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Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report—November 2002

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Budget and Personnel

Norman Nash continued to work on the development of a variety of alternative budget options for 2003/04. He is working closely with each of the division directors to provide guidance as they develop budget proposals.

The costs for operating both the Annex and the General Library Building are charged on an actual cost basis. For the last couple of years, the Library has not been receiving any kind of detailed information on the transactions from Plant Operations. As the Annex has experienced various equipment and building problems over the last couple of years, the Library has not received enough detailed history of the problems to be able to project what we might need for the future. Susan Smith, Norman, and Flo Wilson met with Richard Warf from Plant Operations to discuss the availability of more detailed information; these reports should begin to be received shortly.

The Library had not planned to do a Reassessment request for the current fiscal year, planning to build our various project expenses in to next year’s budget proposal. However, to take advantage of a significant discount on the pricing of the Evans Digital Edition, John, Flo, and Paul have been working on a small request that would include that purchase as well as possibly a couple of other small projects.

Lisa Shipman and Norman attended the Associate Dean's meeting on November 1, 2002.

Lisa met with Michelle Hancock from Vanderbilt University Internal Audit Office regarding personnel/payroll related activities as part of the ongoing audit of the University Library.

The Search Committee for the Information Services Librarian position in the Management Library met with candidate Lisa Tabor on November 7 and 8. Lisa and Paul met with the candidate, and Flo attended the candidate presentation.

The Staff Development Coordinating Committee met and planned three videotape showings of the teleconference "Safeguarding our Patrons' Privacy: What Every Librarian Needs to Know about the U.S.A. Patriot Act and Related Anti-Terrorism Measures" for December and January. The committee also plans to hold a brown bag on European Libraries. Eileen Crawford and Susan Widmer, through library associations, have had the opportunity to travel to different countries in Europe; they will report on their activities. The Committee will also be sponsoring a brown bag on grant-writing; Sharon Weiner and Elaine Goleski will facilitate.

The Staff Lounge Ad Hoc Committee met on November 20. The Committee chose a place in the lounge to hang a plaque and picture of Anthony Buchanan. A price quote has been requested for linoleum flooring to replace/repair the flooring currently in the kitchen area. The committee also decided to ask for a group of volunteers to set up and decorate the staff lounge for the holidays. A new Christmas tree was purchased and decoration donations were requested from GLB staff.

Library Access

Ava Wilson and Lisa met with Elaine to review Access/Library ID card processes. Ava will be reviewing the reporting function from the Gen6 system and resolving issues surrounding individual IDs and access to the libraries. She will begin processing the daily record creation report.

Elaine attended two RFP review sessions for new software for the University Card System. Diebold will be invited in December for another campus visit to answer questions. The Card Office still hopes to have a decision on the new system before the end of the year.

Flo, Elaine, Janet Thomason, and Anne Martin attended a meeting at Fisk to discuss further details of the proposed mutual library privilege arrangement. More was worked out, and the program is to begin with spring semester. Elaine, Anne, and Flo will be working on finalizing all of the information that needs to be communicated to library staff here.

Elaine worked with Debra Stephens and Daisy Whitten to draft a proposal for CAG on a student recognition awards program. The proposal was approved by CAG with some modifications. The final version will be presented to LMC.

Development, Gifts and Donations

Progress was made toward acquiring three important special collections consisting of German fiction, African folk music, and Colombian materials. Elaine, Paul, and Paula Covington joined Professor Helguera for lunch to discuss his collection and then visited the "Helguera Room" at the Annex to see how the processing is going.

The Friends of the Library Annual Dinner was held November 19. A huge number of details are always involved in pulling off such an event, and everything went very smoothly. A number of OUL staff attended.

Elaine met with Sharon Weiner and a Peabody faculty member to discuss library fundraising.

The Library finally received the lists of library contributors for August through October. These had been held up by conversion of the Development database. Kurt Eger will begin processing the backlog of thank-you letters.

Collection Development

The Information Alliance libraries reached agreement with Ovid for access to the complete collection of e-journals published by Kluwer Academic Press. This transaction adds over 700 e-journal titles to our collection. The agreement provides for 20 concurrent users to be shared among the three institutions’ libraries. It increases our cost for Kluwer serials by 25%, but it also triples the number of Kluwer journals available to our patrons. The Biomedical, Central, Divinity, Law, Management, Peabody, and Science and-Engineering Libraries share the cost of this new acquisition.

We also added 42 e-journals published by Haworth Press. All are titles to which our libraries subscribe in print. Haworth had previously imposed an additional charge for adding electronic access, but they recently dropped this requirement.

Interlibrary Loan

Interlibrary Loan Services were extremely busy in November. The volume of both borrowing and lending requests was very high, with only a brief and moderate respite during the Thanksgiving holiday, so ILL concentrated on keeping up with the demand.

Thanks to work by Michael Martin and Kanokwan Pothisiri in LITS to the "cut and paste" and WebSPIRS ILL forms, patron input from all our Web ILL request forms now carries through to the transaction record online in OCLC, thus cutting down on staff re-keying.

Copyright Clearance

Copyright Clearance was also very busy. Jim Webb entered data for art slides for one Fine Arts course in preparation for copyright clearance. Much of November was spent working on Class Pak clearances, as requests for spring began pouring in. The production database for this next semester is the first to be housed on a library server (rather than an individual workstation); this should improve its security and the accessibility for library and Printing Services staff.

