Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--October 2005

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Jody and Paul met with the Graduate Faculty Council to report on ETD's.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

Strategic Plan

The Library Management Council met with the Provost and Dennis Hall on October 11 to discuss the library's Strategic Plan. We held a meeting on October 13 in the Nursing Annex for the library staff to hear about the new committee structure.

Space Planning

The new Space Planning and Utilization Committee held its first meeting. Discussion centered chiefly on how much space remains in the Annex for materials transferred from the libraries. Peg Earheart reported that if the libraries continue to send materials at their present rate without major surges and if we can continue to procure compact shelving, she expects that the Annex can accommodate materials for another four to five years. This means that we effectively have four to five years in which to plan and build an Annex expansion. Committee members agreed that additional Annex space will be essential in the future. We also discussed emergency measures we might consider if we face a shortage of Annex space before an expansion is ready.

Resource Sharing

The Brentwood Public Library became the fourteenth member of Athena. Brentwood PL records now appear in the Athena catalog, and the library is on the regular route of the Athena courier service.

Learning Commons

The Learning Commons Project Team, composed of John Haar (chair), David Carpenter, Leslie Boyd, Jonathan Blake (Office of Innovation through Technology); and Jeff Johnston (Center for Teaching), met to continue planning for a university learning commons. We agreed to consult with Matt Taylor, who designed the Center for Better Heath, to advise us about how we can create a commons with a similar modular, flexible design. Our goal is to develop a firm proposal, including cost estimates, that we will present to Paul Gherman and Allison Pingree of the Center for Teaching.

Sue Erickson and Flo Wilson met to discuss the work of the Geographic Information Systems project team. They expect to complete their recommendations in November.

Personnel

The Science and Engineering Library Director Search Committee finalized its review of the candidates for the position. Four candidates will be invited for interviews in November and early December.

Public Relations/Communications

The Communications Committee held its first meeting. Members include: George Anglin, Angel Bruner, Paula Covington, Henry Shipman, Deborah Sommer, Suellen Stringer-Hye, Celia Walker, Jim Webb, Ava Wilson and Flo Wilson.

Development

Celia met with Tammie Bain of Sponsored Research to discuss ways to generate more grant applications in the library. She also managed the Divinity School brunch for Reunion.

Staff Development

The annual Staff Service Awards reception was held on Wednesday, October 12 at the University Club. Flowers and gifts were distributed to staff members celebrating a 5 or 10 year anniversary of service and three people were given the library's Creativity and Innovation Award: Chris Benda and Rick Stringer-Hye were honored for their creation of a system-wide computer resources page, one of many projects that the two have generated in their years at the library. Dewey James was recognized for his work to support the infrastructure of the library. Dewey calls on his creativity and innovation on a daily basis to make the library function well. Congratulations to all of the winners.

A newsletter open house was held on Tuesday, October 18 to introduce staff to the new RSS feed format of the Staff Newsletter.

The Staff Development Committee held its first meeting. Members include: Judy Carter, Joe Collins, Ann Ercelawn, Rahn Huber, Lisa Shipman, Rachel Vacek, Chris Waldrop, Celia Walker and Daisy Whitten.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

Electronic Resources

John Haar met with Frances Lynch and Deborah Broadwater of the Biomedical Library and with an Elsevier representative to discuss renewal of our ScienceDirect contract. Our current contract expires at the end of 2005. Elsevier has offered one-year, three-year, and five-year renewal options with lower price increase caps for longer renewal periods. A major negotiating issue is how our cancellation of several Elsevier subscriptions will affect our opportunity to continue to license electronic access to all Elsevier periodicals. Elsevier will soon make a revised proposal based on our new, smaller subscription base.

Our current Information Alliance contract with Springer will also expire at the end of the year, and we are in negotiation about renewal terms. As with Elsevier, how our subscription cancellations-and those of the other IA libraries-will effect renewal options is the chief point of negotiation. Springer has proposed contract terms, and we have made a counterproposal.

Collections

John Haar asked library directors to recommend materials inflation guideline percentages for the library's 2006-07 budget proposal. Each director will propose guidelines for monographs, serials, electronic resources, and binding.

Annex

Only six months of available Library Annex installed shelving remain for our campus library transfers, down from eight months reported in September. 246 shelves of new materials were transferred during October 2005 from the Baudelaire Center, Central stacks, Divinity, Government Information, and included newly cataloged theses/dissertations. We fully anticipate November's growth to be more significant, due to the current projects underway. Clint Grantham, Joe Collins, Leonor van Cotthem and Peg Earheart spent every available "non-patron moment" to keep the stream of new transfers flowing. Ironically, we had at least nineteen requests from patrons for seventeen monographs and two serials that had just been shipped to the Annex.

Patrons requested 1039 items for retrieval this October. Our September patron requests: of 625 items seems meager compared to this new number! Certainly explains why, as one staff member commented: "There's hardly time to breathe!" Per usual, we had interesting international requests, which we referred to Inter-Library Loan. A number of our patrons this month needed nearly entire periodicals and serials for their research. Patrons requested 106 faxed pages to be sent. ILL patrons requested 240 pages to be reproduced.

