Office of the University Librarian
Monthly
Report--March 2004
Library Outreach and Campus Interaction
Paul Gherman, Roberta Winjum, Jody Combs and Celia Walker
attended the Institutional Repository Policy Board meeting, where participants
discussed policy and procedure issues relating to Dspace.
Paul met with Andy Stricker and Allison Pingree about strategic
issues between our three units.
Library-wide Efforts and Events
Camilla Benbow,
dean of Peabody, was interested in revisiting the decisions surrounding charging
for printing. Flo Wilson attended the Dean's Council meeting where this was
a discussion topic in order to answer questions and review the activities
and conclusions of the Printing Task Force from last summer.
The Print Conservation
Publicity Group, (Flo Wilson, Mills Bell, Melinda Brown, Stacy Owen, Celia
Walker and Cammey Warnecke) met to plan events to reduce paper waste in the
libraries. The group will design wallpaper for library computers to raise
public awareness in mid-April, during the week of Earth Day (April 20). Other
activities will center around National Recycling Day, in the fall.
Staff
made plans for the Spring Staff Event, which was moved up to April 27 due
to the incoming cicadas. Volunteers included: Debra Stephens, Susan Smith,
Patricia Johnson, Judy Carter, Chuck Owen and Celia Walker.
Many
OUL staff members participated in strategic planning committee and group meetings.
Flo Wilson, Paul Gherman, John Haar, Marshall Breeding, Roberta Winjum and
Celia Walker attended 3 Steering Committee Meetings. Flo Wilson, Roberta Winjum,
Celia Walker, Lisa Shipman, Norman Nash, John Haar, Paul Gherman and Marshall
Breeding attended group meetings.
The Strategic
Planning Services to Faculty Work Group met three times. [http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/strategicplan/Faculty/Index.htm].
The Strategic Planning for External Relations & Partnerships met twice
[http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/strategicplan/external/Meetings.htm]
The Digital Library Group met four times [http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/strategicplan/diglib/summaries.htm].
Administration and Staff
The Library's budget proposal submitted in February prompted further explanation
and review by the Provost's Office. As needed, Flo Wilson and Norman Nash
provided the requested information.
Everyone participated
in the annual review process.
Public
Relations/Communication
Plans
got underway for the installation of objects from the Robinson Collection
in Ingram Hall cases.
Library Access
A survey to all courtesy card holders was distributed to
determine if they wanted to keep their cards and what they thought of the
library services.
Development
Celia
Walker presented a history of the library and talking points for potential
donors to the A&S development officers. The officers took a tour of Special
Collections given by Kathy Smith and Juanita Murray.
A design for the Morris Wachs bookplate was chosen and Celia and Yvonne
Boyer met with members of the French Department to plan an event to recognize
the Wachs acquisition.
A donation of books from local author, Ann Patchett, was received.
Inter-Library Loan
Interlibrary Loans
and Copyright Clearance Services were busy in March, as is usual for the middle
of spring semester.
Demand for lending to other institutions through March outpaced last year,
and borrowing for VU patrons continued at a record level.
We shifted desktop delivery of electronic documents from the Ariel Web server
to the ILLiad online system beginning March 11. Patrons now need only log
into their ILL online account to retrieve articles posted to their account.
In conjunction with Law's and Eskind's ILL/DDS services, we put up a brief
user survey with links from the ILL Web page, the Heard Library homepage (news
item), and several of the campus libraries. We invite interested staff to
take the survey, and we expect to analyze the results over the summer.
Copyright Clearance
CCS continued to process permissions for electronic reserves
in March. Jim Webb also spent time revising the database he uses to track
permissions requests.
Electronic Resources and Collection Development
The SFX Implementation Team made very good progress this month. Rick Stringer-Hye,
Ann Ercelawn, and Kitty Porter have configured about 95% of eligible databases,
ejournals, and library services as SFX targets. Suellen Stringer-Hye. Janice
Adlington, and Chris Benda prepared several design options for the SFX button,
and the Team chose Chris' idea to designate "VUFinder" as our button
label to brand the service. We also created a template of the SFX menu page.
Please see our status report at http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/WebTaskForce/SFXimplementation.htm.
Web Page Development
LMC approved a library-wide gifts policy [http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/cdag/GiftPolicy.html]
proposed by the Collection Development Advisory Group. The policy will be
posted to the Heard Library homepage as the anchor for a larger "Giving
to the Library" section.
Annex
March
was filled with the usual patron activity for the Library Annex. Two new projects
were initiated that affected the Annex--a recon cataloging project for Special
Collections (Peabody vault materials) and a temporary storage project for
the Peabody Library during its renovation.
