The Library offered a weeklong Retirement Learning program for the fourth year in a row in July. Celia Walker managed the organization of the classes; presenters from OUL included Paul Gherman, John Haar, Marshall Breeding, and Lisa Shipman. Flo Wilson updated the web pages for the classes.
Paul and Roberta Winjum met with Provost Nick Zeppos to talk about a proposed electronic institutional repository for Vanderbilt scholarly publications. Initially, the repository would provide a home for electronic working papers and would be tested out with VIPPS in addition to another department or so. The Provost was quite enthusiastic about the project and its possibilities; he will appoint a faculty advisory committee to establish policies and procedures. Once some conclusions are reached the pilot project can begin. Roberta will continue to coordinate this project, and Paul hopes to make a presentation to the faculty senate this fall.
Paul attended a meeting of the Vanderbilt University Press Editorial Board on which her serves.
Paul is also a member of the University Taskforce on the Selection of Electronic Course Management Tools. This group has been working this last spring to identify the needs and available alternatives for course management support following the discontinuance of Prometheus in summer 2004. A two day retreat was held in July to discuss the recommendations to be made to the Provost; Paul was unable to attend, and Flo attended in his place.
The Printing Management System ad hoc task force continued its deliberations in July; Flo chairs this group, and Jody Combs, Bill Hook, and Marcia Epelbaum serve as well. Two alternatives have been identified: acquire a system and implement it without charging in the fall and then begin charging in the spring; should the deans and/or administration be so inclined, decide to not charge but fund the libraries to be able to cover the increased supply costs. A decision is expected by the end of August. A&S, Engineering, Law and Peabody have all been involved with the task force.
Nancy Falls in the Provost’s Office has responsibility for representing the Provost’s Office in building projects on the academic side of campus. Paul gave her a tour of Central, Peabody and the Annex. Paul also met with A&S Dean Richard McCarty and Judson Newbern in Campus Planning about hiring an architect to begin refurbishing plans for selected areas of Central over the next few years. A committee will be established soon to review the needs and possibilities.
Paul approved recommendations by the GLB Security Group (John, Roberta, Bill Hook, Juanita Murray, Norman Nash, Lisa Shipman, Janet Thomason) to increase staff security. The Group is working to implement the recommendations. The first change to be made is moving the pre-7:30 AM staff entrance from the loading dock door to the breezeway door. At the same time, the double doors between the loading dock and mailroom foyer will become an entry point for staff during the workday. The door between the foyer and the staff hallway will be locked and re-keyed for the staff elevator key. The door between the hallway and loading dock area will be locked externally at all times.
With Celia being new to the library and OUL, she wanted to visit all of the various library locations. Paul joined her on these tours, and both found them useful and educational.
The Personnel Office was busy with search committees, new employees, and resignations. The search committee for the Management Library Electronic Resources Librarian position has narrowed its search to 3 potential interviewees. The Science Library term librarian position and the Information Services/Instruction librarian position in Management have been posted, and the committees will begin their work in August. Several of the Law Library staff talked with interested candidates for their reference position at the American Association of Law Libraries meeting in July. Lisa met with two new employees and conducted exit interviews with two departing staff.
The Library Personnel Office successfully sent all the 2003/2004 salary increase letters to all employees again this year through U.S. Mail. We are happy to say there were no reports of missing or lost letters.
Lisa and Celia began work on the Staff Service Awards Reception to be held in early October.
The Library wrapped up its work with Internal Audit in reviewing all of our financial and security procedures. The final report, a quite positive one, has been submitted to the Provost’s Office. Several tasks remain to be done, and these will be worked on in August. As one aspect of this, Susan Smith began working to put together a policies and procedures manual for the library system.
Norman Nash was involved, as were many others, in closing out the 2002/2003 budget year; we ended the year with a small positive balance overall. John, Roberta, Norman and Flo met to discuss the close out of the library’s materials budgets and the principles under which materials funds should be spent.
Norman and Dewey James are serving on a committee to recommend replacements for many of the library’s current photocopiers. Bids were solicited for 17 new copiers and for service support for all copiers. Sherre Harrington is also serving on this committee, which Bill Hook chairs.
Flo tied up many loose ends at the Management Library as her tenure as acting director came to a close; she met with Mark Cohen, the new Senior Associate Dean, to orient him to library matters as he assumes responsibility for day-to-day operations in the Owen School.
Tiffani Conner, our administrative practicum student, completed her practicum. She produced a draft gifts policy, a background study on service quality, and a report of her experiences at Vanderbilt.
Celia is settling in to the routine of producing two newsletters each month and timely minutes from the LMC meetings, all of which are shared with library staff. She is identifying various people around campus that she needs to know in her role as public relations officer; she met with the new staff of the Vanderbilt Register. Several publications made progress during July under her guidance—the 2003/2004 Guide to Libraries was finalized, planning for a new Acorn Chronicle with Bonnie Ertelt was underway, and preliminary work began on this year’s holiday card with Chris Skinker in Special Collections.
