Jean & Alexander Heard Library

Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--October 2003

Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Paul Gherman had lunch with Representative Jim Cooper, along with other Vanderbilt administrators.  While in Washington, he met with a lobbyist group to discuss issues concerning the TV News Archive.  Serving on the search committee for the new head of Information Technology Services, Paul participated in interviews with candidates.

 

Paul also met with John McKivigan who may bring the editorial office of the Frederick Douglas Papers to Vanderbilt; they might be housed in the Library.

 

Peabody College and Peabody Library hosted a celebration of Peabody faculty publications in the Library's main reading room.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

The 2003 Service Award Reception was held at the University Club.  The event was well attended.  Excellent food, great presentations of gifts and awards, and the opportunity to visit with other library staff from across the system--all of these made the event an enjoyable one.  Celia Walker and Lisa Shipman planned and coordinated the effort.

 

The Human Resources Benefits Office presented information regarding the 2003 Benefits Open Enrollment at an open meeting for all staff.  Lisa made the arrangements.

 

LITS, in cooperation with the Staff Development Coordinating Committee, hosted SAFE (Security Awareness for Everyone) Day in October.  The focus of the event was to encourage all staff to have a better understanding of the need for security in using their workstation and the university's computing services and facilities.  Discussion of the need for and development of secure passwords was an important topic.  Staff were encouraged to make changes to their ACORN Workflows passwords at the event.  The Committee helped promote the event and provided the refreshments throughout the day for the participants.

 

The Association of Research Libraries and Educause presented a webcast related to new legislation related to classroom learning titled the “TEACH Act and Distance Learning: Doing the Digital”.  Lisa arranged for this to be presented in the Library's electronic classroom.

 

The fall Information Alliance meeting was held at Vanderbilt this year.  A number of our library staff attended the morning program on institutional repositories, along with around 20 people from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the University of Kentucky.  A number of our staff hosted meetings with counterparts in the afternoon.  Dennis Clark, Roberta Winjum and Celia Walker provided the arrangements for the meeting with assistance from Susan Smith.

 

The directors of the various participating divisions met with Flo Wilson to review and discuss the Staff Time Allocation Study that will be coming up in November.  OUL, Central, Divinity, Science & Engineering, Special Collections, Annex, LITS, and Technical Services confirmed their intention to participate.

Administration and Staff

The Library submits a quarterly report to the University projecting our current budget status and expected year-end results; the first of these was submitted this month.  The Library budget model was updated to reflect revised material and ILL transaction data as work progressed on the 2004/2005 budget proposal.

 

A portion of the indirect cost rate that is charged in grants to the university reflects university investments in the library.  This rate is being renegotiated this year, and the Office of Contracts and Grants Accounting requested our assistance in understanding the degree of external use of the Library.  Flo met with them and discussed the drawbacks to the access statistics that we provide to them each year; we looked at the circulation figures as a complement to those.  They also needed descriptions of several new centers that appeared to be library-related that have been created since the early '90's.

 

Celia and Lisa continued to work with Suellen Stringer-Hye on the revision of the Staffweb.  They met with Roberta Winjum, Mary Beth Blalock and David Carpenter to gather additional information.  Norman Nash and Sue Davis reviewed the draft web version of the Library Emergency Plan as put together by Susan Smith.

 

OUL staff all attended the Staff Recognition event at the University Club.  Joe Collins (5), David Hughett (5), John Haar (10), Dewey James (15), and Elaine Goleski (25) were recognized for their years of service.

Personnel

Human Resources has assigned a new recruiter, Alex Merriweather, to the Library; Lisa and Ava Wilson met with him.

 

In the Management Library, Brent Tenpenny was hired into the Library Assistant IV position; interviews proceeded for the Information Services/Instruction Librarian with an appointment likely in November; and the Electronic Resources Librarian vacancy was put on hold for redefining and re-advertising.

 

The Science & Engineering Library interviewed candidates for the the Term Librarian position.

 

Law is planning on posting its Reference Librarian position in early 2004.

