Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--November 2004

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Jody Combs led the library effort to support electronic publication of the new e-journal, AmeriQuests from the Center for the Americas. He, Paul and Flo were invited to attend the unveiling of the e-publication and the colloquium held in conjunction with its introduction.

Peabody College recognized donors for the renovation projects in the Peabody Library. A formal dinner was held in the Grand Reading Room on November 4. Paul and Flo were invited to attend. The architects and contractors were also invited, and they are the same as those selected to work on possible GLB projects.

Celia and Flo attended a luncheon at the Brentwood Public Library for Volunteer Voices, a digitization project of Tenn-Share's TEL-II program. Celia serves on the Collections Committee and Paul is on the Advisory Board.

Norman attended the Associate Dean's Meeting.

Celia attended the Studio Arts groundbreaking ceremony.

Paul attended a University Press board meeting.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

The Strategic Planning Steering Committee and the GLB building planning group conducted a site visit to the Medical Center's Center for Better Health; this large, flexible meeting space is an attractive example of what might serve well for a group study/gathering facility in the libraries in the future.

Paul Mwanzilo, a librarian from Kenya visited Vanderbilt for a week. He met with numerous library staff to learn how we do our work and to get some better understanding of how to develop websites, and he toured the libraries. Eskind donated medical books to be taken back to Kenya.

As Chairperson of the Performance Evaluation Review Committee, Lisa and committee members Mary Beth Blalock, Zora Breeding, Lorelei Crockett, Nancy Dolinger, Stephen Jordan, Robert Rich and Kathy Smith met every week in November. The committee is focusing its efforts on re-vamping the self-evaluation and supervisor evaluation form.

Administration and Staff

Work continued on defining possible alterations to Baker office space to better configure spaces for LITS and TV News. A final proposal has not yet been received from the management company that would allow us to incorporate these changes and the carpeting in a Reassessment request.

A group of nine ASERL libraries has been working on storage collection overlap. Paul and Flo prepared a document and analysis of the overlap results for discussion at the fall ASERL meeting in December.

Paul, Norman and Flo met with Nancy Falls, Cecily McSurdy, and Tivis Nelson in the Provost's Office to discuss the Library's proposed changes to the allocation methodologies used in the Library's budget. Conversations will now move on to Dennis Hall and Nick Zeppos.

Norman completed Accounting's Unrelated Business Income Questionnaire and updated the Library Budget Model.

Substantial progress was made in collecting data for the ARL Statistics submission for 2003/2004. The results have been distributed to divisions and posted on the web.

Lisa served as ex officio on the search committee for two Computer Systems Administrator II/Systems Librarian positions in LITS and on the search committee for the Reference Librarian in the Law Library. Each search committee met regularly during this month.

Personnel

Ava Wilson celebrated 20 years service to the Library on November 12.

With Susan Smith's departure, OUL welcomed Greg Nichols from VTS to the office suite on November 29. Greg will be assisting OUL with phone coverage and other administrative tasks.

Public Relations/Communication

The Print Conservation Publicity Group wrote a press release and began work on a paper conservation website with Suellen Stringer-Hye.

Kurt, Pat and Greg sent out over 3,000 holiday cards. Kurt also distributed the Fall 2004 Acorn Chronicle.

Development

Celia supervised the Divinity Brunch for Reunion 2004.

Celia, Kathy Smith and Juanita Murray collected papers from Mrs. Gerald Holly and Jim Squires. Mr. Holly was a Vanderbilt photographer for many years and Mr. Squires is a Peabody alum and former editor of the Chicago Tribune.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

The Collection Development Advisory Group convened in October to allocate money in the Vanderbilt Library Excellence Fund, a library endowment. The money is awarded for special acquisitions proposed by the libraries. In the past a committee of faculty made these awards, but we have received authorization from the University to disperse the funds ourselves. The Group awarded funding for seventeen proposals submitted by the Biomedical, Central, Divinity, Management, Music, and Peabody Libraries. The total amount awarded was $46,241. Funded proposals included collections of country, rock, and Jewish music; Index Islamicus Online; ScienceDirect backfiles in business, management, and accounting; and an encyclopedia of medieval art.

An ad hoc group of librarians from the Central, Management, and Peabody Libraries as well as the University Career Center continued to work on developing a virtual career center for students. The Center will include a number of licensed library resources, but it will also hold a variety of free resources. We have tentatively decided that the Center will be segmented into sections on career exploration, researching companies and industries, finding and getting a job, graduate education, and financial aid. Janice Adlington will create a draft website for the group to review.

Interlibrary Loan Service

November was busy in ILL, as we processed record numbers of both lending and borrowing requests.

