Office of the University Librarian

Monthly Report--September 2005

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Library Outreach and Campus Interaction

Flo had lunch with Howard Sandler, Peabody, who is currently serving as Associate Provost for Special Projects, focusing on programming elements of the Freshmen Commons. They discussed the possibilities for the library's participation in the Commons development, and Howard talked about the current emphasis on tearing down silos and building on interdisciplinary, cross-institutional efforts.

Paul had a conference call to plan a day-long meeting concerning the Virtual Storage project.

Library-wide Efforts and Events

Strategic Plan

The Strategy & Planning Council created charges for ten committees and selected members for each committee.

Access to the libraries other than Eskind for Meharry students was explored. The Vanderbilt/Meharry Alliance was interested in ensuring that Meharry students would have access, and, until now, their access has been limited to Eskind (at Eskind's request) and it occurs without an access card. More generic NALA-type access cards have been provided to the Meharry Library through Eskind; students will check out a card from one of those two libraries to get a card that gets them into the other Vanderbilt libraries. Meharry students can, of course, get an LUC card.

Administration and Staff

Lisa Shipman and Flo Wilson met with Provost's Office staff to explain and discuss the Library's practice of carrying forward materials funds from year to year to cover encumbrances. The carry forward request from 2004/2005 to the current year was approved.

Flo attended the Staff Service Awards ceremony at which university staff achieving 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, and 50 years of service were honored. Deborah Brooks was nominated for this year's Commodore Award.

Paul, Flo, Peg and Juanita met to review the Special Collections grant proposal to NEH for shelving at the Annex for journalism collections and re-housing of the political cartoons.

Flo met with David Carpenter to go over the Management Library budget and budget procedures.

Personnel

The Science & Engineering Library Director Search Committee met to discuss the initial pool of candidates. Several candidates were selected from whom letters of reference would be sought.

Public Relations/Communications

We submitted press releases for the VUPrint system, announcing that the system would begin to charge on October 10.

Development

Celia met with university endowment staff to plan a stewardship program for the library's endowed book funds and attended an information session on the university's endowment. She met with development and Special Collections staff to plan a solicitation campaign for the Harris D. Riley Civil War Fund. On the 21st she attended a presentation by Dean McCarty on the state of the School of Arts and Science.

Electronic Resources and Collection Development

Learning Commons Planning

We have established a small group to continue planning for a university learning commons. This group includes John Haar (chair), David Carpenter, Leslie Boyd, Jonathan Blake (Office of Innovation through Technology), and Jeff Johnston (Center for Teaching). This group was originally part of a larger committee formed to develop plans for the Center for Academic Life. In line with our new committee structure, it will now exist as a project team reporting to the CAL Committee. The team will consider adding members.

Web Development

The Career Virtual Library is now on the Heard public website. The library is an effort to gather useful links to online career information for students, including both free sources and our licensed databases, in one location. It's the product of an ad hoc committee (David Carpenter, Deb Sommer, Janice Adlington, Lee Ann Lannom, Mary Beth Blalock, and John Haar) that worked with representatives of the University Career Center. It's currently linked from the Unique Collections and Subject Guides sections of the Heard homepage and will soon be incorporated into the Reference Tools pages. We urge each library to link to it from its homepage as appropriate.

Annex

Work continued on defining future shelving needs for the Annex. Only eight months of available Annex installed shelving remain for our campus library transfers. Three projects were proposed for Reassessment funding this year that would provide shelving for books and archives for a couple more years. Flo worked on drawings that identify the potential shelving uses for remaining space. Campus Planning continues its work on defining renovation needs for the basement, and they've begun a project to do preliminary planning for a possible addition to the building.

The Central Library wins the prize for the most new Annex transfers for the first quarter of our new fiscal year. Central (with the combined total of: stack transfers, Bandy Center transfers, Government Information, and new gift cataloging) equaled 658 shelves! Other libraries had the following 1st quarter gains: Divinity-38, Law-6, Management-15, Music-54, and Science-87.

625 items were requested for retrieval this month. Patrons requested 124 faxed pages to be sent. ILL patrons requested 166 pages to be reproduced. Interestingly, we had six requests for newspaper microfilms that transferred here this Summer from: The New York Times and The Chicago Daily.

Again, as with last month, several engineers, architects, and technicians made multiple visits to the Annex during September in pursuit of the basement renovation plans and proposals. Several of these representatives have re-emphasized multiple times to us that the entire contents of the basement must be removed, before any work can begin. The Annex does not have primary or secondary floor space to store basement contents. At this writing, we do not have a timetable for work to begin.

