October 2007

Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--October 2007

Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Jody combs attended an English department faculty meeting to discuss the VU e-Archive and ETD projects.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

Paul Gherman agreed to to join Duke University Press's pilot project to subscribe to their entire current catalog electronically while maintaining print copies as well.

Bill Hook and Paul met with YS Chi, the President of Elsevier,

Paul took part in two conference calls, one with OCLC to discuss the on-going development of cooperative storage facilities and another ASERL call to discuss mass digitization.

Marshall is now the chair of the Metadata Committee. He has also been added to the Electronic Resource Management System Project Team.

Administration and Staff

Paul Gherman, Flo Wilson, and Celia Walker met with Jackie Case, candidate for the Peabody Library director's position.

Public Relations/Communication

A total of 63 articles were submitted to the Staff News in October.

A donuts & coffee discussion session was held on October 2 for about 60 staff members, who heard updates on the Achives Annex and other topics.

Development

We held a reading and book signing with Ridley Wills for his newest book, Yours to Count on: A Biography of Nashville Banker Extraordinaire Sam M. Fleming, on October 17 in the Johnson Black Cultural Center.

We held a wine and cheese reception in Special Collections ob October 12 for the Wild Bunch, the 1977 alums who support acquisitions for undergraduates. Members of the group were in town for homecoming and the tenth anniversary of the Wild Bunch Fund. Thanks to Juanita Murray, Kathy Smith and Teresa Gray for their help. We also had a Sunday brunch for the group at one of the members' homes on October 14.

Staff Development

The annual Staff Service Awards was held on October 3 to a sell out crowd. Congratulations to everyone who celebrated a milestone of service at last week's Staff Service Awards event. Six staff were recipients of the Innovation & Creativity Award: Sara Beutter, Public Services Librarian for the Wilson Music Library, Melinda Brown, Instruction Coordinator in the Central Library, Leslie Foutch, Instruction Librarian in Peabody Library, Mary Charles Lasater, Cataloger, Technical Services, Eli Moody, Libarray Assistant IV in the Peabody Library, and Dale Poulter, Systems Librarian, LITS.

We held 4 brown bags in October: on October 2, At the Elbow: Understanding Users' Perception; on October 17, Webcast: A Fresh Look at FERPA, on October 26, Worlds of WordCraft, and October 31, an Outlook brown bag.

The Staff Development Committee held a one-hour instructional on porject management. The project was chaired by Cindy Franco and supported by Rhan Huber.

The Staff Development Committee hired New Horizons to provide Outlook training on October 24. A follow-up session will take place in late November for later adopters.

Many of us attended ePac training on October 25.

Public Services

Sue Erickson moved into her new office in room 612b in the GLB. Her phone number remains 322-0155.

This office also houses computer and video equipment related to the library’s TeleVU channel (channel 7 on Vanderbilt’s closed circuit “ResNet” tv service). The library has had a channel on this network since the 1980’s, but it has been underutilized. Since we began broadcasting at the start of the semester, the Government Information & Media Services unit at the Central Library has received two requests to broadcast video material on the library’s channel. Media Services has handled a total of four screenings (2 titles with 2 screenings each). We are currently broadcasting a brief PowerPoint inviting students to visit the 8 campus libraries. If you are interested in submitting material for broadcasting, please contact Sue.

Sue attended a Center for Teaching workshop on Rubrics and demonstrations of RefWorks and Mathematica. She attended the library’s Project Management Training on the 23rd, the Outlook Open House on the 31st and participated in Jackie Case’s interview for the Peabody Library’s director position.

GIS

Jacob Thornton completed a weekly GIS training course for a group of Teaching & Learning students and faculty. The course touched on various methods and uses of GIS and GPS, and included the integration of Census Information. There were 4 sessions in all.

Jacob presented an Intro to GIS and Census information in 2 sessions for HOD 3621, Action Research

Data Services

Sue attended the biennial Official Representatives meeting of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in Ann Arbor, MI where she took in sessions on new ICPSR products and services and learning about ways to introduce students to the data archive.

Sue conducted one data research consultation.

Annex

Peg met with the Library Directors Council members on October 3rd regarding the rationing of our dwindling available space for campus transfers. Our projections are that we will max out of the last inch of available space for the last campus transfer the 1st week of July 2008. At October's end, we had received exactly the amount of transfers that each library had agreed to in the new restrictions.

During October 2007, we received precisely 7,700 new Annex items. Our requests for Items to circulate were 869, of which 343 items were retrieved from "shelf by size" areas of the Annex. We had our highest month on record for Inter-Library Loan photocopy requests and patron fax requests.

