Jean & Alexander Heard Library

Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--July 2005

Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Strategic Plan

 

Paul met with several deans to discuss the strategic plan.(Galloway, Bradford and Wait).

 

Work continued on the development of committee structures and more specific strategies and tasks for our five goals. John and Flo met to discuss space; Celia and Flo met to review communications; Flo and Melinda met to talk about instruction. Roberta drafted a schematic of a possible committee structure based on the discussions in the Strategy and Planning Council, and Flo drafted a format for detailing our goals and assigning responsibilities and time frames to individual tasks.

 

Several of the OUL staff participated in this year's Retirement Learning program, "Mining the Web" (July 11-15). The class was packed and we offered a new subject, "Gardening Resources on the Web", led by Sue Erickson. Library tours were offered to participants. Special thanks to presenters Marshall Breeding, Paul Gherman, John Haar, and Lisa Shipman.

 

Library-wide Efforts and Events

The Library Directors Group met in July and reviewed broadening the Kesler program participation, decided to participate in the spring 2006 LibQUAL+ survey, demo-ed and discussed the 'pay for print' service to be implemented soon. Future topics will be exploration of a faculty delivery service, and compilation of an inventory of space, facilities and services across the library system. The entire Web-page structure has not been integrated yet into the Staffweb, but the Library Directors Group Web pages can be found at http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/publicservices/LD.htm

Administration and Staff

Julie Blagojevich began working with Lisa and Flo to create a new budget development spreadsheet needed to fully adopt the changes to our budget distribution model.

 

Lisa completed a successful 'end of year' budget close, managing the process of handling 'carry-overs' of money for encumbered materials and incomplete projects. The Library ended the year with a tiny overage.

 

Flo met with Jody to review budget matters as he begins to assume direct responsibility for the Systems budget.

Personnel

David Carpenter moved into the director position at the Walker Management Library. Flo and David worked with the Walker staff and with Pam Brown from Human Resources on a new leader assimilation process that introduced David to the staff and the staff to him. Flo and Pam also met with the Management Library staff to review Pam's final report from the Organizational Assessment that she conducted in June. David and Flo met with Jim Bradford, the Owen dean, to introduce David as the new acting director.

 

Sara Beutter joined the Music Library staff in July. She will be responsible for coordinating circulation, reference, and instruction in the Music Library. Flo met with Sara several times and with the rest of the Music Library staff, in her role as acting director.

Public Relations/Communication

Celia worked with Bill Hook and Jody Combs to prepare publicity materials for the new pay-for-print policy. The materials include a press release, e-mail communication, electronic resources, and orientation seminars.

Development

Celia worked with the A&S Development team to help to plan the Studio Arts building dedication, scheduled for November 2.

Staff Development

Four Brown Bags/Web casts were offered in July:
  • We offered a Web cast on July 7 on E-Portfolios that attracted a number of professors and Vanderbilt staff from outside of the Library.
  • A brown bag on "Wikis, Blogs, RSS, Etc: New Tools for the New Library?" led by library staff, attracted 29 attendees.
  • On July 21 we held the Web cast, "Narrowcasting 101: Using Blogs, Poscasts, and Videoblogs in Higher Education."
  • Heike Schniedermeyer, visiting librarian from Frankfurt, spoke on July 27 on "Frankfurt - Banks, Books and Bembels." Despite a thundering downpour, 25 staff members attended the lecture.

    • Electronic Resources and Collection Development

    Electronic Journals

     

    The SFX Team is working on replacing our current A-Z list of electronic journals, generated from a locally-maintained database, with a list created from our SFX knowledgebase. Creating and updating the list in this way will enable us to store our ejournal access information in one location. The team is formatting the new page and will send it to public service librarians for review prior to the beginning of the fall semester.

     

    Homepage Development

     

    The Web Task Force held what will likely be its final meeting as responsibility for the Heard homepage shifts to the Digital Library. The Task Force recommended that we not refresh the homepage prior to the fall semester and that the Digital Library thoroughly redesign the homepage in the context of developing a library portal.

     

    We added a link from the homepage to a new page called "Computers in the Libraries (http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/heard/computing.shtml). For each library, the page lists public workstations and associated software, circulating laptops, scanners, adaptive workstations, and information about wireless access.

     

    Collection Development

     

    John Haar met with Frances Lynch and Deborah Broadwater to formulate our strategy for renewing the library's subscription to ScienceDirect. Our current three-year contract expires at the end of 2005. Elsevier is preparing a renewal cost estimate as a starting point for our negotiations. It is not clear whether we can afford to continue our subscription to the "Freedom Collection," the full set of Elsevier ejournals.

