Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--November 2006

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

On November 29 the library, the American Studies Center, and the Visiting Writers Program co-sponsored a reading and book signing with the National Endowment for the Arts called "Operation Homecoming." The program drew from stories created by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who participated in writers workshops sponsored by the NEA. An 11 minute film on the program is showing in early December in the Central Library foyer and a book published by Random House is available in the library's Leisure Reading section.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

Building Issues

November saw repeated problems with the Card Access system and building security. Card Office procedures for changing building schedules during breaks have proved to be less than efficient. We had several incidents where the doors were open before the library was to open, and also several times when the doors did not lock when the building was to close. We are working with the Card Office to improve their procedures, and have established backup procedures for staff closing the library to verify that doors are locked and access schedules are correct. Testing has been going on for the last several weeks on the new building security system. Staff are becoming familiar with the system, and a number of bugs became evident during the testing.

Administrative and Staff

Joell Smith-Borne transferred to full-time status at the Library Annex on November 20th.

Administrative Services

Flo and Lisa met with John McDaniel and others to review the historical model of budget allocations that have resulted in the support currently received for the Library from the Medical Center.

Public Relations/Communication

Seventy-three articles were submitted to the Staff News this month, of which 26% were committee agendas and minutes, 60% were general news items, and the balance were staff news and monthly reports. To date, 864 articles have been posted since January 2006.

Work continues on the Library News, the communications channel designed to inform our public audience (with a special emphasis on the news that our faculty could use). Our goal is to launch the news in January. It will be available as an e-mail digest and also on the library's home page. Anyone with information relevant to our faculty, students and scholars is encouraged to send it to Celia Walker or Pat Johnson.

Development

Flo attended an update on the Shape the Future Campaign (fund-raising).

Staff Development

The Staff Training and Development Pages http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/training.html were revised by a subcommittee of the Staff Development Committee composed of Rachel Vacek, Judy Carter, Chris Waldrop and Celia Walker.

Brown Bags

November 8 Webcast: Facing Facebook and Other Social Networking Technologies

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

John Haar finalized terms for the renewal of our subscription to Wiley Interscience. Our subscription is part of an Information Alliance consortial deal. We will continue to provide electronic access to virtually all Wiley journals. We agreed to renew our contract for five years to take advantage of the lowest negotiable annual price increase caps.

John, Tracy Primich, and Deborah Broadwater met to review our cost-sharing model for subscriptions to journals published by Nature Publishing. We have negotiated a new contract covering all our Nature subscriptions and providing stronger guarantees of perpetual access to paid-for content.

Public Services

The library's GIS service has been available for its first full month now, acting as a Geographic Information Systems resource and continuing the services of the Census Information Center. Progress is underway in obtaining an ESRI site license that will give everyone on campus access to GIS software. We have also seen map production, census data, and GIS help requests from faculty, staff, and students. Jacob Thornton, our new GIS coordinator is rapidly being oriented to the library and university environment, meeting with people from all the libraries and from many departments, both academic and administrative.

The SFX project team provided an information session on SFX for all library staff. FindIt@VU was an informative and useful explanation of the mechanics of how SFX works.

A group to promote, plan and coordinate information literacy efforts across the University has been getting together for a couple of months. The group has dubbed itself the Committee on Undergraduate Information Literacy (CUIL, pronounced 'cool'). Members include representatives from the A&S Dean's Office, the Writing Studio, each of the libraries that primarily serve the schools with undergraduate programs, OAK, and the Center for Teaching. Flo, Melinda Brown, and Patricia Armstrong (CFT) have now met with Lucius Outlaw, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education twice to talk about approaches to furthering the case for more formal information literacy programs. A great deal of interest in information literacy is now being generated, from the spring's proposed QEP proposal, to Vanderbilt Visions, and looking forward to the Freshman Commons.

Annex

199 new shelves of campus library transfers arrived during the month from: Central, Divinity, Government Information, Law, Management, Science, and Special Collections. Science sent the most new transfers, with Management taking second place.

616 items were retrieved for patrons, 37 % of which were from storage shelving. Patron specified deliveries accounted for 17% of our November retrieval requests.

543 photocopies for Inter-Library Loan patrons were produced. Only 18 faxed copies were sent to local Vanderbilt patrons.

Staff concentrated on preparing empty shelves for future transfers; and in tackling the massive Oversize tear-down project. This is a huge labor-intensive project, which must be completed before our Spring 2007 interior construction.

Copier and Printing Services

Bill Hook and two other members of the VUprint steering committee met with a number of student leaders from the SGA. The SGA representatives wanted to renew their request for a "free printing" allocation for all students. The discussion included explanations of how the steering committee reviewed that option last year, and why it chose not to implement such a policy. While technically possible within the CSPrint software, it would be complex to administer and require requesting funding from each Dean to add money to student accounts to subsidize that free printing. The conversation was cordial, and they left with a greater understanding of the decision process that the steering committee had used.

Technology Projects and Activities

Ex Libris, our development partner in creating and pursuing a beta test of Primo, their new discovery and delivery tool, visited Nov. 8 - 10. Plans for the beta test were laid out, and training was done for the backroom tools for configuring Primo. The beta test will occur in two phases, the first beginning in January and extending through February, the second occurring during March and April. Broad testing of the functionality of the new system will likely occur during phase 2, with several project teams more actively engaged during the first phase, confirming that we understand how it's working and whether our initial preparations have resulted in a usable catalog file. During the last day of the Ex Libris visit, we also met with a representative from the University of Minnesota, which is the other development partner in the U.S.

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

Comtini-Volterra Project

In support of the project funded by the Kress Foundation to digitize the photographs from the Contini-Volterra collection, Marshall created a new version of the image management system. This version of the interface was significantly different than previous versions in that it uses MySql as the relational database instead of DB/TextWorks. This will be the first of the library projects to use this version of the infrastructure we use for digital projects.

Marshall met with Shanmuga Sundaram who is the person in ITS responsible for developing storage strategies and infrastructure. He had asked to meet to assess the storage needs of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

Paul Gherman attended a NALA meeting where he reported on our plans for a storage facility. He attended the SIRSI/Dynix academic Directors Council in Chicago. Marshall and Paul traveled to Case Western to discuss an IMLS grant in support of ETANA.

Celia Walker and Yvonne Boyer attended the Art Libraries Society of North America/ Southeast conference in Atlanta. Celia also attended a meeting of the Volunteer Voices project at the Brentwood Public Library.

Flo Wilson attended the lecture "Publishing, History, and the Crisis of the Book" sponsored by the Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.

Marshall Breeding was invited by the OCLC Office of Research to deliver the latest in their Distinguished Seminar Series. The presentation was titled "Trends in Library Automation: Meeting the challenges of a new generation of library users." In addition to this presentation, Marshall met with a number of other departments and ind ividuals at OCLC on various topics.

Marshall attended the Internet Librarian 2006 and gave a number of presentations including: "Using Google and Search Engines to Increase access to Digital Collections," "Repositories in Action: Vanderbilt Television News Archive," and "Web Managers Academy: Web Services."

Marshall was invited to speak at the Hawaii Library Association's annual conference held in Hololulu, HI. He gave presentations on "Trends in Library Automation" and "Library Security Issues" and participated on a panel addressing the topic of "Dead and Emerging Technologies."

Marshall's regular column appeared in Computers in Libraries and he wrote several short articles for the October and November issues of ALA TechSource Smart Libraries Newsletter.

12 December 2006