The all-new Central Library homepage made its debut this month. The new page is much more attractive and functional than its predecessor and includes a wealth of information about library service points, locations, policies, and procedures. The page is the work of Peter Brush (chair), Melinda Brown, Sue Erickson, Julie Loder, and Larry Romans. They were assisted by Michael Moreland, a student assistant in Government Information. The group is now revising the Central staff homepage.
Stacks Maintenance
Stack Maintenance workers continued to work on clearing out the sorting area
and getting all books put back in their places. Books were coming in at a steady
pace until the last couple weeks of April, when it seemed like they were just
pouring in. Of course, we expect it but it does seem overwhelming.
Three student workers in Stack Maintenance are graduating: Vernon Brewer -worked entire 4 years in Library and mainly shelved the Arts material. Amanda Davis-it was her only year working for us but she did an excellent job Keven Franklin-- worked for 2 years and did a great job. Only sent 1 cart of books to the Annex for the Transfer Project. This was expected since we were overrun with return material as well as still getting in new books, serials etc. Jo again reached the magic number of 10 Acorn notes and will receive another porcelain Acorn.
Circulation
Robert and Daisy attended the LITS monthly meeting on April 9. Janet and Yolanda
attended the CAG meeting on 4/11. All staff attended an iLink demonstration.
Daisy has agreed to serve as the CAG representative to the iLink task force.
This will be a weekly commitment of time and potentially a lot of work for her
on this committee. Rachel attended a Preservation workshop on April 18. Janet,
Jo and Rachel attended the Staff Forum on 4/25. Janet did a presentation on
a conference she attended on Library Security. On Wednesday, 4/24, Circulation
staff gave a luncheon for all graduating seniors. Kit Russell, Aaron Marr, Sarah
Blake and Bryant Gaddy are the Circulation students who are graduating. Kit
has worked in our department all 4 years of her time at Vanderbilt. We will
sorely miss all of them. As is usual for this time of year, books and more books
pouring in was the top story. It's something you never get used to and it is
so physically draining. A big thanks goes to Johnnie Anthony for pitching in
so much help during this period and for Rachel Gray spending many afternoons
sorting books when she was supposed to be working for the Director's office.
It is a big boost to our morale to get this extra help when we need it so badly.
Daisy Whitten also received 10 Acorn Notes and will receive a porcelain Acorn.
Reserve Room
The last day the Reserve Room was open for this semester was on May 2, and we
closed at 5pm. Requests for reserve lists for fall were sent out this month.
Larentina sent a packet including the letter, Eres request form, and the manual
reserve form. Instead of sending the packet to the individual professor's, it
was sent to the departmental secretary or administrative asst's. Approximately
360 packets were sent out. Activities in the reserve room were very busy up
until the last few days before the reserve room closed. 2 Students who worked
in the Reserve Room graduated this year. They were Todd Deese and Denise Irizarry.
Electronic Resources:
The Electronic Resources Committee met on April 8th to discuss various databases.
Two databases-World of Learning Online and L'Annee Philologique
(1969-)-were approved for purchase. The Universal Database of Russian Publications
and Keesing's Online were discussed but the Committee decided not
to purchase these databases. Database trials now in progress include Black
Drama, Oxford Reference Online, Reference Universe, and World
Shakespeare Bibliography Online. The Committee will meet again on May 8.
Martha Kallstrom has been assisting us in reviewing and updating electronic resources pages. During April, she wrote twenty-four database descriptions.
Lolly Madden, ISI Representative, presented two sessions to give an introduction to the Web of Knowledge, a new information portal involving the Web of Science and other ISI databases. Most of the bibliographers were able to take advantage of this opportunity.
Transfer Project:
All bibliographers continued to devote time and energy to the Transfer Project.
During April an additional 11,622 volumes (63 of these for withdrawal), were
identified bringing our total to 30,530. Melinda Brown and Mary Beth Blalock
met with Anne Martin on April 30 to discuss the feasibility of utilizing a hand-held
scanner to capture data for titles selected for transfer to the Annex. Our initial
discussion was positive but we still need to evaluate data output possibilities.
Departmental Meeting:
The monthly Bibliographers' meeting was held on April 17 in the Goldberg Room.
Discussion centered on ways to recognize faculty especially a "program"
used at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, location codes for CDs,
and an update of the Transfer Project.
Outreach:
Dale Manning presented a bibliographic instruction session for a Prose Fiction
class on April 9.
Paula Covington and Melinda Brown gave an electronic instruction session for Professor Souza's class in Latin American Economics.