Using the ILLiad client to circulate and track patrons' interlibrary loans to and from the Peabody and Science & Engineering libraries continued to work well, and we plan to offer this capability to other campus libraries soon.

Copyright Clearance Service

Jim Webb spent most of his time processing clearances for Spring Class Paks

Annex

217 shelves of new stacks transfers arrived from the campus libraries. Although only 4 shelves more than our October 213 totals; this was nearly doubled our September 2004 growth. Materials arrived from Central, Law, Management, Music, PColl, Peabody, Science, and VColl. LITS sent us additional electronic dissertations.

774 Annex items were requested during this month. 19% of items retrieved were from Storage shelving classifications. 16% of our circulation was patron-specified delivery to other than the owning library's service desk.

We also had 40 requests from ILL for the photocopying of 281 journal pages. Local patrons asked us to fax articles from 17 journals for them. In a few cases, they asked for journals that are not stored here. Thus, we referred them to campus libraries, and in some cases, Inter-Library Loan. We faxed 201 pages to our local patrons.

Technology Projects and Activities

Representatives from two companies conducted demos of their 'pay for printing' systems-Diebold and Uniprint.

The Print Conservation task force continued its work on publicizing the need to conserve resources and to charge for printing in the future. This group will work with others to develop a publicity program for this implementation of a new pay for printing system.

The new e-journal, AmeriQuests, from the Center for the Americas made its debut on Nov. 12. LITS worked with the Center to make it available in time; the journal is registered with the LOCKSS Alliance and as an OAI-compliant harvester target.

Deede Wang left her position in LITS for one in the Medical Center. TaNisha Smith completed her temporary work with LITS in providing office and telephone support. 35 applicants were considered for the two CSA II/Librarian positions in LITS and four were selected to interview in December.

Over the Thanksgiving break, ACORN was re-indexed. An ILLiad upgrade was completed. More than 3600 NetLibrary and 4400 EEBO bibliographic records were added to ACORN. Fall seems to be the season for many new ETD's to be added to our collection. A process for retrieval and processing of series authority records from Marcive was developed. Work was done on a new Bandy Website; a slideshow from the Library's Halloween party was added to the Staffweb.

Exciting technology developments were accompanied by feasibility inquiries in LITS-use of Wiki's for staff communication, testing plan for MetaLib testing and implementation, VUnetID authentication for ACORN/ILLiad, authentication/proxying and VUFinder use with Google Scholar.

Improved support from ITS was explored for high capacity storage needs and for network and Mulberry problems.

Television News Archive

NEH Project

The Archive's off-air recording of the 2004 presidential election resulted in a small reduction in the total volume of material encoded from the retrospective collection. In October the team digitized 1,042 hours programming, about 150 hours below the previous month. By the end of the month the evening news collection from 1968 through February 1982 had been digitized.

Subscriptions

The School of Communications at Temple University purchased a subscription and trial accounts were established for Virginia Commonwealth University and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Library Technology Officer Activities

This month Marshall continued work on the new backup digital recording system for the TV News Archive.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

A number of OUL staff attended the SLA Chapter meeting on "Amazoogle."

Dale Poulter, Suellen Stringer-Hye met with Rachel Vacek and Rick Stringer-Hye, all attendees at LITA's National Forum, to plan a brown bag reporting on the annual technology meeting.

On November 4th, Marshall met with the lead archivists of NBC and ABC in their offices in New York. Marshall also met with Lucal Hilderbrand, a Ph.D. candidate at New York University. Lucas will focus his dissertation on the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and issues related to copyright and intellectual property.

On November 11, Marshall participated in a panel discussion on "Real World Television Digitizing Projects" at the Association of Moving Image Archivists in Minneapolis, MN; On November 16th he gave a presentation at the Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey, CA focusing on the technology, business, and legal issues involved with the Archive's migration to digital formats. At his same conference Marshall also helped teach a day-long workshop titled Web Manager's Academy.

On October 1, Marshall gave the keynote address for the Annual Conference of the Michigan Library Consortium on "Current Trends in Library Automation."

Marshall taught a workshop on "Wireless Networks in Libraries" as an adjunct trainer for SOLINET for several libraries during the month. Marshall's regular Systems Librarian column was published in Computers in Libraries and he also contributed to the November 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.

Celia gave a talk at the Tennessee State Museum on the topic of 20th Century Painting in Tennessee.

Celia attended a TEL-II committee meeting.

Lisa attended ARL's Human Resources Management Symposium "Positive Organizational Scholarship: A New Approach to Organizational Development in Libraries" on November 8 and 9 in Washington, D.C.

Paul attended a NALA meeting at the Nashville Public Library.

Paul attended the ASERL Fall Meeting.

15 December 2004