Homepage Development

The Web Task Force added a !Tell Us button to the library homepage. !Tell Us is a companion to ?Ask Us and enables users to submit comments, suggestions, and concerns. !Tell Us messages go to the same mailbox as ?Ask Us messages, and reference staff members review each message. If the message is one that should have been sent to ?Ask Us, they answer it or forward it to the appropriate library for answering. They forward comments, suggestions, etc. to Paul.

The Task Force is reviewing the results of our latest round of usability testing and considering ways to improve methods of assisting users in finding and using databases and e-journals to answer research questions.

Resource Services

Flo and Peg Earheart met with Glen Miller (ITS) and Jeff Kimble (Medical Center Network Computing Services) to discuss any possibilities of using a portion of the Annex for disaster recovery for the Medical Center’s computing operations. While there appeared to be many interesting possibilities, such an arrangement was decided to be impractical.

TV News Archive

Overall, the Archive experienced a slow month in November. Income from fees charged for videotape loans was down significantly. Activities related to off-air recording and abstracting were consistent with normal activity. Website activity as measured by the number of new users, total log entries and searches were lower than previous months. These decreased activity levels seem due largely to the holidays.

A new interface for browsing the collection by date was implemented. This interface uses a set of dynamically generated calendar-like pages for displaying all the programs available in the Archive for a given month. New functionality was added to the website to gather and report more information on use activity; as part of our marketing efforts for TV News, the Archive needs to gather and organize as much information about the users of the website as possible.

A business plan for the TVNA was developed which was sent to ABC, CNN and NBC for their review, and it is hoped that it will lead to further discussions with the networks. A three-year budget projection for the Archive was developed; it demonstrates the impact of different income possibilities.

Paul gave a talk on the Television News Archive at the Canadian Association of Research Libraries meeting on Open Archives in Ottawa.

Marshall Breeding created a bibliography of resources related to the Archive, available at: http://lib14.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib/tvn-citations.pl.

Technology Projects

Dennis Clark has been working with Marshall, Jody Combs, and Flo to determine the technology requirements for pursuing the African Music project which the Blair School and Music Library are involved in. Development of a grant proposal is expected.

Other OUL

The final version of the LibQUAL report was made available on the web. Print copies were prepared for deans and other university administrators. John has been working on a brief follow-up inquiry to faculty on the electronic resources related questions so that we can better understand how to improve these services to better fulfill their expectations.

Vanderbilt has been asked to participate in another ARL-related staff time allocation study. Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, and possibly Virginia Tech will be experimenting with a simplified version of the time and cost study methodology to gauge the usefulness of this approach for understanding time allocation across the library system, not just in technical services.

Paul announced some reorganization of the centralized library services. Flo becomes Deputy University Librarian with oversight of budget, personnel, the Annex, and LITS. Roberta Winjum becomes Assistant University Librarian, reporting to Paul, with responsibility for technical services. Resource Services as an identifiable library unit is dissolved. John is now Director of the Central Library in addition to being Associate University Librarian with responsibility for collection development and resource-sharing. These changes take place officially on January 1, 2003. Pat Johnson, administrative assistant for Resource Services, joins the OUL office, performing her old duties and additional ones as time permits.

The office staff in OUL, joined by Pat, prepared for a new office configuration. Susan, Elaine, Pat, Kurt, Ava, and Mark Cabus met to discuss the changes in the organization and individual responsibilities.

Elaine finalized the design of Library’s 2002 holiday card, developed by Creative Services.

Susan worked closely with Special Collections and Management as their administrative support positions went through transitions. Susan helped both divisions with deposits, cash handling, budget reconciliation, uploads, etc.

Other University-Related Staff Activities

Paul and John conducted two focus group lunches with A&S faculty to better understand their library needs.

Several of the OUL staff attended the farewell breakfast for Pauline Aranas, Director of the Law Library.

Flo attended the fall meeting of the Campus Technology Forum. Dr. Duco Jansen of Biomedical Engineering talked about their use of wireless response systems in the classroom.

Paul attended the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) meeting in Atlanta. He also attended a planning meeting of the Tennessee Library Association in Dickson on November 1.

Marshall completed the one-year Leadership Vanderbilt professional development program, which provides information about the people, values, and internal workings of the University.

External Activities

Paul attended the Elsevier North American Advisory board meeting in Philadelphia.

John attended a conference on cooperative collection development, sponsored by the Center for Research Libraries and ARL, in Atlanta. He wrote and presented a paper based on the work of a group he chaired, and he led a discussion group conversation.

John Lynch attended the Association of Moving Images Archivists convention in Boston where he presided over the meeting of the News and Documentary Interest Group.

Marshall’s regular Systems Librarian column was published in the December 2002 issue of Information Today Volume 19 No. 11: "Monitoring the use of your Web Site". He attended the Internet Librarian 2002 conference in Palm Springs, CA from November 3 – 7, presenting a session on "Toolkits and Technologies" as part of a day-long workshop called "Web Manager's Academy" and giving a talk on "Wireless Strategies” as part of the regular conference program.

9 December 2002