     

    OCLC prepared a list of records for titles held at Vanderbilt that show no other holding libraries. The Collection Development Advisory Group met to discuss how we should treat these titles. In many, probably most cases, the titles are not truly uniquely held at Vanderbilt. Rather, they are merely unique records, and other OCLC records indicate duplicate copies of the same items. CDAG decided that each VU library would examine the "unique" titles in its collection and make decisions about location, circulation status, and preservation.

    Annex

    As of July 31st, our Library Annex has only 11 months of installed Spacesaver shelf space left. All campus libraries have been contacted by Peg, requesting estimates for their transfer needs for the period of August 2005 and June 2006.

     

    During July 2005 we received 392 new shelves of books, cds, electronic dissertations, lps and microfilm from the campus libraries. Basically in one month's time, we received the equivalent of what is normally three months' worth of transfers.

     

    75,267 more campus library items were stored in our Library Annex as of 6/30/2005 as compared with our holdings as of 6/30/2004.

     

    858 items were requested for retrieval this month. Local patrons requested 65 faxed pages to be sent. 21 ILL patrons requested 169 pages to be reproduced.

     
    Special Collections now has electronic compact shelving in the 2nd Floor "Peabody Room". The final shelving pieces and the electronics were installed on July 14th. The linear footage increase of available shelving space is abundantly welcomed. A by-product is that Professor Helguera can now return to his office space here.

     

    Our new air-conditioning compressor, which malfunctioned daily and caused the remainder of our HVAC to malfunction (daily) was finally replaced by the manufacturer in July.

     

    Our new back-flow water mechanism (installed in order to meet metro codes) malfunctioned and we experienced another basement flood. It could not have occurred at a worse time. Temperatures in our basement soared to 90 degrees (due to the a/c problems), and humidity peaked at 70% (due to both a./c and water problems).

     

    Thirty-seven visitors arrived this month.

    Library Messenger Service & GLB Mailroom

    During July 2005, the Library Messengers were especially busy with the summer surges. James and Greg transported 10,884 new items to the Library Annex.

     

    Two hi-lights for this particular July were: (1) the Messengers assistance to Special Collections in the transport of the Farringer Collection from the family's home to the Library Annex; and (2) their transport assistance to the Cataloging Team in the transport of the 2005 printed dissertations.

     

    At various times during July, Dewey James as well as two temporary staff members filled in for Michael Chandler in our GLB Mailroom. At this writing, Alex Esom, from Vanderbilt Temporary Services, is working full-time in the Mailroom. We missed Michael and we wished him well, as he convalesced.

     

    Critical equipment needed at various library sites was deployed by James and Greg. Their ability to rapidly arrive around campus is a huge benefit to us.

    Technology Projects and Activities

    Marshall spent the first two weeks of July completing the grant proposal to the NEH to request funding for a two-year project to digitize the specials collection of the TV News Archive. With assistance from Paul, John Lynch, Flo, and Celia, Marshall wrote the narrative sections of the grant, prepared the budget, and submitted the required forms to Vanderbilt's Sponsored Research office.

     

    In the second half of the month, Marshall worked on the implementation of a project that aims to increase the activity on the TV News Archive's Web site by exposing metadata from the TV News database to search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo. The OpenWeb site was launched on July 21, 2005 and its base URL submitted to Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Marshall will be collecting data to measure the impact of this project on the TV News Web site.

    Television News Archive

    NEH Project

     

    The NEH-funded digitizing project continues. This month the team digitized 884 programs. At the end of the month, the evening news collection from 1968 through April 2000 has been digitized. Michael Ruzicka accepted a new position at the Battleground Adademy library and will no longer be working on the project. We are in the process of recruiting his replacement.

     

    Other Activities

     

    This month finally saw substantial progress on the renovation project. The carpet was installed for the suite over the course of four nights and each area has now been repainted. All the Archive staff worked hard to move the furniture and make other preparations for the work. John coordinated the effort and did much of the work related to reinstalling all the equipment in the off-air room.


    Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

    Celia attended a 2-day SOLINET Web class on blogs and RSS feeds.

     

    Marshall gave a presentation on "Security Issues with Library Wireless Networks" for an OCLC WebJunction Live Event Web cast on July 21. He completed the research and writing for a complete issue of Library Technology Reports on Wireless Networking in Libraries Sep/Oct 2005 (Vol. 41, Issue 5) that will be published in September 2005. Marshall's other publications this month include his Systems Librarian column in Computers in Libraries magazine and contributions to ALA's Smart Libraries Newsletter.


     17 August 2005