We congratulated Bryan Jones on his acceptance of his first professional librarian position. We are sad to see him leave the Library Annex, but delighted that Nashville Public Library will benefit from his services. His last day with us will be Friday, November 16th.

Will Stringfellow accepted our offer to return to the Library Annex in a part-time
temporary position which will start the week of November 12th. Will, now a graduate of Belmont University, is a former summer session student-assistant.

Interlibrary Loan Service

The demand for interlibrary loans remained high as the semester progressed. Borrowing for VU patrons increased from last month, but was slightly lower than last October. Lending to other institutions also increased, and exceeded last October's volume.

Faculty Delivery

The number of Faculty Delivery requests has grown steadily since the beginning of the school year. The service filled 131 requests in August, 166 in September, and 272 in October. Jim Webb received a new telephone number (322-8470).

Copyright Clearing Service

The focus in October was on ClassPak billings and processing clearances for current electronic reserves. A few early orders for Spring semester ClassPaks were processed. Marymae Jansson is now at telephone number 936-4627.

Television News Archive

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive will be a participant in a grant-funded project awarded by the National Science Foundation to the Informedia Labs at Carnegie Mellon University which was announced in October. Participation in this project will give the Archive access to some of the technologies that CMU has developed related to automated description for video content. Work on this project will commence later this year.

Interest in institutional subscriptions to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive continues to grow. This month institutions requested trial subscription included: Colgate University, McMaster University, Ogondaga Community College, St. Edwards University, The University of Manchester, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and
Washington and Lee Univeresity.

Marshall worked on revisions to the interface of the GMA database with the able assistance of Jodie Gambill. This process involved tweaking the interface to incorporate functional an presentation features requested by staff in the Music Library. This process also served as a training opportunity for the new Diglib Framework.

Marshall continued to work on a large technical project to upgrade the Web site and database environment for TV News. The new system will include the ability to incorporate transcripts in addition to the abstracts that have long been part of the system. Transcripts will be handled through a new text field, which involves rebuilding the fulltext indexes. This also gives us the opportunity to make some changes such as support for queries for three-letter words and to make changes in the stopword list. A new feature under development includes "This Day in History" that highlights events that happened today with stories selected from the Archive's collection.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

Jody Combs attended the LITA Forum 2007. He and Dale Poulter co-presented a session entitled "Integrating Resources: The tale of the Vanderbilt Primo development project."

Jody attended a mini-symposium at Notre Dame: "Dr. Strangelove or How we learned to Live in a Google world," and presented a session on "Issues and decisions leading to the Primo development project at Vanderbilt."

Paul attended the ARL meeting which marked the 75 th anniversary of the organization. He stayed on to attend an ARL/CNI meeting on Instruction.

Jacob attended the Census Information Center conference in Washington DC . He also presented a session entitled “Using GIS in a CIC” with fellow CIC GISer Blaine Ray, from the TN Neighborhoods Resource Center, at the annual Census Information Center Conference in Washington DC .

Marshall met with Brian Flaherty from the University of Aukland in New Zealand regarding our experience with Primo, which is under consideration by their university. Aukland University also has a television news archive and they are interested in any possible opportunities for collaboration and to learn about our processes for digitization.

The Chinese Library Journal, a publication of the Shanghai Library Association, published a translation of "An Industry Redefined" based on Marshall's "Automated System Marketplace" article published in the April 1 issue of Library Journal.

Marshall and Zora gave a brown-bag presentation to the Divinity Library Staff on their recent trip to Asia.

Marshall participated in the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, CA. He was part of the panel, along with Darlene Fichter, Frank Cervone, and Jeff Wisniewski, that taught the day-long Web Manager's Academy, a workshop for library staff responsible for Web sites. He also gave a presentation on Next-Generation Library Interfaces.

Marshall's column in the October 207 issue of Computers in Libraries was titled "The Birth of A New Generation of Library Interfaces." For ALA's Smart Libraries Newsletter, Marshall wrote an article on ownership changes at the Mandarin Library Automation, a company focused on the school library automation arena.

Marshall gave a presentation to the Snow-Isle Libraries in Lynwood, WA on October 7 titled "Next Generation Library Interfaces: the intersection of new library interfaces, Web 2.0, and Web Services."

Marshall gave an invitational lecture to the staff of the Morgan Library at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO on October 19th. His topic was "Library Automation Landscape: Status Quo or Transformation."

Marshall's article "Recasting Library Catalogs" was published in the October 2007 issue of American Libraries.

26 November 2007