Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--June 2005
Library
Outreach and Campus Interaction
Flo attended the farewell party for Andy Stricker, Assistant Provost for Innovation through Technology.
Paul met with Jane Landers of the History department to discuss storing 40,000 images of Cuban church records on our servers.
Paul met with Nim Chiniah and Dennis Hall to discuss the future of OAK.
Library-wide
Efforts and Events
Members of the Strategy and Planning Council met with many active, system-wide committees and task forces to get their input into the successes and barriers that they experienced in the performance of their charge.
Paul led a discussion of the Strategic Plan and other topics at a "donuts and coffee" gathering in the staff lounge of the GLB. Six dozen donuts were consumed and several thought-provoking topics were discussed at this first in a series of open staff meetings.
Within the new 'public services' arena, Flo met with the Library Directors to discuss regular meetings and interactions. She also met with Melinda Brown to discuss the instruction goal in the Strategic Plan and our current instruction and orientation activities. Flo also joined the Peabody Library staff to talk about 'public services' as they continued their deliberations on revising the Peabody Library vision for the future.
Other Activities
Paul, Flo, John and Jody met with the Geographic Information Systems task force as they presented their review and recommendations. The group prepared an excellent report which will be posted to the Reports and Documents section of the Staffweb.
Administration
and Staff
OUL prepared for the
year end close, assessing the state of the library-wide budget and preparing
for reports and for reserves and materials carry-forward requests.
Personnel
Flo began working with
staff in the Music Library as she assumes the Interim Director role there.
The spring 2005 issue of the Acorn Chronicle was distributed.
Celia met with A&S development staff to plan for the opening of the Studio Arts building, scheduled for November 2.
Staff Development
Kurt Eger oversaw a Web cast on the topic of Google's Library Digitization Project.
Electronic
Resources and Collection Development
Center for Academic Life
A committee composed of two members of the library staff, David Carpenter and Leslie Boyd, plus representatives from the Center for Teaching and the Office of Innovation through Technology, completed a proposal for an information/learning commons. The commons would be supported and staffed by the library and the other two units, would serve the entire university community, and would probably be located in the GLB. The committee presented their proposal to Paul Gherman, John Haar, Allison Pingree (Center for Teaching), and Andy Stricker (OIT), who agreed that we should pursue the creation of the commons. John will head the project. First steps are developing a cost estimate and considering which other campus units might be invited to become affiliates. The group views the commons as one part of a larger collaborative endeavor envisioned in our strategic plan as the Center for Academic Life.
Collection Development
We have purchased two more JSTOR collections. Central, Divinity, and Music will share the cost of the Arts and Sciences III collection. Central will purchase the Arts and Sciences Complement. We were unable to create an equitable cost-sharing model for the Arts and Science IV collection. Despite its name, most of the titles in this collection duplicate print holdings in the Law and Peabody Libraries. It also largely duplicates electronic holdings in other Law ejournal aggregations. Thus Law was willing to contribute in order to facilitate purchasing the collection, but did not feel that paying a full share was cost-effective. Peabody was unable to fund a disproportionately large share of the one-time payment and annual fee.
MetaLib Trial
The MetaLib Implementation Team recommended to LMC that the library not implement MetaLib at this time. Our trial revealed significant problems with the tool, including an unacceptable frequently of suspended searches, inconsistency in reporting the numbers of citations found, and confusion about use of the back button. ExLibris acknowledged the two latter problems and expects to correct them in future releases. They feel that the suspended searches were related to local installation. LMC accepted the Team's recommendation. The Team will make another recommendation about addressing the library's need for a metasearching tool.
Interlibrary Loan Service
June continued steadily busy for ILL borrowing and lending. Preliminary figures for the fiscal year 2004/2005 from OCLC suggest that we maintained last year's record high level of items borrowed for Vanderbilt users, and that we filled about 17% more requests for other libraries this year.Copyright Clearing Service
Jim Webb continued to
work on GLB signage. Towards the end of June, fall semester Class Pak clearance
requests began to increase.
Annex
As of June 30th, the Annex had 14 months of "new campus transfer" capability. This figure does not include Special Collections and University Archives growth; nor does it reflect unusual surges anticipated in July for two VUL libraries.
To accompany the University Archives' primary floor, 160 static steel shelves were recently installed by the Coates Company; another 378 shelves of cantilever shelving was installed during June. All 538 shelves are already at 100% occupancy.
At month's end Annex staff were busy with preparations for July construction, facility and equipment repairs & replacements, new project implementation, and citation assistance and retrievals for our patrons.
Library Messenger Service & GLB Mailroom
During June 2005, Michael Chandler, James McCullough, Greg Weldy, Dewey James and Peg Earheart informally met on several occasions as they prepared for VUL Strategic Planning implementation changes. A temporary staff member was hired for the GLB Mailroom. Dewey's liaisoning with local vendors resulted in significant Annex and University Archives savings on June equipment purchases and repairs.
Technology
Projects and Activities
Television
News Archive
Meetings,
Activities and Professional Development
Celia attended the annual meeting of DORAL (Development Officers of Research & Academic Libraries) at Columbia University in NYC. She also attended a one-day workshop on planned giving held at the Law School.