 

Other new staff hires included Jennifer Pitts, Administrative Assistant I, in the Peabody Library, and Charles (Greg) Weldy, Temporary Clerical, for the messenger service.  Benjamin Miller was appointed to the vacant messenger position, following his temporary help for several months, but left toward the end of October to take another position.

Public Relations/Communication

The Library will be publishing an Annual Report this fall.  Celia has been compiling essays from each of the library's division directors and she is working with Creative Services on the design and final publication.

 

The fall membership meeting will be held in November, and Kurt Eger sent out the invitations for this event.

 

Celia met with Ann Patchett, Betsy Wills, Juanita Murray, and Kathy Smith regarding the Friends of the Library board.

Library Access

Lisa, Ava, Flo, Susan, Celia and Pat Johnson met to review the various OUL activities related to library card issues.  Celia began exploring revised policies, especially for library-wide courtesy cards so that we can ensure accountability for these.

Development

Celia volunteered at Homecoming, attended classes in use of the Development Office software, and worked with Dr. Leon Helguera on the Colombiana Fund.

Inter-Library Loan

The volume of ILL borrowing and lending requests remained high, and with over a month's experience with ILLiad, Jim Toplon reports that we were able to concentrate more on the routine processing and less on learning to use the new ILL online system.

Copyright Clearance

In Copyright Clearance, Jim Webb finished permissions work on Class Paks, resumed work on electronic reserves, and notified faculty of the due date for Spring Class Pak orders (November 17).

Web Page Development

Broadcast Searching/Reference Linking.  We hosted onsite demonstrations by ExLibris and Endeavor on October 1 and 2.  Subsequently the Web Task Force, ISAG, and the Electronic Resources Task Force unanimously recommended to LMC that the library contract with ExLibris for both their broadcast searching product, MetaLib, and their reference-linking product, SFX.  Major reasons for preferring ExLibris included:

·          Considerably lower cost

·         More reliable and customizable platform for building local linking and metasearch environments

·         More deliverables available to us now

·         Better ability to accommodate record import and export

·         More experience in providing their products to SIRSI libraries

LMC approved the recommendation.  There was general agreement that we implement SFX as soon as possible.  Implementing MetaLib will be a more complex and staff-intensive operation, so we plan to approach it incrementally.  We have entered into final negotiations with ExLibris.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

ProQuest representatives visited to present their proposal to digitize their entire backfile of Vanderbilt theses and dissertations.  The digitized materials would be available to VU users through the Digital Dissertations database.  The ProQuest offer includes microfilming and digitizing older dissertations not presently in their files.  The total cost for the project is very high, and we are awaiting additional information about the total number of VU dissertations eligible for inclusion before proceeding.

 

The Digital Collections Committee considered a recommendation by the Service Quality Improvement Team that the library create a digitization service for fragile items.  While finding that such a service was not the best method of making fragile items available to users, the committee recommended that the Collection Development Advisory Group develop guidelines for determining the fragility of items and their availability for loan and use.  CDAG decided to formulate two sets of preservation guidelines: a brief checklist for staff in circulation units and the Annex to use in determining whether to circulate materials and how to treat worn or damaged items after discharge; and another more comprehensive document for collection development staff to assess an item’s condition and value and determine its preservation treatment and location.  John Haar, Kathy Smith, and Sue Davis are drafting the guidelines. As a first step, they surveyed CAG, CDAG, and the Annex to learn if circulation or collection development staff at any of the libraries have already developed preservation guidelines.

Annex

October circulation was the highest for any October on record.  447 patrons requested materials through web requests. 1,156 items were retrieved for campus, 121 of which were sent to other than the owning “home library”.  217 pages were sent for ILL requests; and 169 pages scanned/faxed to campus users.  A number of fragile materials were requested; and as these returned from use, liaisons were asked to consider further preservation action.

 

Campus transfers were fewer this month (161 linear feet).  Bibliographers finalized decisions on 97 Education Z-classification titles, and these were moved to regular Annex “circulating” storage shelving.  University Archives increased their floor space usage with the arrival of more archives records boxes.

