Statistics
Access*:
28,389 total entrances
19,585 undergraduates
5,497 graduate students
1,574 faculty/staff
793 alumni,faculty/staff/student family members
939 visitors (incl. Fisk, Sewanee, NALA)
*Reported
entrances are lower than last year at this time because we no longer have a
turnstile in the Reserves area
Circulation:
13,366 charges at circulation desk (highest monthly total of the year)
264 renewals at circulation desk
13,255 online renewals
563 laptop charges
479 reserve charges
695 holds placed (also a record
for the year and a 29% increase from April 05)
14,987 items discharged
3,877 items received from other libraries
23,067 books shelved
591 bound periodicals shelved
1,006 unbound periodicals shelved
356 newspapers shelved
189 periodical volumes sent to bindery
Reference:
926 (81%) questions at Reference
desk
127 (11%) by e-mail
85 (8%) by telephone
31 off-desk questions (email)
7 research consultations
Government
Information/Media Services:
473 items charged
196 reference questions and service transactions
Instruction:
3 sessions for 40 participants
General
Book
Sale:
Central's third annual book sale was a big success.
Our thanks go to Bryan Kurowski for organizing and planning the sale, to bibliographers
for reviewing a large number of gift titles to determine what could be sold,
and to the numerous volunteers who assisted. In addition to clearing our backlog
of gift books not needed for the collection, we made almost $3,000. This year
we are donating 50% of the revenue to Gulf coast libraries damaged by hurricane
Katrina.
Assessment:
John Haar, Sue Erickson, Melinda Brown, and Janice Adlington hosted a pizza
dinner for eleven members of the Graduate Student Council on Apr. 19. Discussion
covered the students' opinions about Central Library services and collections
as well as Acorn and electronic resources.
Facilities:
Through the
efforts of Janet Thomason, we created a small lounge area for patrons on the
4th floor adjacent to the Leisure Reading collection. Janet furnished the area
with chairs, lamps, and artwork from the former Reserve Room.
Personnel:
Robyn Harris,
our new Administrative Services Coordinator, began work on Apr. 10.
Circulation (Janet Thomason)
Stacks
Maintenance:
Stephanie Dillard resigned as supervisor of Stacks
Maintenance; her last day was Apr. 14. She completed all student evaluations
before she left and created network files for all the forms she put in place
during her term of service. She leaves a huge hole in our department, and we
certainly will miss her. We interviewed three candidates for the position. Daisy
Whitten, Ben Darling, and Robert Wright participated with Janet in the interview
process.
Shelving
was our focus this month, and we're happy to report that the sorting area stayed
in very good shape. Kelly Lockaby moved what remained of the Bibliography section
to the 6th floor and transferred the National Union Catalogs to the 3rd
floor. To make room for Bibliography, it was necessary for us to change the
way we shelve newspapers. We previously kept many newspaper backfiles, including
The Tennessean, The New York Times, and The Times of London in
the newspaper stacks until the receipt of microfilm. Now, all newspaper backfiles
are housed in the Periodical Reading Room.
Circulation
April is always a heavy month for circulation as the statistics above indicate.
It is usually the highest circulation month of the year, and this year was no
exception. Circulation activity increased 5% compared to April 2005.
Janet completed performance evaluations for the Circulation staff. The unit gave a going-away party for Stephanie on Apr. 13. Laptops were the hot item with 563 charges, a 21% increase from April 2005. We encountered lots of problems with laptops, but thankfully LITS saved the day on more than one occasion. Janet, Bill Hook, and John Haar met with 3M to discuss the installation and placement of new theft detection gates in Central and Divinity. Yolanda Campbell sent email messages to all open carrel holders to advise them of the need to renew their carrels for the coming academic year, and she posted signs about carrel renewals around the library. She was also busy with scheduling because many student assistants dropped and switched hours as the end of the semester approached.
Reserves:
LaRentina Gray sent Fall '06 reserve letters to the faculty
and began preparing for the move of the Reserves unit to the 4th floor.
Periodicals:
Evelin Sanchez finished addressing duplicates and other problems and began replacing
labels in the reading room. Her term appointment ended on May 12.
Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)
Electronic
Resources:
The Electronic Resources Committee met on Apr.
