involved in several events honoring the Rev. James Lawson and we met with him and his son to discuss his papers.

Paul, Celia, Catherine Gick, Kathy Smith, and Sue Davis have been working with Dean Wait concerning the deposit of the Robert Craft Stravinsky collection at Vanderbilt.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

Learning Commons:

The Learning Commons Project Team met on Jan. 6 and decided to approach the College of Arts and Science for funding. While we did not have a firm cost estimate, we anticipated costs to run upwards of $300,000. Though we envisioned the Commons as a campus-wide service, its probable location in the Central Library decreased our prospects of attracting funding from schools other than A&S. Unfortunately A&S is unable to fund the project at this time, so the Project Team has disbanded.

Collaborative Collection Development:

Information Alliance libraries have purchased OCLC's WorldCat Collection Analysis system to promote collaborative collection building. Alliance staff members tested the system in selected subject areas to develop a methodology for bibliographers to measure the current overlap in subject collections, determine which titles are unnecessarily duplicated among Alliance libraries, and reduce the overlap rate in the future. We expect to agree on a final procedure in February.

Public Services

Flo met with Janice Adlington to discuss the progress on LibQUAL+; with Melinda Brown to discuss the Instruction Forum and Instruction goal from the strategic plan; Amy Limpitlaw and Melinda Brown to better understand the database identification/selection issues in the current library website. The Faculty Delivery Proposal project team got underway and Flo met with them to discuss the charge and answer questions.

Flo and Dale Poulter met with people from Student Accounts and Accounting to review practices for collecting on library debts owed by students. Celia, Flo and Julie Loder met to figure out how to correct mistakenly expired patron records.

Interlibrary Loan Service

The most recent upgrade to ILLiad allowed us to begin using the OCLC "Direct Request" service. Acting on criteria and profiles that we provide the ILLiad and OCLC systems, this service sends some borrowing requests directly to potential lenders, without staff intervention.

Copyright Clearing Service

Once classes began (and most ClassPak permissions completed), Jim Webb turned to clearances for electronic reserves, and also worked on signage for the GLB.

Annex

We opened our Library Assistant III vacancy by announcing it on January 2nd. Several applicants, with very good library experience, applied. We made arrangements for Annex interviews in late January and early February.

The usual flurry of Annex visits from architects, Campus Planning staff, various technicians and service representatives was coupled with additional and new faculty and scholars who were on site during January. In addition to our "construction" and repair projects with the primary building, we had planners on site working on a feasibility study for an addition.

We sadly watched the Vanderbilt movers arrive to cart away the Kadar Holocaust crates. Those paintings have been at the Library Annex longer than Clint, Joe, or Peg! The reason they had to leave is because we urgently need the floor space to be taken over with more electronic compact shelving. It's a race to have shelving constructed here so that we can absorb the Central Folio stacks --before Central/Divinity renovations can occur on campus.

103 shelves of new campus transfers arrived during the month. Libraries transferring materials here this month were Central, Divinity, Government Information, Law, Management, Music, and Special Collections. We received print copies of PColl and VColl. dissertations, and we also received ETD's.

977 items were requested for patron retrieval. This is not quite 300 more than last month. Of the 977 items, 339 were pulled from our Storage Shelving stacks (which represents items received after May 2002, which are shelved by size of the book). 105 of our 977 requests were sent to libraries other than the owning campus library. In addition to all of the above, we had nearly 400 photocopies for ILL patrons; and we sent 137 faxed pages to our Vanderbilt community.

Library Messenger Service & GLB Mailroom

We welcomed in the new calendar year with the news that both UPS and USPS charge were rising. We notified all of our liaisons that January 2nd our UPS charges went up; and then just before January 8th, we notified everyone that all USPS charges were rising, effective that day. It wasn't just your 39 cent stamps!

Our newest staff member, Barry Bennett, participated in a number of tours and orientations this month. A special thanks to the following staff and departments who hosted him: Yvonne Boyer, and the Bandy Center, Sue Davis and the Preservation Team, Bryan Kurowski, Kelly Lockaby and Central Reference, and Central Collections Development, Jim Toplon and Inter-Library Loan, Kathy Smith and Special Collections, and Daisy Whitten, Central Circulation. Peg plans
to schedule further tours and orientations in March.

James, Barry, Dewey, and Peg made plans, along with Greg for Greg's absence during mid-February to early March. James and Barry will be sharing Greg's "out-of the GLB duties"; and Dewey will be pitching in for GLB Mailroom surges.

Technology Projects and Activities

On January 13, Marshall met with Juanita, Teresa, and Karin of Special Collections to talk about the interface to the Photo Archives digital collection.

Television News Archive

NEH Project

The NEH project to digitize evening news continues, focusing primarily on finishing the quality checking of the digitized files and re-processing ones that have errors and problems. As we work on finishing the evening news collection, we have begun working on the specials collection. We begin this effort with the CNN specials, since that material can be made available to subscribers once it is digitized. Our preliminary work with the specials will help us develop procedures for a more wholesale approach that will commence if the NEH funds our second grant. Steve Davis was out for the month, which slowed the operation considerably. Steve will be back in February.

OpenWeb Project

As hoped, our OpenWeb project did result in additional Web site activity and an increase in videotape loan requests. For each month since the OpenWeb site has been active we have been able to document a significant level of activity where the user begins with Google, finds a page on the OpenWeb, and enters our production Web site. The number of visits that follow this path is about three to four times the number that arrive at our site directly from Google. The analysis also revealed the number of users who begin on Google, hit our OpenWeb site, enter the production site, and subsequently place an order. From August 2005 to January 2006, roughly 30 percent of our videotape requests can be directly attributed to this path. The number of items in these requests tends to be small. Bottom line: During this period 13% of our income from videotape service fees can be attributed to our OpenWeb initiative. That figure represents income we would not have taken in otherwise.

Subscriptions

In January 2006 a trial subscription was set up for the University of Southern Florida.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

Celia met with the Volunteer Voices group at the Tennessee State Library and Archives.

Several staff attended the Mid-Winter ALA Conference in San Antonio, among them John, Paul, Flo, Roberta, Peg and Marshall. At ALA Paul chaired a meeting of the Virtual Storage Steering Committee, met with several key individuals from Portico, and discussed preservation archiving in informal discussion with a number of other ARL directors.

Flo attended the ARL Statistics Coordinators meeting and learned about SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative). She chaired the LITA Nominating Committee, met with the LITA 40th anniversary celebration committee.

Marshall spent January 16-17 at Virginia Tech working with Ed Fox and his students on the ETANA-DL application. We reviewed installation requirements and procedures so that we can install the software on a server at Vanderbilt. We have ordered a server that will be used for the project.

Marshall was invited to give a presentation on January 12th for the Orbis Cascade Alliance in Oregon on "The Future of Integrated Library Systems." Marshall's publications this month include his Systems Librarian column in Computers in Libraries magazine and contributions to ALA's Smart Libraries Newsletter.

103 February 2006