Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--October 2004

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

The Faculty Library Committee met for the first time this year. A.J. Levine is chairing the advisory group, which is addressing a number of issues relevant to the Library throughout the coming year.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

The Staff Service Awards took place at the University Club on October 6. Innovation and Creativity Awards were presented to 5 staff members. Thanks to Pat Johnson for her help with the set up.

Staff enjoyed a Halloween party on October 29, organized by volunteers Jo Bilyeu, Angel Bruner, Mary Colosia Conn, Rahn Huber, Rachel Vacek and Celia Walker.

Vanderbilt hosted a meeting of the ASERL Virtual Storage task force. A representative from OCLC described the methodology and the findings of the collection overlap study they completed for the group's nine storage collections. The participants, with most of the nine represented, discussed the degree to which the overlap indicated there might be further benefit in developing cooperative storage commitments and approaches to weeding of non-storage collections. Potential problems were identified. OCLC and ASERL will be working on generating a report that might be used for weeding here at Vanderbilt as a demonstration effort.

Paul, Flo and Lisa met with Karen Williams, Human Resources, on the Library's Community Survey results. Karen had reviewed our summary report, agreed that many of the concerns were broader university ones, and concluded with us that having each division take a look at its own results for the high importance/low performance items would be a useful approach.

Paul, Flo, John and Bill Hook met with Director Todd Kelley and representatives from Sewanee: The University of the South's Jessie Ball duPont Library to sign an agreement for cooperative lending. The Sewanee group toured the Peabody Library and Science and Engineering Library to gather ideas for their new facility.

As an outgrowth of the building planning project under consideration in Central, several other representatives were added to the group to look at the broader scope of the General Library Building. Roberta Winjum, Juanita Murray, Bill Hook, Paul Gherman and Flo Wilson have joined this group in thinking about building-wide needs and implications.

Lisa organized an ARL Webcast on Web accessibility.

Administration and Staff

Norman and Flo worked through various budget allocation methodologies that might be considered by the Provost's Office as alternatives to our current system. The benefits would be greater simplicity and the ability to generate budget proposals in a more timely fashion. Paul, Norman and Flo met with representatives from the Provost's Office to discuss these.

To provide additional support and coverage for the Management Library during Deb Sommer's medical absences, Flo assumed some division director responsibilities for that library, and John Haar took on the acting division director role in Science and Engineering.

Flo, Jody, Marshall, Roberta, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Pat Johnson worked with Architectural Affiliates on selected modifications and refurbishing for the Library's Baker office space. Re-carpeting is planned, and a few wall and cubicle relocations will be part of the project. This project, if approved, will be funded by Reassessment.

With the absence of Michael Chandler due to illness, the mailroom staff was appreciative of the assistance of Micah Smith from VTS.

GLB Renovation

As the Central Library continues to plan possible renovations for the fourth floor lobby and adjacent areas, another group has begun to consider long-term planning for the entire General Library Building in the context of the library's strategic plan. Chaired by Paul Gherman, the group includes Flo Wilson, John Haar, Roberta Winjum, Bill Hook, and Juanita Murray. Among the issues the group is discussing are

· The possibility that the Divinity Library may remain in the GLB and renovate its space. How can we coordinate and integrate Central and Divinity space to best serve user needs for collections and services?
· Whether the fourth floor space occupied by Technical Services staff is better suited for public space. If so, what functions should be located there? Should TS staff relocate to other GLB space or another building?
· Assuming that GLB expansion is not likely for many years, how should we repurpose the building for the long term? What is the proper balance of space for storing print collections and user services? What kinds of user services (information commons; digital media center; multi-purpose space for group study, conferencing, programming; etc.) are most needed?

Public Relations/Communication

Chris Skinker and Celia worked with Gary Gore to create the 2004 holiday card.

The Acorn Chronicle went through final edits and went to the printer for a mid-November distribution.

Development

Paul, Celia, Juanita Murray and Kathy Smith met with Jim Squires concerning his papers.