12 and 26. We approved renewal of AccuNet
Multi-Media Archive
and increased the number of simultaneous users from one to five because
of the number of turnaways we have experienced. We approved two databases--C19:
the Nineteenth Century Index and Arab-Israeli Relations (lower priority)--for
purchase when funds are available. We approved trials for British Periodicals,
LexisNexis American Statistics Index, and LexisNexis Congressional
Research Digital Library. We determined that free resources including REALIA
Project, Visual
Collections, Photographic
Portraits of American Artists, and Today's
Front Pages are more appropriate for subject pages and will not be added
to the Articles & Databases page. We did not approve SocINDEX and
Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences. We discussed Periodicals Archive
Online but will not make a decision until we can evaluate the specific journals
covered by the database and the overlap of existing journal coverage. Although
there was some interest in Wiley InterScience's Psychology Backfile Collection,
we considered the ScienceDirect Psychology Backfile more important and
approved it for purchase when funds are available. We will monitor the development
of the InterScience Psychology Backfile Collection and discuss again
in the future.
Department
Meeting:
Our April Collection Development meeting was devoted
to learning more about eNotes reports and Request functions of Blackwell's Collection
Manager. Following a web presentation by Maggie McNair and a few minutes
for questions, Mary Ellen Wilson discussed the procedures for requesting orders
via Collection Manager. Bibliographers are exploring using eNotes and
Request functions. Susan Widmer and Janice Adlington are currently using the
Request function for ordering titles from eNotes reports.
Training
Session:
In December we purchased a major database, Eighteenth
Century Collections Online. Sara Tarpley, Thomson/Gale trainer, conducted
a training session for ECCO on Apr. 13. Several bibliographers and one
faculty member attended the session.
Outreach:
Janice met with an undergraduate to discuss native
health care resources.
Yvonne Boyer met with Professor Christopher Johns, Chair of the Art and Art History Department, and Professor Marilyn Murphy, Associate Chair for studio art, regarding library resources. She also met with Lawrence DeLooze, Professor of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario, to discuss the Bandy Center Collections.
Paula Covington interviewed for a Vanderbilt Register article, "The Last Word with Paula Covington" by Kara Furlong, April 10, 2006. Paula also met with the Spanish faculty liaison, consulted with a visiting scholar from Brazil on the potential for a long-term research project at Vanderbilt, attended the Latin American Resources Forum with a Library of Congress representative to evaluate their Latin American database (Handbook of Latin American Studies), and attended a lecture and reception at the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies.
Susan
Widmer met with Professor Margaret Setje-Eilers and met separately with three
Economics students to discuss their research.
Gifts:
Bryan Kurowski received 60
gift items.
Paula
continued work on the Helguera Collection.
Projects:
Yvonne met
with Suellen Stringer-Hye and Henry Shipman to discuss the Baudelaire web exhibition.
Peter Brush replaced broken links and updated webpages for Resources for History, Resources for East Asian Studies, Resources for African American & Diaspora Studies, Central Library Site Index, and Central Library FAQ webpage (with assistance from Janet Thomason, Amy Stewart-Mailhiot, LaRentina Gray, Sue Erickson, John Haar, and Bill Hook).
Paula worked to process the books she purchased on her trip to the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Honduras. She was able to acquire more titles for the money than usual because of the significant savings per title. The average cost of the Dominican Republic books was $9.49 instead of the vendor's average cost of $35. The Guatemalan and Honduran books averaged $13.39 (including travel expenses) instead of the vendor's average cost of $35.
Dale
Manning and Mary Beth continued work on the English, Communication Studies,
Film Studies, and Theatre approval profiles.
Committee
and Other Activities:
Everyone
participated in the annual performance evaluation process.
Janice attended presentations on Camtasia, MOOs, and tablet PCs as part of the Teaching with Technology group. The group has concluded its work for the spring; it's uncertain whether it will reconvene in the summer.
Yvonne participated in an online telephone conference for an ARTstor demonstration with the Art and Art History Department.
Paula attended two meetings of the Communications Committee and, as part of her committee responsibilities, met with reference librarians to discuss Library Guide revisions and with David Carpenter and Martin Cerjan in connection with the Committee's survey.
Susan Widmer attended two meetings of the Heard Web Site Update Team and participated in four usability tests conducted by the team.
Mary Beth met with three vendor representatives (Blackwell, LexisNexis, ProQuest), as well as Don Jones and Mat Trotter to discuss the Faculty Staff Campaign messages. She also attended a meeting of the Electronic Resources Librarian Search Committee.