Gifts:
Paula Covington was instrumental in securing the collection of retiring Centennial
Professor of Spanish, Francisco Ruiz Ramon. The collection, which emphasizes
Spanish drama particularly the siglo de oro period, consisted of 2,233 books,
695 journals, 4 tapes, and 22 typescripts. Paula also completed the review of
the Biderman Brazilian gift collection. Many of the items including some books
and art/exhibition catalogs, memorabilia, chapbooks, and posters were sent to
Special Collections. She also completed reviews of the Rayfield Colombian History
collection and the Arbena gift as well as continuing the review of the Pupo-Walker
gift collection. Julie Loder documented a total of 2,965 new gifts this month.
Committee and Other Activities:
David Carpenter, Peter Brush, and Mary Beth Blalock met on April 23 and 29 to
discuss procedures for ordering and processing Central's CDs.
Peter Brush and Dale Manning attended two "Steering by Standards" videoconference presentations as well as iLink demonstrations.
Julie Loder participated in meetings of the Central Homepage Committee and the Technology Support Coordinators. She also attended an iLink session.
Mary Beth Blalock attended meetings
of the Staff Development Coordinating Committee and an iLink demo.
Larry Romans gave a fun-filled presentation with Christopher Brown (Univ. of Denver) on “URLs and PURLs in the Online Public Access Catalog and Web Pages" on April 24 at the Depository Library Council Meeting in Mobile, AL.
Romans and his student assistant, Michael Moreland, added a search engine to the FDTF Frequently Used Sites government information web site and have started the transition to using server- side includes and SHTML. Larry has been consulting with Jody Combs about transferring his pages to a database format. He hopes the inputting of information can occur this summer and the pages go online by the Fall.
There is a new web page about the department, which was uploaded on April 25, in addition to the site that links to government information sources. In addition, the new Central Library web site went online this month, after much work by Michael Moreland.
Gretchen Dodge's position was reclassified from Library Assistant IV to Library Associate. Congratulations!
Both Nancy Dolinger and Gretchen Dodge attended an iLink session. Dodge also attended the monthly meeting of the Library Information Technology Support Coordinators.
Nancy processed incoming documents, helped Chris Benda with problem records at Education, changed locations on LC materials.
Periodicals:
221 titles were sent to bindery for the month of April. Carrie attended the
iLink seminar & the Staff Forum meeting. Periodicals hired a new summer
employee, Teara Robinson, who will begin work May 22nd.
Microform and Media Center:
Patron activity for videos and reserve items was surprisingly moderate in April,
considering that this month included final exams. Traffic in microforms was
considerably busier. The computer room was extremely busy, with the two printers
there running through 90 reams of paper in one month. The Media Center added
27 new videos to its collection.
Instruction
Melinda Brown, John Haar and David Carpenter met on April 9th to look at Central
Library's instructional program and to discuss some initiatives or goals that
we might want to emphasize in the coming year.
Most of our Reference meeting on April 18th was also devoted to a discussion of library instruction issues. The meeting included the following topics: 1) How the library might welcome the new 2002 students; 2) Voluntary evaluation of instruction sessions; 3) Putting course handouts on the web; 4) Creating web-based instructional modules/tutorials; 5) Considering research consultations as an additional way to reach our students; and, 6) The scheduling of regular instruction meetings.
Paula Covington and Melinda Brown provided a bibliographic instruction session on electronic bibliographic and statistical databases for Professor Souza's Latin American Economic Development (ECON 222) course.
Melinda Brown assisted with a tour for visiting South African scholars on April 10th.
Melinda met with Anne Womack and Amy Limpitlaw in the Divinity Library to discuss the that unit's Research Assistance service.
Web Page Development
Janice Adlington met with Martha Kallstrom to discuss the drafting of a new
"how to" guide for doing research in Classics, to take advantage both
of Martha's knowledge of Classics and her expertise in creating subject oriented
guides before she leaves us.
Sue Erickson devoted much time in April to SIRSI iLink activities as part of her work on the Acorn/Virtual Catalog Task Force (ISAG subcommittee). Sue conducted a round of usability testing and summarized results (with Jon Erickson); presented usability perspective to Heard Library staff at three of the five iLink demos; and gathered feedback (continuing) from Central Library staff to present to the Task Force.
Martha Kallstrom created approximately twenty-four reference database descriptions in April to be added to the Heard Library Research Databases Web pages. These brief overviews of databases are very helpful to individuals who need to decide which databases to search, especially if they are doing so from outside the library and cannot benefit from a reference librarian's advice.
