Office of the University Librarian
Monthly Report--September 2004
Library Outreach and Campus Interaction
Paul, Flo and Celia met with A.J. Levine, chair of the Faculty Library Committee, to plan the Committee's activities for the year.
Several library staff attended the University Service Awards ceremony and various events associated with employee recognition month.
Library-wide Efforts and Events
The Office of the University
Librarian hosted a New Employee Welcome Session on September 8. Thirteen new
staff members were invited to the session, with 11 in attendance.
Lisa
and Celia made plans for the 2004 Staff Service Awards reception scheduled for
October 6.
A
special meeting of library directors was held to discuss the strategic planning
process and the ongoing need of the division directors to discuss mutual library
unit issues and concerns.
Development
Paul, Celia, Juanita Murray and Kathy Smith met with donors to Special Collections to plan for a bookplate and picked up materials from a new donor. Paul and Celia also met with other donors to talk about giving opportunities for the library.
Personnel and Budget
Lisa coordinated the 2004 Benefits Open Enrollment presentation for Library staff on September 22. Approximately 40 staff members attended.
Lisa attended Human Resources' Peoplesoft system overview on September 29. VU will be upgrading its Peoplesoft version, which will now be a web interface. This new version will go live on October 11.
Search Committees were formed for two Computer Systems Administrator II/Systems Librarian positions in LITS and for the Reference Librarian in the Law Library.
Norman and Flo met with Provost Office representatives to discuss the current budget allocation models and possibilities for the future. Several alternatives were considered and developed further during September.
Planning continued for a fall request for Reassessment
funding. Computer replacements and Annex
shelving are on the list. Funds may be
requested for some refurbishing in the
Electronic Resources and Collection Development
Collection
Development
Forty
collection development librarians from the Information Alliance libraries, including
fifteen Vanderbilt librarians, met on September 28 and 29 at
Electronic
Resources
We acquired the fourth Solinet shared collection of netLibrary electronic books. The collection currently contains approximately 2,000 ebooks and will continue to grow as Solinet selects new publications. We now hold over 40,000 netLibrary ebooks, and the collection is heavily used.
Annex
On September 1st, the final installation of our August initiated high-water alarms for our primary floor were completed. We now have 8 sensors installed to aid in the early detection of new flooding from mechanical room that seeps into areas we need to protect.
During September 2004, 124 shelves of new stacks
transfers arrived from our campus libraries. 13 new electronic dissertations
from LITS were received. The Peabody T (theses) to Special Collections transfer
project continued, as well as an assortment of newly cataloged materials unique
to the
The Peabody Youth Collection was sent from "temporary construction storage" at the Annex back to the Peabody Library. Annex staff sent several containers of Collections Development gifts to both Music Collection Development and Central Collection Development during September.
715 Annex items were requested during the month. 615 of these were sent to the Campus Libraries. Sixteen percent of our requests were pulled from Storage Shelving arrangements. Eighty-four percent were retrieved from Dewey Decimal, LC, SuDocs or periodical "shelve by title" classification sections. Twenty percent of our campus (non-Library Loan requests) were specified by the patron to be sent to other than the owning library's circulation/service desk.
Technology Projects and Activities
The major technology project
that
Paul, Marshall, Jody, Flo and Bill Longwell met to
discuss the interest from the
Flo, Marshall, Jody and Roberta met
with Juanita to discuss the current status of the Photo Archive project. Special Collections is making great progress
in scanning photographs and creating records for these for future web searching
and retrieval. Longer term storage of
the images was discussed, and possibilities for metadata enhancement were
reviewed.
Television News Archive
NEH Project
In September the team digitized
1,223 hours programming, producing 3.9 Terabytes of MPEG-2 video files. By the
end of September, all evening news programs from August 1968 through May 1977
had been digitized.
Fox News Project
Eric Adams continues his
training in producing the abstracts for the one hour of Fox News that we record
daily. To date, there are about two months worth of abstracts of this network
now available in the database.
Meetings, activities and professional
development
Celia
hosted a meeting of groups in the middle-Tennessee area that are involved in
digitization projects. The program was co-sponsored by the TEL-II committee of Tenn-Share. Juanita Murray, Kathy Smith and Henry Shipman
attended from Vanderbilt's Special Collections, along with representatives from
On September 17th
Paul attended a TEL Advisory Board meeting.
15 October 2004