Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--June 2004

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

The Strategic Planning Steering Committee met with staff from the Office of Innovation through Technology and from the Center for Teaching in retreat mode. The three units sought to determine how we might collaborate more often and more effectively.

Norman participated in the HR focus group for middle managers.

Marshall and John met with Elizabeth Latt (Assistant Vice Chancellor for News and Communications), Emily Pearce (Assistand Director, Vanderbilt News Service) and Brian Smokler regarding the possibility of a joint project with the Vanderbilt News Service that would involve the creation of an off-air recording sytsem that would serve the backup needs of the Archive and provide the News Service with high quality video copies of television coverage of the University.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

All of the six strategic planning work groups prepared their final reports for submission.

In preparation for the time study week in June, Flo met with staff in Music and Management as they joined the group of libraries already participating. The Peabody Library also began participating in June.

The New Horizons training contract was renewed for the 2004/2005 year.

John and Paul interviewed and selected the architectural firm to refurbish the General Library Building.

Administration and Staff

Paul led an OUL meeting organized by Lisa to talk with staff in LITS, Annex, ILL, and OUL about the new salary setting methodology used for OUL staff, testing it out before implementing it more broadly.

June always brings closure to the budget year. The state of the library's various budgets was reviewed to insure that we would end the year with a positive balance. We looked at several projects that had been funded by Reassessment to determine their level of completion and to seek to carry any balances remaining into the new year for project completion. Flo met with Deb Sommers to talk about how the end of year budgeting works. Norman refined the line item budget for FY 2004/05, started the budget process for FY 2005/06, and participated in Library year-end budget closing discussions.

This year the library will be reviewing the budget allocation methodology that we currently use to see if it could benefit from improvements. Dennis Clark, Bill Hook, and Roberta Winjum will meet with Norman Nash and Flo Wilson to explore alternatives. Flo met with Debbie Janke, Director of Financial Planning and Budgeting, to understand better the needs for budget information and explanation within the business-side of the university.

Personnel

The Government Information Services Librarian interviews began. Three candidates were invited to interview. Amy Stewart-Mailhiot has accepted the position.

The Library Personnel Office completed the 2004/2005 salary increase letters to all staff, except Biomedical. The letters were mailed on June 25.

Public Relations/Communication

Freshman library orientation publicity was submitted.

The Acorn Chronicle was received and distributed. We've received much positive response regarding the issue, designed by Suzanna Spring and edited by Lew Harris.

Development

Friends of the Library renewal calls were made by Ruffalo Cody.

A new bookplate was completed for the John W. Poindexter Book Acquisition Fund.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

SFX Implementation

The Implementation Team created two test sites, one in Acorntest and one featuring SilverPlatter databases, for a staff trial of SFX, known locally as VUFinder. We will host an open house for staff on July 8 to answer questions and field comments about the service. We expect to put VUFinder into production beginning July 19. The rollout will occur over a period of time because each of our database vendors will have to activate the service separately. The latest information about the Team's work is at http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/WebTaskForce/SFXimplementation.htm

Collection Development

The Vanderbilt Library Excellence Fund, one of our endowments, has in the past provided each of our libraries with supplemental funds to acquire expensive resources. A faculty advisory committee considered proposals from the libraries and made awards. Feeling that there was little benefit in convening a committee solely for the purpose of deciding how to allocate VLEF money, we suspended the awards while we requested that the university disband the faculty committee.

The Faculty Senate decided to retain the faculty advisory committee, but to broaden its charge to deal with general library policy issues. The committee will no longer be responsible for dispersing VLEF funding. In the future this task will be assigned to the Collection Development Advisory Group. The fund has now accrued over $50,000. We will begin the award process in the fall, when each library will be asked to propose expensive items for funding.

Electronic Resources

A few months ago we hosted a trial of ISI's version of PsycInfo on the Web of Knowledge platform. Since then several of our libraries have considered whether to replace the Ovid-SilverPlatter version of PsycInfo that we currently offer with the ISI interface. ISI's price was substantially lower, but faculty opinion about the interfaces was divided. Faculty in A&S Psychology strongly favored retaining the SP version, while some faculty in Peabody and the Medical School preferred the ISI version. In the end selectors in the Peabody Library felt that Peabody faculty would find the new SilverPlatter Internet interface acceptable. Their willingness to retain SP, combined with the firmness of the Psychology Dept.'s preference for SP, resulted in a decision to retain our SP subscription. SilverPlatter reduced their price, though it is still more expensive than Ovid.

Interlibrary Loan Service

We hosted separate visits from staff at MTSU and at TSU, who were interested to see how we have implemented ILLiad.

We closed the online patron survey that we had posted (along with Eskind DDS and Law ILS) in mid-May, and while the results were too few to draw any statistically valid conclusions, users for the most part responded positively to questions about ILL service and ILLiad.

Preliminary figures indicate that ILL borrowing for VU patrons in fiscal year 2003/2004 increased by more than 14% over last year. At the same time, we loaned roughly 6% fewer items to other libraries (although we received nearly 7% more ILL requests from other
institutions).

Copyright Clearance Service

Jim Webb completed a redesign of the database system he uses to track copyright clearance requests and royalty payments, and has put the new version into production.

