Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--November 2003
Library Outreach and Campus Interaction
Paul Gherman was
asked to join the SIRSI management in Chicago as part of their college and
university advisory board. The discussion at that meeting focused heavily on
course management systems in general and Blackboard in particular, which
coincided well with his role on the Course Management System Steering Committee
here at Vanderbilt. The University has
selected Blackboard for their CMS.
Other library staff are being considered for and/or appointed to various
implementation groups for Blackboard.
Early implementers are expected to begin using the new system in May
with Prometheus being completely replaced in approximately 18 months.
The Institutional
Repository Advisory Board held its first meeting. Paul, Roberta Winjum, and Annette Williams serve as ex officio
members of the Board. The Board is
looking at dSpace as the underlying software and will make recommendations on
how our dSpace might be organized and implemented. Paul, Roberta, Annette Williams, Flo Wilson, Marshall Breeding
and Jody Combs met with Roger Chalkley from the Medical Center to look at
possible dSpace applications for some of the projects they are working on,
including some interface with their extensive faculty database.
Paul met with Greg
Barz (Blair faculty), Dennis Clark and Catherine Gick to discuss a proposal to
begin a collection of African music here.
Much of the collection would be made available in digital form.
Library-wide Efforts and Events
The Library has decided to move forward with a new strategic planning effort that will help to further align our goals with those of the university. The University Librarian's Advisory Group, plus Sherre Harrington will serve as the steering committee. Other members include Paul, John Haar, Roberta, Flo, Marshall, Sharon Weiner, and Martin Cerjan.
All staff in the Annex, Central, Divinity, ILL, LITS, OUL, Science & Engineering, Special Collections, and Technical Services participated the Staff Time Allocation Project. A number of meetings were held to explain the rationale and details, and data was gathered the week of November 10.
Administration and Staff
Norman Nash and John
Haar met with Francis Kovac, head of Traffic and Parking, to discuss use of the
GLB loading dock area for staff parking at night. Traffic & Parking agreed to not ticket library staff with
valid VU parking permits who park in the area after 5pm. This change will
enable us to park up to three staff vehicles in the loading dock area at
night. Central and Divinity staff who
work until 9pm or later can now park in a well-lit area adjacent to the
building.
Various scenarios
related to the 2004/05 budget proposal were examined to determine a base budget
and to identify the impact of various exceptions. Norman has completed most of the work that's possible to do until
the Library receives further guidance and instruction from the Provost's
Office.
Flo and Jody Combs met with Zafar and Phil McGovern from ITS to discuss revising the budget model used for the ITS assessment for support of a number of library systems.
Flo, Norman Nash and
Susan Smith worked on preparation for the Time Study project by extracting data
from the budget and personnel databases for loading into the time study
application.
Personnel
Following three interviews, the term librarian position in Science and Engineering was closed after concluding that they were able to function without this position in the coming six months or so. Interviews were held with candidates for the LITS Computer Systems Administrator II position; Huiwen (Deede) Wang has been hired. The Law Library hired Greg Finlay as a Library Assistant III.
Paul, Flo, and Lisa Shipman met with Susan Mezger and Leslee Hughes from the Office of Classification and Compensation to discuss librarian benefits and salaries.
Lisa presented Family Medical Leave Act information to LMC to ensure that all divisions were aware of the details of the provision.
Public Relations/Communication
The State of the Library report is nearing completion, and Celia Walker worked with division directors to select photographs to include as illustrations in the document. She had worked with the photographer from Creative Services to capture photos that would show our work in the various libraries to good effect.
The Staffweb Committee--Celia, Lisa, and Suellen Stringer-Hye--continued to work on changes to the staffweb; a review by selected staff as a focus group will be done in January.
Development
The Friends of the
Library dinner was held, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the
organization. Michael Sims (former
Special Collections employee and now author) talked about his love for reading
and its effect on his development as a child and on his writing interests now. Celia Walker and Kurt Eger worked hard on
organizing and putting on this event.
Celia worked with
Yvonne Boyer and John Haar to entice the Shiviro's to donate the Wach's
Collection of rare French books to the Library. She also worked with Julie Loder on a unique microfilm donation
Inter-Library Loan
Interlibrary loan
activity continued to increase. Borrowing for the month rose approximately 25%
over last November, with year-to-date since July up over 13%. Lending increased
about 4% over November 2002, with year-to-date up by over 7%.
Copyright Clearance
Copyright clearance
activity shifted from E-Reserves to ClassPaks towards the end of the month, as
the Spring semester deadline came and passed.
Electronic Resources
We learned that it
is now possible for us to convert our Elsevier print subscriptions to
electronic-only and save 10% on the subscription cost. Unfortunately we have already renewed
Elsevier subscriptions for 2004 with two of our major vendors, but we were able
to convert our 2004 print subscriptions vended through Ebsco. We can convert the
others in 2005. All libraries with
Ebsco subscriptions except Management (which is consulting with faculty) and
Law have converted their subscriptions.
Collection Development
A CDAG subcommittee
(John Haar, Sue Davis, and Kathy Smith) continued work to draft two sets of
preservation guidelines: a brief checklist for staff in circulation units, the
Annex, and Interlibrary Loan 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. The subcommittee completed
the circulation/Annex/ILL draft and sent it to heads of those units for review.
Annex
312 patrons requested materials via the web. 857 items were retrieved for campus
requests, 58 of which were sent to other than the owning library. 121 pages were sent for ILL requests; and
157 pages scanned/faxed to campus users.
Our continuing Annex stacks
projects; and our weekly projects with Divinity, Music, and Technical Services
were on target with a couple nearing completion.
Campus stacks
transfers were practically non-existent.
Special Collections increased their Annex 1st Floor Stockade”
space with the direct receipt of many boxes of University archives. We created floor space on the 1st
Floor for the Wachs Collection gifts.
The initial Davis Collection gifts arrived and are stored on our 2nd
Floor.
Climate control during November was a bit of a challenge. We have ordered new parts for the HVAC steam valve.
Technology Projects and Activities
Flo Wilson and John
Haar worked with ExLibris to finalize license terms for our acquisition of
MetaLib and SFX, the software for our broadcast searching and reference-linking
projects. We agreed to terms by the end
of the month and signed the license in early December.
Special Collections has been working hard on bringing to fruition the Virtual Reading Room, a digital project for the web. That and other imaging/metadata projects received assistance from Technical Services, LITS, and the services of a term position supported by OUL. An update on the project was called by Flo to ensure that Special Collections had sufficient resources to complete their ambitious task.
Television News Archive
TV News staff
continue the routine work of recording and abstracting news programs and
filling requests for videotape loans.
Steve Davis continues digitizing the retrospective collection. Marshall continued technical work on
preparing the subscription-based service.
The Archive received
a $50,732 grant from a local foundation to purchase streaming video software
needed for the video delivery system of the TV-NewsSearch subscription service
to begin in January 2004.
Meetings, activities and professional
development
At an Association of Southeastern Libraries (ASERL) meeting, Paul made a presentation about the concept of a cooperative Virtual Storage system.
Marshall and John
Lynch both attended the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference in
Vancouver Canada.
Marshall gave
presentations at the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, CA.
Marshall's more complete
report is at available on the staffweb.