Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--June 2006

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Administrative Services

The temporary appointment that Leonor van Cotthem jointly held with the Helguera Project and the Library Annex came to an end on June 30th. On Wednesday, June 28th we had a lovely lawn party in her honor.

Public Relations/Communication

Celia Walker and Flo Wilson met with a representative of the Vanderbilt Digital Life project to see how the library could contribute to the online electronic resource for the Vanderbilt community.

The Staff News Feed had 61 articles in June, with 26% being committee minutes or agendas, 62% being articles of a general nature, 7% were monthly reports and the balance were articles about staff news or strategic planning updates.

Development

The Acorn Chronicle was printed and distributed.

Staff Development

The Spring Staff Picnic was a big success with almost 200 in attendance. Over 40 staff members responded to a survey on the picnic, the results of which will be posted and used to help plan next year's event.

We held one brown bag this month: a report on the Test Pilot Web page and the refreshed Heard home page, conducted by representatives of the respective project teams. Seventeen people attended the event.

After much review by a subcommittee of the Staff Development Committee, ElementK was chosen to provide online technology training for library staff. Look for more information in the coming weeks about how to access these resources.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

Collection Development

John Haar and Linda Phillips (UT-Knoxville) met with a representative of John Wiley & Sons at the ALA conference in New Orleans to discuss the renewal of the TENN-SHARE multi-year contract for Wiley ejournals in 2007.

The Committee on Collections received training from Bryan Kurowski on the OCLC WorldCat Collection Analysis system.

Annex

The Owen Management Library staff completed their massive Summer transfer project on Friday, June 2nd. Other campus transfers arrived from Central, Government Information, Law, Music, Science, and Special Collections.

The Arbena Gift Collection continued to trickle in during the month of June. The Burssel/Barsky Gift Collection arrived on June 22nd.

849 items were retrieved for patrons. For the fiscal year, 10,792 items had been requested. Another 577 pages were photocopied from 53 journals. We only had 15 patrons to request faxed articles to campus locations this month.

The initial shipment of flooring, steel rails, and shelving components arrived on Friday, June 23rd for the Manuscripts and Political Cartoons section. Central Business Group staff began the actual installation on Monday, June 26th.

Interlibrary Loan Service

The ILL office began desensitizing materials obtained for Vanderbilt users, so that interlibrary loans should not set off the detector alarms in the campus libraries using the 3M system.

Preliminary statistics for the 2005-2006 fiscal year indicate that levels of borrowing and lending activity remained historically high, but decreased slightly from the previous year. We supplied roughly 7,413 copies (down about 12.3%) and 11,304 loans (up about 6.2%) to other institutions, for a total 18,717 filled requests (down about 2.0%). We obtained roughly 5,909 articles (down about 1.2%) and 8,680 loans (down about 1.9%) from other institutions, for a total of approximately 14,589 items borrowed for Vanderbilt patrons (down about 1.6%).

Copyright Clearing Service

Jim Webb shifted attention to GLB signage and assisting with ILL lending as the bulk of Summer Session electronic reserves clearances was completed. Near the end of June, the pace of new Fall ClassPak permissions began to pick up.

Public Services

The LibQUAL project team, led by Janice Adlington, began its review of the results of the spring LibQUAL survey. They will prepare a report to present to LMC at their annual retreat. The comments are being processed and prepared for distribution to the libraries and to library staff.

The Faculty Book/Document Delivery Service project team reported its recommendation to the Library Directors, who, along with the Strategy and Planning Council concluded that such a service should be implemented. Funding considerations are being addressed, and a decision about moving forward and timing should be forthcoming in the near future.

Flo and Rick Stringer-Hye met with Karen Montefiori to talk about arranging a site license for the ESRI ArcINFO software for our GIS services and for GIS use across campus.

Television News Archive

NEH Project

Work is well underway on the NEH-funded project to digitize the Archive's collection of news specials. A considerable amount of material has been digitized as we work out procedures and workflows for the specials that are somewhat different from the evening news.
An article appeared in the Vanderbilt Register about the new grant award from the NEH. 

The Archive finished the 2005/06 fiscal year with a budget surplus, meeting a long-time goal of financial self-sufficiency. A number of factors contributed to balancing the budget. We had a record-breaking year in the number of videotape loan requests, boosted by the increased exposure of our metadata through the OpenWeb project. All of our original sponsors became regular subscribers as thier two years of complimentary access expired. Most of all, the hard work of the Archive staff made it possible for the Archive to operate extremely efficiently while enduring a very heavy workload.

Subscriptions

The University of Miami Law Library purchased a subscription to the Archive in June 2006.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

John Haar attended ALA.

Paul Gherman attended a join meeting of ARL and ALA in Chicago to develop a response to Section 108 of the copyright law. He also attended the NARA Advisory Board meeting in DC for the Records of Congress.

Celia Walker attended a conference for development officers of academic and research libraries (DORAL) in Santa Barbara, California.

Jim Toplon attended a meeting of the TENN-SHARE Board on June 11-12, as an Academic Libraries representative.

Marshall gave the Keynote address for the VTLS User's Group in Chattanooga, TN on "Trends in Library Automation: Meeting the needs of a new generation of library users." Hel gave a Web presentation for the Education Institute of the provinces in Canada titled "Library Automation Update." Marshall attended the American Library Assocation annual conference in New Orleans on June 23-27. At the conference he particiapted in the LITA Top Technology Trends panel and gave a presentation titled "Understanding library users you don't see: Techniques for tracking and analyzing library web resources" for a program sponsored by LAMA.

Marshall was on vacation June 1-18. While in Slovenia, he had meetings at the National and University Library in Ljubljana, Slovenia. During this meeting he received an extensive tour of the library, and met with library administrators to discuss the library's automation projects and digital initiatives.

Marshall authored the May/June issue of Library Technology Reports published by ALA TechSource titled Web Services and the Service-oriented Architecture. As a contributing editor for ALA TechSource Smart Libraries Newsletter, Marshall wrote articles on OCLC's acquisition of RLG and on the new Encore product from Innovatived Interfaces.

Flo attended ALA which included a LibQUAL workshop where 2006 and earlier participants learned more about the survey and discussed the results.

13 June 2006