Jim Webb and Jim Toplon attended meetings of the Ereserves Working Group and took training in OAK (Vanderbilt's Blackboard implementation).

Annex

This month another milestone was reached. The 500,000 mark! It was reached in regards to the number of bar coded books stored in the Library Annex. In addition to our estimated 204,348 still unbarcoded Periodicals and SuDocs; we have as of June 30th: 506,523 bar coded items.

During June 2004 our Vanderbilt libraries transferred another 201 shelves of books, electronic dissertations, and music scores to the Library Annex. New materials also arrived from Central Collections Development and Special Collections-University Archives.

Patrons requested 542 items and 17 pages of photocopies.

Technology Projects and Activities

Technology support for document and book delivery functions by several of the libraries prompted a meeting to better understand how the ILLiad software might best support that need. In addition, there is a desire to improve the notification/information to patrons as materials move through the messenger service in the library. Jim Toplon, John Haar, Dale Poulter, Jody Combs and Flo Wilson participated in the discussion. Flo agreed to meet with Science, Peabody and Management to better understand their possible uses of document delivery capability.

Flo and Jody met with Sharon Weiner to talk about the configuration of services to be provided and supported in the Peabody Library computer lab.

Paul, Flo, Roberta, and Jody met to discuss timing and feasibility issues associated with the implementation of DSpace.

Many OUL staff attended the webcast on institutional repositories sponsored by ARL. It was useful to hear of other experiences as we prepare to roll out our DSpace implementation.

Flo attended the Law School portal demonstration by the Law School technology staff. Their portal implementation is an interesting example of the variety of services that can be made available through a single interface.

Television News Archive

The NEH Grant Project for digitizing the retrospective evening news collection continues to ramp up. This month we hired Michael Ruzicka, who will begin work on July 12. Thus far, we have hired four out of the five positions for the project: Steven Davis, Honor Gherman, Rachael Gostowski, and Michael Ruzicka. Steve and Rachael spend most of their time encoding programs from videotape; Honor, Michael, and the unfilled position perform quality control, label discs, and other tasks that keep material flowing through the system.

The volume of digitizing has increased relative to the increased staff. This month 538.5 hours of retrospective material was digitized. We will be digitizing the retrospective collection working forward from its beginning date of August 5, 1968. So far, we have digitized all of 1968 and 1969.

This month we also made preparations for the grant project to record and abstract Fox News. The position for the abstractor for the project has been created and posted.

While the digital recording station has been in operation since mid-2003, we continue to use videotape equipment as a backup in case of equipment failure and to catch news programming that might occur at unexpected times. We have long seen the need for a digital backup system so that we can get away from videotape entirely and to have a higher quality backup copy. This month Marshall worked on designing the backup system.

New subscribers to the Archive in February include:

Muskingum College (OhioLINK)
Wilmington College of Ohio (OhioLINK)
Fine Mortuary College
Berkshire School
Georgia State University

Trial subscription periods were initiated for:

Furman University
University of ALbertay Dundee

Meetings, activities and professional development

With the Special Libraries Association meeting in town, there were a number of opportunities for us to meet with people from other libraries. Along with LITS, Flo met with Vicky Reich from Stanford who is the head of the LOCKSS project. (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) We have been participating in the beta testing of this methodology for ensuring long term retention and availability of electronic journals. The project is ready to move into production, and Vicky is hoping that Vanderbilt will be an active participant.

Flo attended ALA at the end of June and was involved in the following activities: the ARL LibQUAL+ workshop--ShareFair session in which she presented an invited poster session, ALA Nominating Committee meetings, and the NMRT resume reviewing sessions. She met with our marketing representatives from SIRSI to discuss the Director's Station and the Electronic Resources Management System as new SIRSI products we might wish to purchase. Flo also agreed to serve a one-year term on the LITA Board, filling a vacancy created by a Board member being elected President-Elect in the middle of his term; the Board decided it would be best to have a past president fill this one year slot.

Norman participated in the Plant Operations User Conference.

Lisa arranged for ARL's "Institutional Repositories: Revealing Our Strengths" Web cast on June 10, co-sponsored by SPARC and CARL.

Lisa completed Human Resources Dispute Resolution Process Training on June 11 and is now a Dispute Resolution Hearing Officer for the University.

Celia attended the Development Officers of Academic and Research Libraries [DORAL] annual conference held this year at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.

Paul attended both a NALA board meeting and membership meeting. He also attended a meeting of the Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress.

Marshall attended the ALA Annual Conference Jun 25 - 29 in Orlando, FL. He was a panelist on the LITA Top Technology Trends session; convened the Sirsi Large Sites Interest Group; met with executives from all the library automation system vendors, and attended various technology-oriented presentations.

Marshall gave a presentation on Library Security Issues for the Tech Connections Conference sponsored by the Ohio Valley Association of Libraries conference in Columbus, OH, on June 7th.

Marshall's regular Systems Librarian column was published in Computers in Libraries and he also contributed to the July 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.

Jim Toplon participated in activities of the "Kudzu-2" working group, which is looking at possible changes to the catalog and other infrastructure for the Kudzu consortium.

Jim also attended the ALA meeting in Orlando.

15 July 2004