Other facilities issues during September included our troublesome HVAC system. In addition to purchasing a third replacement compressor, after numerous and continued service calls, a complete re-wiring of our 3 compressors was accomplished. This meant that miles of cable were pulled and discarded; and the pile of discards was taller than Peg, at one time. It took a leap of faith to believe the system would ever be active again, but it ran for two days before we went into high temp/high humidity alarms again. At this writing, it is working.

Annex staff attended September employee events, and were especially thrilled for Linda Davis, former Annex member extraordinaire on her VU recognition for 25 years. Annex staff also attended meetings with vendors, Library colleagues, and most of our University tenants during the month.

Library Messenger Service & GLB Mailroom

Michael Chandler elected to apply for long-term disability. His expertise, dedication, and attentiveness to every detail will be sorely missed. Alex, from VTS, continues to help us with mail room duties. He was especially helpful to the Central Library and to OUL during September with some urgent light furniture moving.

James returned from vacation, and immediately began helping us with extra deliveries that arose. He's been integral to the new Music rush routine from the Baker folks. James made plans to help the Peabody Library with special needs during October.

Greg, in addition to all his regular duties, and the special priority and hand-delivery responsibilities, also helped OUL with extra pickups this month; and he was of assistance to Celia with events surround the Etana meeting.

Technology Projects and Activities

Jody, Flo and Celia met to talk more about using RSS feeds to distribute newsletter-type information to the Library staff. November 1 was determined to be a reasonable beginning date.

Jody and Flo met with Greg Barz to discuss the potential of the Global Music Archive and how the Library might help to support that. A monthly project meeting was held to assess progress on the Archive's development. Hours of audio files have been created, and a number of metadata records have been added to the database. Photographs will be developed, printed, and then linked into the audio and metadata records. Another student has been hired to work on this project to move it along a bit more quickly.

Library Technology Officer Activities

At the request of Chuck Jones of the Oriental Institute in Chicago, Marshall created an RSS Feed for the ABZU bibliographic database of information related to the study of the Ancient Near East on the Web. The RSS feed will include new items as they are added to the database.

Television News Archive

NEH Project

The primary goal of digitizing the Archive's entire collection of the evening news collection is largely complete. The staff involved on the project have gone through the entire collection from August 5, 1968 through June 2003, the month when digital recording commenced. Quality checking of some of the material and reprocessing of programs identified as having problems still remains. The grant funding carries through the end of April 2006. The existing project staff members will begin digitizing the CNN portion of the specials collection with the time remaining on the grant.Thanks and congratulations go to the persons involved in this project for completing an enormous project far ahead of the original schedule.

Sarah Dryden was hired to fill a vacant staff position funded by the NEH grant. We also hired Karen Williams, a graduate student, to work part time to work on the backlog of Fox News abstracts. This position is funded by the grant that supports the recording and abstracting of Fox News. David Winjum, now an undergraduate student at Vanderbilt, continues working with the Archive as a student assistant.

Subscriptions

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

Open Web Project

In September 2005, the OpenWeb server received 5,886,368 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 2,640 visits to the regular TV News site were referred from the OpenWeb. We believe these increases are related to the OpenWeb, and we will continue to monitor activity and gather statistics to see if the data confirm this trend.

Other Activities

Paul discussed our contract with Nelinet as the marketing agent for TVNA. He was also involved in discussions to ship the Middle Eastern Television Archive here for long-term storage.

Meetings, Activities and Professional Development

Paul attended the NALA Executive Committee meeting and the first SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) Accreditation Team meeting.

We held an ETANA meeting here on the 12th. One of the key concerns relates to the Dig-Base software that is being funded by the NSF and developed at Virginia Tech. Vanderbilt will host this software when the grant expires in August 2006. We need to become more involved in preperation for this transition.

Celia took an online class on academic library marketing offered by the Quantum Workshop.

John Haar and Amy Stewart-Mailhiot attended a workshop on "The Future of Government Documents in ARL Libraries" in Washington on Sept. 8-9.

A number of OUL staff attended the Friends of Larry Romans party.

Marshall attended the Annual Conference of the International Federation of Television Archives in New York on September 16 - 20. The majority of the participants in FIAT come from organizations in Europe, though North American television networks are well represented. Marshall participated on a panel describing television archiving activities in the United States. His portion of the program focused on the Vanderbilt Television News Archive as an example of a television archive that is not operated by the network producing the content.

On September 30th, Marshall attended and participated in an all-day workshop in Berkeley, CA titled "Online Video and the Future of Television". Marshall's presentation gave an overview of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and the issues it faces in providing access to its now complete collection of digitized news programming.

Marshall's publications this month include his Systems Librarian column in Computers in Libraries magazine and contributions to ALA's Smart Libraries Newsletter.

12 October 2005