Dewey, Flo, Lisa, and Peg met with Mark Petty and others from Plant Operations to talk about HVAC performance at the Annex. Recent failures of air conditioning equipment suggested we should again ask Plant Operations to advise on the likely future needs for maintaining the building.

Library Messenger Service & GLB Mailroom

The Library Mail Assistant vacancy took a few steps forward. The position description that was submitted to HR was co-written by Ava Wilson, Lisa Shipman and Peg Earheart. HR officially opened the position for candidates on October 27th.

Peg re-wrote the Functional Job description during October with invaluable input from Dewey James, James McCullough, and Greg Weldy. Michael Chandler dropped by the GLB, and several staff commented how great it was to see him. The GLB Mailroom will long miss Michael, but we are also eager to move forward. Plans are to begin interviews in November. Meanwhile, VTS's Alex Esom continues to assist with Mailroom duties.

During October, Greg passed the van keys to David Stringfellow and to Bryan Kurowski for special pickups their departments needed to do. Additionally this month, Greg covered James' usual routes, so that James could work on three special projects involving the Library truck. These included James' assistance to Lee Ann Lannom with the Odum Gift Collection (Psychology building to Peabody; and Psychology to GLB for mailings); and to Bill Hook and Donna Smith for the Biddle Gift Collection.

Technology Projects and Activities

Ecclesiastical Sources for Slave Societies

One of the major projects Marshall worked on this month involved creating a Web-based interface to a collection called Ecclesiastical Sources for Slave Societies. This collection is the product of a research expedition by Vanderbilt faculty member Jane Landers to Cuba to digitize materials in Cuban church archives. The project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, produced thousands of digital images of pages from volumes in church archives containing birth, baptismal, confirmation, marriage, and death records in several parishes throughout Cuba. Landers met this summer with Paul, Marshall, and Jody, resulting in an agreement that the library would ensure the preservation of this collection by storing the images on managed file servers and that we would attempt to produce some type of interface to the images. Marshall gave a presentation for the Metadata Committee on October 31 describing this project.

Jody Combs, Dale Poulter, George Anglin, Flo Wilson, John Haar, and Mike Martin (ITS) met to discuss the state of university transition to a non-SSN unique identifier that would be used for all Vanderbilt-affiliated people, allowing the Library to move away from using the SSN as part of our authentication mechanism. The Library has been working toward a solution that will use LDAP for authentication and which might be ready in the late spring. Any transition by the University to a new identifier is likely to be several years out. Expansion of wireless access in the General Library Building was also discussed. The University is funding some of this access, and the libraries have been designated as a high priority for placement of new access points.

Television News Archive

NEH Project

With the first pass complete of digitizing the evening news collection, work continues to review the quality of each digitized file, to redigitize any programs with problems, and to prepare for the process of digitizing the specials collection. We currently expect the quality review process to be complete at the end of November.

Subscriptions

This month a trial subscription was set up for the HELIN Library Consortium in Rhode Island. Letters were sent to all the original ARL Sponsoring libraries to invite them to subscribe once the sponsorship agreement concludes in December 2005.

In September 2005 Williams College became a subscriber to the Archive following a trial subscription set up last month.

Open Web Project

In November 2005, the OpenWeb server received 5,588,251 page requests. Most of this activity was related to search engine spiders gathering pages for indexing. We have begun to see an increase of activity on the regular TV News Web site and the number of requests for videotape loans has increased. At least 3,133 visits to the regular TV News site were referred from the OpenWeb.

Visitors

Two reference librarians from the Central Library, Susan Erickson and Hillary Rudsenske were given tours of both the behind-the-scenes digital technologies employed by the Archive and the standard tour of the Archive's operations.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

Paul participated in an ASERL finance committee conference call. He also attended the ARL annual meeting and talked to Barbara Dewey about a possible joint effort on African Music. He spoke with Kevin Guthrie of Ithika about our project. He also led a discussion session on Virtual Storage. Paul met with the Virtual Storage Steering Committee all day on the 25th to advance the project.

Flo Wilson participated in a telephone conference dealing with the ASERL Virtual Storage project and OCLC's participation in the project through collection analysis tools, reports, and information to be stored in WorldCat records and registries. She also attended the presentation at the Peabody Library on Presidential Libraries, a special program part of this year's Reunion events.

John Haar attended a luncheon sponsored by the Faculty Senate. Father Edward A. Malloy, past president of Norte Dame and a member of the Vanderbilt Board of Trust, spoke on university governance.

Marshall attended the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, California, from October 22nd through 23rd. At the conference he taught a section of the "Web Managers Academy: Building Next-Generation Library Web Sites," a full day workshop to introduce new skills to those responsible for managing Web sites in a library, and did presentations on "The Open Croquet Project", "Web Management Tools", and on "Systems Management: Automation Tools to expedite the digitization of video at the Vanderbilt Television News Archive." Marshall's publications this month include his Systems Librarian column in Computers in Libraries magazine and contributions to ALA's Smart Libraries Newsletter.

11 November 2005