Bryan
conducted Mulberry training for Teri Bante, our new Government Information staff
member. He also attended a Committee on Collections meeting to discuss training
for the WorkFlows Java client.
Government Information/Media Services (Amy Stewart-Mailhiot)
We began the month welcoming our new assistant, Teri Bante. Teri came to us with over three years of experience at the Eskind Biomedical Library and has already demonstrated that she will be a real asset to our team. She spent the majority of the month learning about the Federal Depository collection, working with records, and familiarizing herself with her new environment. Amy continued working on updating records and organizing our UN collection. She also assisted Prof. Don Hancock in gathering more statistics for his upcoming book. Rachael Bankes worked on video reserves, a re-labeling project for some of our DVDs, and training Teri on the media operations of the department. We also celebrated the end of the semester with a pizza party for our student workers.
Amy met with Mary Beth Blalock
and LexisNexis representative, Scott Eller, to discuss new database products.
She also met with Flo Wilson to discuss GIS and attended the Blackwell webcast.
Teri met with Bryan Kurowski for Mulberry training and with Ava Wilson to go
over HR-related information.
Instruction (Melinda Brown)
Central librarians
presented 3 course-related sessions to 37 students, 2 instructors and one observer.
ENGL 115 - Women Poets in America (Bachmann), Melinda Brown, 14 students, the professor and an observer.
ITAL 201 - Italian Composition and Grammar (Barrett), Yvonne Boyer, 8 students.
SOC 115 - Controversies in the Practice of Medicine (Boehm), Melinda Brown, 15 students and the professor.
Additional
Instruction Activities:
Melinda met with Kate
Daniels and Amy Hodges Hamilton to discuss the First Year Writing Seminars and
the library sessions.
Reference (Sue Erickson)
Activities:
At the Apr.
6 reference meeting, we discussed how we have kept track (or not) of our off-the-desk
reference, including research consultations. Our conclusion was that we've been
inconsistent, and some of this activity has not been recorded at all. We agreed
that we would keep these statistics separately from the desk reference statistics,
and Sue created a form for those who want to use it. Each reference librarian
will report these statistics as part of his/her monthly activities report, and
Sue will compile them as part of the department activity report. She will also
keep a spreadsheet for office reference/research consultations so that these
statistics can easily be included in what we report to ARL.
We also discussed revising our current desk statistics sheet to include directional, reference, and search categories for email. We agreed that once the new form is in place, we will count assigning QuestionPoint questions to other libraries in the directional category for email.
The rest of the meeting was spent discussing instruction-related issues and activities.
Sue met with Hilary Rudsenske to discuss the proposed "zone" signage for various areas of the Central Library and with Kelly Lockaby to discuss 3rd floor signage needs resulting from the transfer of Oversize and Folio materials (new signs have been created--thanks, Jim!--and are in place). She also met with Robyn Harris to orient her to the department.
Several Central bibliographers attended the Reference Forum "meet and greet" on Apr. 20 for an informal discussion of reference. The Reference Forum plans to hold events monthly. Events will include topical discussions and database demonstrations. Other suggestions are welcome (email Sue).
Annual evaluation meetings
were conducted for all Reference staff.
Meetings, Conferences, Training
Janice Adlington: Blackboard Day; Digital Library Steering Committee meetings; Technology Support Coordinators meeting
Mary Beth Blalock: Committee on Collections meeting.
Yvonne Boyer: Reference Forum; Archiving the Web webcast; Divinity renovation brownbag.
Melinda Brown: Blackboard Day.
Peter Brush: Faculty Delivery Project Team meetings; Journal Citation Reports web training; Reference Forum, Archiving the Web webcast; Web Spiders meeting; Google Print webcast.
Paula Covington: Communications Committee meetings; Reference Forum; Blackboard Day.
Sue Erickson: GIS Project Team meeting; 18th Century Collections training; Blackwell eNotes webinar; Music Library director candidate presentation.
Bryan Kurowski: Technology Support Coordinators meeting.
Janet Thomason: Circulation and Access Committee meeting.
Daisy Whitten: Staff Development Committee meeting; Technology Support Coordinators meeting.
Susan Widmer: Heard Web Site Update Team meetings; University Staff Advisory Council meeting.
Robert Wright: Technology Support Coordinators meeting.