Access and Card Office issues provided challenges during July. With the new Card Office system, referred to as CS Gold, and without Elaine Goleski who understood the access system in great detail, Celia, Susan Smith, Pat Johnson, and Flo have been trying to figure out how to provide the support needed by the libraries and to work with the Card Office in understanding the issues that exist there. Meetings between OUL and the circulation staff from most of the libraries, and meetings with Kay Keaton, the new manager of the Card Office, helped to illuminate the problems, but resolutions for many of the issues have not yet been reached.
Celia is the contact for non-Vanderbilt library-wide use privileges. She worked with a person from the College of Worcester and another from the administration of the Fisk Race Relations Institute. Susan Smith worked with the English as a second language office (ESL, formerly COPE).
Celia worked with the Wild Bunch to gather information needed to make their annual acquisition.
Learning more about how the Development Office works is an important task, and Celia attended the Advance traning program.
The Friends of the Library Fall Dinner will take place Nov. 18 at the Stadium Club where the topic will be the Fugitives and the 30th anniversary of the Friends will be noted. Marice Wolfe is working with Celia. Celia met with Marc Stengel to discuss the FOL Board; four new board members will be needed.
The big news for July was welcoming David Hughett to the Interlibrary Loan Service staff. ILL borrowing and lending business was brisk, and staff concentrated on keeping current so that the transition to ILLiad, the new automated system supporting ILL activities, would be as clean as possible.
In Copyright Clearance, Jim Webb continued to process the growing number of fall Class Pak orders. First indications are that a greater than usual proportion of orders were received before the deadline.
The Web Task Force received responses from twelve vendors of broadcast searching and reference linking products. The Task Force selected three vendors for further consideration and sent them requests for additional information. When this information is received, the Task Force will ask ISAG and the Heard Library E-Resources Committee to join them in reviewing the responses and making a purchase recommendation to LMC. A general staff presentation was planned for August to describe the features of these products.
Many of the databases supplied to us by Ovid-SilverPlatter are available from other vendors. Prices for several databases have increased dramatically since SilverPlatter merged with Ovid. The Collection Development Advisory Group sent requests for information to three vendors (Ebsco, FirstSearch, and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts) to obtain comparative pricing for their versions of databases we currently acquire from O-SP. After reviewing their responses, CDAG may attempt to negotiate special pricing for a package of databases. Price is not the only consideration in evaluating offers from database vendors; the quality of the vendor’s interface is also an important feature. The Task Force expects to conduct trials of each vendor’s interface and consult ISAG before making a decision to switch vendors for any database.
The Library Annex received 554 linear feet of new transfers during July 2003. These arrived from all libraries except Biomedical. 752 items were retrieved to circulate to campus patrons; users asked that 46 be sent to other than the owning campus library, and 47 of the total came from the "shelved by size" portion of the collection, transferred since spring 2002. 33 ILL requests were filled with photocopies, and 7 campus patrons received faxed articles from the Annex.
The Annex continued to participate in the Reduction in Inventory project for Divinity and Technical Services. The staff began working with the Robinson Music project with Dennis Clark and Catherine Gick, and they continued to send both Robinson gifts and Ruiz-Ramon gifts to Central Collections Development.
The Office of the University Librarian switched to VUmail during July. The transition has been smooth, though a number of Pegasus clean-up tasks remain.
Marshall met with Paul and Doug Knight (DivinitySchool) regarding the ongoing work of ETANA. This year NSF funded a project to develop an application for gathering and aggregating archaeological data. The grant was awarded to Case Western Reserve University, with much of the work taking place at Virginia Tech. While Vanderbilt will not be extensively involved in the development phase, we will host the application once it is completed, about two years from now.
The NEH grant proposal was submitted with revision and editing involving Paul, Marshall and Celia.
Paul met with Kevin Davis in the Legal Office to investigate the copyright status of early TVNA programs.
TV News continues testing and training its staff with the new digital recording facility. The final switch over to this equipment is expected on August 5, 2003, the 35th anniversary of the Archive. All new programs are being digitized and many existing programs are being converted. This month staff digitized 281 hours of material contributing to a total of 775.5 hours that have been digitized to date.
Marshall created a server-based distributed system for producing lightweight streaming video files in RealMedia format from our MPEG-2 masters.
We implemented a major structuring of the TV-NewsSearch database. Changes involved the approach used for linking together the segment records that comprise a program and creating and populating a new field for the duration of each program.
Four new Dell servers and a rack-mount cabinet were ordered to provide additional digital storage for the Archive as part of the NSF grant.
Paul attended a meeting at the Center for Research Libraries on the preservation of print materials and the possibilities for improved cooperation in the future.