Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--March 2005
Library
Outreach and Campus Interaction
Flo and Celia attended the opening of the Student Life Center, with a particular eye toward looking for available spaces for library programs.
Flo and Lisa attended the February meeting of the Associate Deans where they heard a presentation by David Jones, Director of Procurement and Distribution Services regarding an e-procurement pilot program underway at the University. Additional 2005/2006 budget information was also discussed with the group.
An ad hoc team including John Haar, Janice Adlington, Mary Beth Blalock, Lee Ann Lannom, Deb Sommer, and Kimya Cole (Career Center) has evaluated career resources offered in our libraries and the Career Center and is close to completing work on a virtual career library. The library will consist of links to licensed databases that include information on careers, preprogrammed Acorn searches, and links to other sites such as graduate education sources, career exploration databases, job listings, company research, and job application guides.
Paul met with Andy Stricker's staff about using D-Space for his faculty teaching portal.
Library-wide
Efforts and Events
Lisa coordinated three Web casts as brown bag sessions: Library Marketing: Tips & Techniques; Library as Place: Where People Want to Be; and the ACRL sponsored real-time conversation between Clifford A. Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, and Michael A. Keller, University Librarian, Director of Academic Information Resources, Publisher of HighWire Press, and Publisher of the Stanford University Press, at Stanford University.
Administration
and Staff
Personnel
Based on the PERC recommendations, Lisa developed a job description template
and example document to assist supervisors and staff with writing a job description.
This was posted on the Staffweb (http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/perc/2005percforms/MainEvalFormsPg.htm)
in March.
Lisa conducted another performance evaluation training sessions for three
supervisors who were unable to attend the sessions in February and early March.
The search committee for the Music Librarian for Public Services in the
Music Library was formed. Members are Dennis Clark (chair), Catherine Gick,
Stacy Owens (Peabody), Robert Rich, and Lisa Shipman (ex officio).
Celia and Paul met with Frank Sutherland and the Special Collections crew about Mr. Sutherland's donation.
Electronic
Resources and Collection Development
MetaLib Development
We have scheduled installation of MetaLib for April 26. MetaLib Team members will train on April 29. During our 30-day trial (ExLibris will permit us to extend the trial by two weeks) we will make the tool available for staff use and conduct usability tests with undergraduates, graduate students, and (if possible) faculty. The team will then make a recommendation to retain or discontinue development of MetaLib.
Collaborative Collection Development
The Collection Development Advisory Group developed procedures to implement a policy adopted by LMC that will permit us to better coordinate firm orders with Information Alliance libraries for materials that are so specialized that they would be very infrequently used. In these cases, one book might be sufficient for the entire Alliance. CDAG agreed that, once all three IA libraries institute procedures, we will recommend adding an Information Alliance search (the Kudzu catalog limited to UTK and UK) to VUFinder with a note about rapid delivery. We will use two methods for bibliographers to designate purchase order requests that Order Services will search at UTK/UK: adding a radio button to the online order form, and batching paper orders with a label such as "low use" or "check IA catalogs."
Annex
Meanwhile, 404 more "Storage Shelving" arrangement shelves were filled to capacity during the month of March 2005 alone. The new balance of our available empty shelving for campus stacks transfers has whittled down to only 249, as of March 31. We plan to continue accepting new transfers until we exhaust the last empty shelf.
Peg met with the Microform Media Center staff regarding a 6500 item Summer 2005 transfer project. We are looking forward to working with the Center staff. Peg also met with Sue Davis and Charlotte Lew regarding fine-tuning our Preservation and Annex partnership.
March was also a busy month for patron retrievals. For
Inter-Library loan requests, we reproduced a whooping 510 pages from journals.
We also sent another 149 individual monographs and serials to Inter-Library
Loan. As for our circulation to campus service desks, we received 1,024 requests.
Of these 136 patrons wanted their Annex volumes sent to other than the owning
library. 211 of these 1,024 were from storage shelving arrangements (as opposed
to being stored by the classification numbers).
Technology
Projects and Activities
The LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) project software may have some utility for preservation of electronic theses and dissertations. This idea is being explored by ASERL as a cooperative venture, and Paul, Roberta, Jody, Marshall, John and Flo met to discuss the possibilities.
The Pay for Printing project has been funded with reassessment money. Bill Hook is pursuing implementation plans with the Card Office, LITS and ITS. Divisional libraries and school labs will also be brought into the implementation process in the very near future. A full fall implementation is anticipated; the earliest installation of software and hardware is probably the end of May.
The upgrade process to a new version of SFX did not go smoothly. LITS staff and others spent significant time trying to work with Ex Libris to remedy the problems with the KnowledgeBase.
ILLiad clients were installed in Music, Divinity and Management libraries to allow better service control over circulation of ILL materials from those libraries.
LITS has been working with the new SIRSI java client,
putting it through its paces as SIRSI continues development work on it.
Television
News Archive
Marshall met with a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to discuss opportunities for collaborative projects. The Informedia research group at CMU has been involved with developing research methods and software related to automatically describing video content since the mid-1990's. They have primarily focused their research on broadcast news. Given the mutual involvement in this type of content, we believe that there will be opportunities for collaborative projects that will benefit both organizations.
In March, Marshall began to develop custom software to control the Hauppauge PVR-350 television card so that we can further automate the process of recording the news. Marshall also continued the technical tasks needed in preparation for the migration of TV News Web server to new hardware.
Meetings,
Activities and Professional Development
Many library staff attended and presented at the SIRSI SuperConference held in Nashville. Marshall participated in a meeting of library staff with Berit Nelson and other SIRSI staff to discuss the company's development work on an electronic resources management module for Unicorn.