Ninety people attended the 31st annual Friends of the Library Dinner, which took place at the University Club on October 28. Betsy and Ridley Wills presented the Library's three millionth volume and Marshall Eakin, President of the Friends, presented the Library's three millionth and first volume. The speaker, Richard Powers, spoke on the making of his book, The Goldbug Variations. Thanks go to volunteers Mills Bell, Yvonne Boyer, Paula Covington, Kurt Eger, Pat and Preston Johnson, Juanita Murray, Kathy Smith and Malah Tidwell.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

Collection Management

Representatives of eight ARL libraries who are also ASERL members met at Vanderbilt on Oct. 5 to discuss the possibility of creating a shared virtual collection storage capability. The group examined OCLC's report on the duplication rate among items currently in their storage facilities. They agreed that the level of duplication was sufficiently high to go forward with a project designed to help libraries weed their collections. We will ask OCLC to generate a list of titles held by Vanderbilt and three or more storage collections as a demonstration of a usable weeding product. The objective is to create a tool that would enable participating libraries to withdraw low-use items that they might otherwise send to storage if the item is held in storage by multiple libraries and those libraries agree to retain items and to lend them. If widely used, such a project could reduce the number of items each library would need to place in storage and reduce the need for adding more storage space.

Interlibrary Loan Service

ILL borrowing and lending continued at high levels.

We agreed with CAG to simplify how campus libraries bill for materials lost on interlibrary loan to other institutions. Rather than invoicing the borrowing institution, divisions will charge (and be paid by) ILL directly. (ILL will then recover the charges from the borrower.)

ILLiad client software was installed in the Peabody and Science & Engineering Libraries to track and circulate ILL loans to users there. Testing at Science & Engineering was completed, and the new system is in use. Once Peabody has implemented the approach, the system will be offered to the other campus libraries.

Copyright Clearance Service

Jim Webb concentrated on permissions for electronic reserves material.

Annex

During October 2004, 213 shelves of new stacks transfers arrived from our campus libraries. This has nearly doubled our September 2004 growth.

Annex staff increased their project time with Professor Helguera's Colombia collection in order to meet specific end of calendar year deadlines.

916 Annex items were requested during the month. 27% of our retrieved items were from Storage Shelving. (Storage Shelving began being used in March 2002.) Patrons requested 148 items to be sent to other than the owning library. We also had 45 requests from Interlibrary loan for the photocopying of journal articles.

Technology Projects and Activities

To resolve some anomalies in ACORN and to better incorporate the many records added to ACORN since the last re-indexing, plans got underway for a complete re-indexing over Thanksgiving. LITS communicated with all the library workgroups that are affected by ACORN operations.

The Library is expanding its technology support operations to include the publishing of electronic journals. The first to be introduced is AmeriQuests from the University's Center for the Americas. Shooting for a November introduction date, Jody Combs worked with the Center staff and with the e-journal publishing software to get the first issue ready to go. Julie Loder from Central/A&S participated in some of the preparation; she may serve as a contact for other A&S faculty/units that have interests in electronic publishing in the future. Jody also exchanged information with John Conley, Economics Department, as the Library and A&S work toward an understanding of what's required to support his e-journal in the way that his current proprietary system does.

Special Collections has created a huge file of images associated with the Vanderbilt Photo Archive. To facilitate economical and effective use of available space, the tiff version of the images were moved off of the Storage Area Network to more offline-like storage.

More effort was expended in developing Interoperability between OAK and EZProxy, so that users would not be required to re-authenticate when selecting an electronic library resource from OAK. This will require some development work through the University's MIS, and this work has not yet been scheduled.

Television News Archive

NEH Project

This month, the pace of the NEH project to digitize the retrospective news collection was down just a bit from previous levels due to increased off-air recording related to the U.S. Presidential and Vice-presidential debates. In October the team digitized 1,193 hours programming, just 30 hours below the previous month. By the end of the month the evening news collection from 1968 through February 1980 had been digitized.

We processed several shipments of MPEG files to the Library of Congress, totaling 3,641 files--a record number. While this mitigates the crisis that we were facing as our storage servers approached capacity, we still have a considerable backlog. If we continue transferring files at this pace, that backlog will diminish over the next few months.

Subscriptions

In October, Baylor University, Brooklyn College, Florida Atlantic University, and the University School of Nashville each requested trial subscriptions.

Library Technology Officer Activities

Marshall continued the development of the new digital backup recording system for the TV News Archive.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

We held an ASERL Virtual Storage meeting here on the 5th with participants from a number of ASERL libraries to discuss the results of the OCLC overlap study of our collections.

Paul attended the fall meeting of ARL in Washington, D.C.

Flo's article "LibQUAL+ 2002 at Vanderbilt University: What do the results mean and where do we go from here?" appeared in the Journal of Library Administration, 40 (3/4): 197-240.

Flo attended a one-day Symposium on Open Access and Digital Preservation held at Emory

Celia attended a meeting of the Collections Committee of the TEL-II Volunteer Voices project.

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.

16 November 2004