 

Peg Earheart, Yvonne Boyer, Mary Beth Blalock, Janet Thomason, and Suellen Stringer-Hye met  to better understand and improve the retrieval, delivery and use of materials from the Pia/Sigaux/Baudelaire collections housed at the Annex.

Technology Projects and Activities

Kate Duvall and Laurie Chase, SIRSI, have been assigned as our new contacts at SIRSI; they deal with strategic accounts.  They visited with Jody Combs and Flo to discuss our technology futures and those of other academic libraries, and to discuss particular issues outstanding between Vanderbilt and SIRSI.

 

Marshall Breeding created a program for loading records into the electronic resources database that would not interfere with the operation of the online system; problems have been experienced with the database being unavailable when it was being updated.

 

Suellen Stringer-Hye arranged for a demonstration by tappedinto.com, a company that offers services for streaming video and audio; a number of library staff attended to consider how streaming technology might be incorporated into our web pages, especially for instructional purposes.

 

The Digital Collections Committee met to learn of updates on various projects, and some activity occurred on several of these during the month.  A new Digital and Unique Collections web page went live with links to a number of digital projects.  Our Electronic Theses and Dissertations database became harvestable for sharing data about our holdings with Open Archives Initiative sites.  We reached a little more clarity with people at the American South project on how we might contribute to this OAI site.  Several members of the committee and Special Collections and Roberta Winjum met to determine if we might get a digital collection project off the ground in the near future.  Special Collections described the Virtual Reading Room that they expect to have available by the end of the year.  We discussed the possibility of other staff helping Special Collections so they might make more rapid progress on several other collections and their availability in our digital collections database; a temporary position was created to do scanning; several Order Services staff are working on entering metadata for images; LITS is being consulted on design and technical issues with both the Reading Room project and with the database development; and Marshall completed some refinements to the image management system created for the Photographic Archive digitization project.

Television News Archive

Ongoing routine activity related to recording and abstracting news programs and to digitization of CNN material, continues.  Marshall developed a new interface for TV-NewsSearch, and he implemented a new IP-based authentication system.  Further work was done on the deployment and configuration of the streaming video delivery system for TV News.

Meetings, activities and professional development

Paul Gherman attended the annual ARL meeting in Washington, D.C. and conducted a session on Institutional Repositories.  He attended the OCLC Members Council meeting and led the Digital Libraries Discussion Group.  He also met in New York with the Elsevier North American Advisory Board on which he serves.

 

While in New York, Paul toured Columbia's Butler Library to see the remodeling project, and he met with the project staff there.

 

Many OUL staff attended one or both of the Technical Services Open Houses.

 

Celia worked with Chris Skinker, Jodie McCauley, and Jo Bilyeu on the Library Staff Halloween party.  Susan and Flo helped out on the day of the event.

 

Flo 'attended' an ARL Statistics Coordinators webcast, talking about the overall ARL statistics programs.

 

Ava attended “How to Complete an I-9 Form” training sponsored by Human Resources on October 23.

 

Celia attended the TEL-II Collections Committee meeting at the Tennessee State Library and Archives; Celia is a member of this group.  She and Flo attended the American Memory/Colorado Digitization Project Teleconference at MTSU which emphasized the development and use of digital collections for K-12..

 

Marshall gave a presentation on the OpenURL and Reference Linking at the NetSpeed 2003 conference in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

 

Flo attended the Library and Information Technology Association National Forum in Norfolk, Virginia.

 

Marshall's regular "Systems Librarian" column was published in Computers in Libraries, and he authored contributions to the December 2003 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by the American Library Association.

 

An article that Marshall had authored earlier this year for Library Journal was reprinted in the October 2003 issue of Spider: Pakistan's Internet Magazine Volume 5 Number 57, pp 47-50.

 

Marshall's full Monthly Report is at <http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/breeding/reports/2003-10-October-report.html>

 

11/11/03