427 patrons requested their Library Annex materials through
the Web forms. 737 items were retrieved for campus requests. Twelve percent
of these 737 items were requested by the patron to be sent to other than the
owning library.
An interesting statistic is the circulation from Classification
shelving areas versus "next book in"/storage shelving arrangements.
For March 2004, 89% of requested items were stored in Dewey, LC, Periodical
"shelve by title" or SuDocs areas; 11% from the storage shelving
(items transferred since May 2002).
88 volumes were sent for Inter-Library patrons; 26 additional
requested items could not be sent due to the fragility of the material. 16
Inter-Library loan patrons asked for photocopies of articles, resulting in
144 pages. 12 campus patrons requested articles (100 pages) be faxed to their
homes or offices.
225 new shelves of transfers arrived from our campus libraries.
Technology Projects and Activities
Marshall Breeding
has begun working with a group of researchers that are developing technologies
and ontologies related to the description of news broadcasts. The project
is working on a project titled "A large Scale Concept Ontology for Multimedia
Understanding" and includes participants from IBM Research, Carnegie
Mellon University, Columbia University and UCSD, and other research organizations.
Our database of abstracts is of interests to this research community for the
purpose of tracking trends and themes in news that can serve as a benchmark
for automated descriptive technologies.
Television News Archive
Monthly statistics
of user searches continues to rise along with the number of searches performed
(from 6,975 in February to 11,314 in March) and pages reviewed. Numbers of
institutional subscribers continued to climb and is now at 88. New subscribers
to the Archive were Iowa State University and the University of Western Ontario.
For more monthly statistics, go to http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/breeding/reports/2004-03-March-report.html.
In March, the
NEH notified the Library of its $281,154 award for a two-year project to digitize
the retrospective collection of evening news broadcasts of the Vanderbilt
Television News Archive. The material currently resides on ¾-inch U-Matic
videotape and will be converted to MPEG-2 digital video program streams. This
grant will fund 5 technicians for two years and support the costs related
to storing the digitized files on DVD. In addition to the DVD-R copies that
will be held locally, digital master copies will be transferred to the Library
of Congress for long-term preservation. The collection of evening news targeted
in the grant for conversion totals about 300,000 hours.
The Press Release issued by Vanderbilt News Service provides additional information
about the grant.
A local foundation
fully funded a 5-year project totaling $181,177.50 to add Fox News to the
slate of national news programming collected by the Vanderbilt Television
News Archive. This grant will support one new staff position whose primary
responsibility will involve producing abstracts of Fox News programming as
well as the computer equipment needed to expand the off-air recording studio
and a computer workstation for use by the new abstractor.
Meetings, activities and professional
development
ASERL
is working on a feasibility study for a Virtual Storage Project. Participants
would agree to keep all titles already in storage as preservation copies,
to mark holdings in OCLC appropriately, and to lend these titles to other
institutions. OCLC would provide overlap and uniqueness reports for each of
the participating libraries in order to inform the understanding of what's
contained in these storage collections. The ultimate goal would be for a library
to request a report of virtual storage titles (held by 'x' or more libraries)
from OCLC that the library could use to select titles for withdrawal rather
than needing to continue to store/retain them. A conference call/web meeting
was held with the 7 participating ASERL libraries, the ASERL executive director
and OCLC staff to review the kinds of overlap and uniqueness reports that
OCLC can provide and to discuss the requirements for the records to be submitted
by each library to OCLC for study. Paul Gherman, Flo Wilson, John Haar and
Roberta Winjum participated in the electronic meeting.
Jim Toplon attended the TLA conference in Knoxville March
18-19, including a meeting of the TENN-SHARE TEL II Rapid Delivery and One
Step Access task forces held with the Resource Sharing table talk.
Marshall Breeding's regular "Systems Librarian"
was published in Computers in Libraries. He taught a series of 3 full-day
workshops for the State Library of North Carolina sponsored by SOLINET. Marshall
authored the Automated System Marketplace 2003 feature, which was published
in the April 1, 2004 issue of Library Journal. This is the third consecutive
year that Marshall authored this report. Marshall also contributed to the
April 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.
Paul gave a talk at the University of Oklahoma
on Collection Management of multimedia collections, March 4-5. He attended
the ASERL meeting in New Orleans, March 13-15th. He met with Donna Nicely
and Susan Earl of the NPL to talk about future activities. He attended the
Senate monthly meeting and a special luncheon to hear Donna Schalala, President
of the University of Miami. He testified before the TN Senate Judiciary Committee
concerning the SuperDMCA act.