Working closely with Dale Manning, and incorporating the content of some of Dale's instruction handouts, Martha Kallstrom created Web pages for three English literary guides: Finding Literary Criticism, Finding Biographical Material About Authors, and Finding Primary Texts for Literature. These three new guides are now linked to Dale's Resources for English subject guide, and should be especially appreciated by students, although librarians giving reference assistance will benefit from them as well.
Janice Adlington and Martha Kallstrom conducted usability testing of the Heard Library Web page with two additional students. This work will assist the Heard Web Task Force consider a redesign of the top level Heard Library Web page.
Other Reference, Research or Instruction Related Activities
On April 30th, David Carpenter met with other members of ISAG's Cooperative
and Virtual Reference Services subcommittee to discuss the disappointing response
to the Ask a Librarian LIVE virtual reference service trial. David shared some
summary usage statistics for Ask a Librarian LIVE and offered examples of questions
received via the service. The CVRS subcommittee drafted some preliminary conclusions
about the trial of the virtual reference service for presentation to the larger
ISAG group, for its consideration.
Paula responded to many Latin American Studies graduate student research queries about primary sources and similar topics during April. She also fielded several e-mail queries from graduate and undergraduates in Latin American Studies (14 research questions; 2 reference questions) and some faculty requests as faculty begin to find time for their own research once again.
During February through April, Paula oversaw the preparation and completion of a bibliography on nationalism for Professor Doyle (History), prepared by an Latin American Studies (LAS) graduate student assistant in the library. Peter Brush advised on the U.S. section of the bibliography. The bibliography was in preparation for a grant and conference being planned for Vanderbilt on national identity and the independence period in the US and Latin America, and will be available and updated for conference planners and participants as a resource. The Web page will be linked from the Vanderbilt LAS homepage. Paula also supervised the preparation and completion of a long-term research project on Colombian politics for Professor Aviles' book that was researched by a LAS student research assistant in the library (during March-April).
Martha Kallstrom updated and posted version five of the Central Library PowerPoint slide show, which informs library users of new library services and other interesting and useful information.
During April Martha contributed many of her afternoon hours to providing back-up assistance for Linda Williamson at our reference desk. We saw a much larger than usual number of afternoon reference questions resulting from students needing assistance with term or research papers, as the semester came closer to its end and assignment deadlines drew near.
David Carpenter, Peter Brush and Mary Beth Blalock met on April 23rd and 29th to continue their work on the development of consistent and well-defined procedures for the processing, installation, storage and provision of access to Central Library's CD-ROM based databases.
We were very busy with many library committee or library task force assignments during April, including service to the following committees or groups: Heard Web Task Force, ISAG Web-based Instructional Support Subcommittee, Technology Coordinators, Acorn/Virtual Catalog Task Force, Central Library Homepage Revision Group, and the ISAG Cooperative and Virtual Reference Subcommittee.
Conferences, Meetings and Presentations Attended
On April 3rd, Janice Adlington and Sue Erickson attended a presentation in Knoxville
entitled "Connecting Information and Scholars: Adapting the Portal Perspective,"
by Dr. Sarah E. Thomas of Cornell University. This presentation was sponsored
and arranged by the Information Alliance. Janice and Sue gave a brief overview
of this presentation at our April 10th Reference meeting.
Reference staff attended an ISI Web of Knowledge demonstration on April 10th, one of the alternative SIRSI iLink demonstrations offered in April, and most also attended the two OCLC's Steering by Standards videoconference presentations on April 16th and 24th.
Reference staff were well represented at the poetry reading by professors Kate Daniels and Mark Jarman, as part of National Poetry Month, held in the Central Library as a "brown bag" event on April 17th. Despite the high temperature in the classroom, we really enjoyed this event and hope for more like it.
Martha Kallstrom's New Job
We heartily congratulate Martha Kallstrom on her acceptance of a new job with
the First Amendment Center
at Vanderbilt University. Martha's contributions and support to both reference
services and collection development in the last few months have been considerable,
as noted in our monthly reports. Her assistance in helping to staff the reference
desk until our German and Economics Bibliographer/Reference Librarian position
could be filled was (and continues to be) much appreciated.
We knew that Martha was employed
in a term position and would need to leave us no later than June, but we are
pleased that she will move to another position on campus and can maintain close
ties with her friends in the Central Library. Martha's last day of work with
us will be Friday May 24th.