Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--May 2004

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

In Paul's absence, Flo attended a planning forum for Phase One of Residential Colleges, the Freshman Commons. Administrators and faculty from around campus gathered to hear an update and to discuss issues and needs associated with the future development. A core team has been appointed to work this summer to lay out a detailed plan for moving forward in the fall. The focus will be on programming and fund-raising.

Several of the deans have again raised the issue of pay-for-printing, and they've asked for a specific proposal for putting such a system into effect into the libraries (and possibly the labs). The proposal developed last summer will be reviewed, updated and submitted. The Provost's Office has also endorsed Paul's and the deans' support for this implementation.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

All of the staff worked with their Strategic Planning work groups to make recommendations and begin plans for the final reports, which are due July 1.

Administration and Staff

Norman Nash completed the approved line item budget for fiscal year 2004-2005. The University's Financial Advisory Committee, the Provost, and Dennis Hall met to discuss the outstanding issues; Flo was on hand to answer questions. Shortly after that meeting concluded, we were informed that the Library's budget, as proposed, had moved forward, uncut.

Planning proceeded for the next week and next year of data gathering for the time study. A conference call among the principal investigator, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame covered various aspects of the time study and the changes and schedule to be put together for 2004/2005. The Divinity Library agreed to participate once again; and the Peabody, Music, and Management libraries joined the time study effort for the first time.

Technical Services has created a task force to study binding and marking workflow. Flo met with the group to provide information on the budget and to provide data from previous time/cost studies.

Public Relations/Communication

Publicity for the freshman orientation was reviewed and submitted by an ad hoc committee. The committee members were Leslie Boyd, Melinda Brown, Catherine Gick, Sherre Harrington, Carlin Sappenfield, and Celia Walker.

Development

The Friends of the Library spring meeting took place on May 27 at the Wyatt Center Rotunda. John Seigenthaler was our speaker, talking about the subject of his new book, James K. Polk: 1845-1849, The American Presidents Series. A full room of 89 people listed to Mr. Seigenthaler, had a cocktail dinner, and listed to Professor David Schnaufer, who performed dulcimer music from the first half of the 19th century.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

SFX Implementation

The SFX Implementation Team completed its design of the SFX menu. To keep the menu from appearing too long and complex, we created primary and secondary menus, which will link to each other. The primary menu links users to services such as full text, Acorn, our consortial catalogs, WorldCat, and interlibrary loan. The secondary menu offers services such as cited authors, cited journals, cited articles, and Google. You can see how these services will be sequenced and the descriptive text for each service at http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/WebTaskForce/SFXdisplaylogic.htm.

The Team also recommended to the SerialsSolutions Team that we cancel our SS subscription and utilize ExLibris' MARC-It service. MARC-It is less expensive, will provide the same functions as SS (including Acorn records and holdings data for our A-Z ejournal list), and enable us to store our e-resource information in a single database. The SS Team accepted the recommendation, and LMC approved subscribing to MARC-It.

We expect to offer an SFX trial to staff in early July, make modifications based on the suggestions we receive, and introduce it to users by mid-July. The latest information about the Team's work is at http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/WebTaskForce/SFXimplementation.htm.

Collection Development
We hosted a demonstration of Elsevier's new Scopus database. Scopus is an abstracting and cited reference database designed to compete with ISI's Web of Knowledge. We will soon offer a three-month trial of the product.

Annex

Flo and Peg met with Doug Kreager from HST Interior Elements regarding SpaceSaver shelving. He will be preparing a proposal for how we might fill out the remaining Annex space with shelving, and he will be pricing the segments that we will request next and plan on installing this next fiscal year.

During May 2004 our VU Libraries transferred 117 shelves of books, electronic dissertations, and music scores to the Library Annex. Other new materials arrived from Central Collections Development and Special Collections-University Archives.

281 Annex Web requests were received during May 2004. For these requests, 486 items were retrieved for campus delivery. 24% of these 486 items were requested by the patron to be sent to other than the owning library. 93% of the requests were for materials stored in classification arrangements; and 7% were from "next-book-in" storage shelving arrangements. Only 2 campus patrons requested articles be faxed to their homes or offices. We sent them 19 pages.

96 volumes were sent for Inter-Library patrons. An additional 35 items requested for Inter-Library loan were denied for lending, due to the fragility of the material. Thus, during May 2004, 36% of our Annex ILL requests were denied for lending. Only 17 Inter-Library loan patrons asked for photocopies of articles, of which 107 pages were reproduced.

Technology Projects and Activities

This month Marshall worked on various activities related to preparing for the upcoming TV News projects. In addition to various server configuration details, Marshall developed applications related to DVD disc checking and label printing.

Television News Archive

This month marked the beginning of the two-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to convert the retrospective collection of evening news on videotape to digital MPEG-2 files. This month key activities involved recruiting and training staff for the project, working to refine the flow of material through the digitizing process, and improving the technical infrastructure and automation. The grant includes funding for five staff. John Lynch, the Director of the Archive, will coordinate the daily work of the project. Steve Davis, originally hired for a 1-year term position for the NSF-funded project, will continue on with the Archive, as one of the NEH-funded positions. Steve's main responsibilities will focus on encoding MPEG-2 files from videotape. Relying the experience gained from the NSF project, Steve will be the one to deal with problems and non-routine issues. Honor Gherman has been hired to participate in the project. Her responsibilities will focus on checking the digital MPEG-2 files for errors and visual quality. Rachael Gostowski was recently hired for the second MPEG encoding position. She will work an evening shift, taking advantage of the time that the digital encoding workstations are not being used for off-air recording and digitizing activities that occur during the normal workday. We are still working on filling the two remaining positions.

The number of registrants continues to rise on the Archive Web site, to 20,439 for the month of May. Also rising are user logins, records viewed, video clips viewed and searches. The number of total institutional subscribers has risen to 116, an increase of 16 over the previous month. New subscribers include: Emerson College, Florida International University, Huntingdon College, Lipscomb University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, California Digital Library, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Durham, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

A new brochure, designed by Creative Services, was printed for the Television News Archive.

Marshall and Paul attended the first Advisory Board of the Television News Archive, in Washington, D.C.

Meetings, activities and professional development

Paul attended the Solinet Annual meeting and was elected Vice President/President Elect of ASERL. He attended the ARL membership meeting in Tucson and the OCLC Members Council Meeting and chaired a panel discussion of DSpace.

Marshall gave a demonstration of the TV News subscription service at the SOLINET Annual Meeting in Atlanta (May 6) and discussed the project at one of the "Table Talk" morning sessions. He taught a course at the LITA Regional Institute on Wireless Technologies in Libraries for the Long Island Regional Library Consortium on May 17 and taught a day-long SOLINET workshop at Clarksville Public Library. Marshall also contributed to the June 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.

15 June 2004