MONTHLY REPORT
AUGUST 2003

Statistics

Circulation:
7,116 charges and renewals
4,836 web renewals
$2,802 in fine charges transmitted to Student Accounts
$1,007 fine income deposited
6,765 books shelved
900 unbound periodicals shelved
1,106 bound periodicals shelved
549 newspapers shelved

Reference: 728 questions
506 (69%) at Reference desk
172 (24%) by e-mail
50 (7%) by telephone

Government Information: 39 reference questions

Microform Media Center: 14 directional questions, 65 reference questions

Web: 18,954 visitor sessions, 141,174 hits

General News

The campus face of the GLB received a "pressure washing" courtesy of the college of Arts and Science over the weekend of August 8. While the results were not quite a transforming as we might have wished, we appreciated the attention.

Patrons occasionally request blank diskettes at the Reference desk. Rather than set up a complicated accounting procedure to sell them, we will give them away upon request on a trial basis. If we find the cost too high, we will reconsider. We will do the same for blank CDs for our new scanner's CD burner.

Circulation (Janet Thomason)

August was a busy month as staff worked to complete projects and take last minute vacations. Yolanda Campbell , Daisy Whitten, and Robert Wright took some vacation time off. Circulation staff migrated to the Mulberry mail system during the month of August as well, hoping to make the transition a little smoother without the pressures of the academic year. August 5-7 saw three straight days of security problems. The first day, a group of young men tried to steal some reference books, and Robert and one of our student workers chased them. They dropped the books and kept going. The next two days, a lady taped mysterious packages to a carrel in the documents section and VUPD were called to investigate. The next day, a graduate student reported that someone had taken a photo of her in her carrel and left it in the carrel for her. We were hoping that the beginning of the month was not going to be a hint of what the rest of the month held in store for us but fortunately, the security problems calmed down after those episodes.

On Aug. 6, Janet met with Mary Beth Blalock and Peter Brush to discuss labels and holdings codes for Media Center materials. On Aug. 7, Janet met with Bill Hook to discuss the chairperson duties of CAG. Bill replaces Janet as chair of that group. Janet weeded the Leisure Reading collection. Dale Manning then went through those and designated ones to be withdrawn and ones to be sent to the stacks. 70 were transferred to the stacks and 80 were withdrawn from the collection. On Aug. 14 Janet gave a luncheon for the Circulation staff in the staff lounge. On Friday, 8/15 Sharon Chilton resigned her position in Reference/Collection Maintenance. Her last official day was 8/29/03. On 8/21, Janet attended a meeting on the CS Gold system. The last week of August was extremely hectic and stressful.

Classes started on 8/27. By that date, we are expected to be open the regular academic hours. On 8/25 Janet signed up to be a backup for 2 orientation tours but was not needed due to the low turnouts. On 8/26 Janet attended the Library's Customer Service workshop and on 8/28, Janet and Jo Bilyeu attended the job fair. Although a lot of effort was spent trying to hire CWSP students before the job fair, most of our current pool of workers were hired that day at the fair to work in Circulation, Reference/Periodicals, Reserve and Stack Maintenance. Only 1 new worker who is work-study was hired before the job fair. Several staff did a lot of juggling of their shifts and worked extra hours to keep the library open those first few days after classes started.

Reserve Room:
Whew!!!! Hectic is the word. Reserve started off like a whirlwind. Reserve was very short of student staff during the first week of classes. Manual Reserves haven't stopped coming in. As of today we have received approximately 74 lists. For ERes we have processed approximately 48 requests, and they are still coming in. So between hiring and training new students workers and working long hours it has been somewhat stressful.

Stacks Maintenance:
August in stacks maintenance was a little different this month. Ben, student worker, took 2 weeks off to get married and then was not able to return to work for us. Kelly, another student worker was out for one of those weeks as well and then somewhere in there, Sharon turned in her 2-week notice.

Let's throw in learning Mulberry and school starting and the job fair and hiring and training new students!!!!!!!!!!

In spite of all of the above...we got all of the books shelved, worked on annex transfers, unbound journals and newspapers, and other normal work duties.

Now, we have students hired, have started training and September is looking good.

Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)

Electronic Resources:
The Electronic Resources Committee met on August 13th and 27th. Two databases-Women and Social Movements in the U.S. and xreferplus--were approved for trials. Of the four databases under consideration for subscriptions, Reference Universe received support from several bibliographers as well as committee members. John is pursuing the possibility of shared funding with other divisional libraries. The Committee recognized the value of the Index to 19th Century American Art for researchers interested in this specific area but did not approve a subscription. Mary Beth will explore the availability and cost of a one-time purchase with perpetual access. Black Thought and Culture and North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries…, both new databases from Alexander Street Press, were not approved for subscriptions. The Committee also approved changing some of our SourceOECD titles from print to online access. Several free resources were discussed and approved for the Articles & Databases page including Gender Inn, Women in Politics, and Diotima: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World. The Commercial Closet: The World's Largest Collection of Gay Advertising was determined to be more appropriate for a subject page. Members of the ERC are Janice Adlington, Yvonne Boyer, David Carpenter, John Haar, and Mary Beth Blalock (chair). We meet every 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of the month and welcome your suggestions of titles you think will enhance our electronic resources.

Departmental Meeting:
Bibliographers met on August 20 to discuss the details of Central's materials budget for the year and the impact of the reduction in the monograph budget for subject areas as well as strategies for bridging the gap in funding. Other items of discussion included a cataloging issue involving the filing order of titles caused by subfield b, E-slips now being offered by Harrassowitz Approval Plan, and ideas for library sponsored programs for the academic community.

Outreach:
Janice Adlington met with Leslie Boyd, Peabody Library, about Psychology faculty interests and existing shared psychology collection responsibilities of Central and Peabody. Sue Erickson (Sociology, Anthropology) and Dale Manning (English) met with new faculty members to discuss the Library and their instructional and research needs. Paula Covington assisted a Spanish professor by locating and identifying Cuban and Puerto Rican materials from the 1920s. She also attended a session to introduce all new Center for Latin American Studies students to faculty who will be teaching courses this fall, met with Professor Eakin regarding a course they are team teaching with Professor Crispin, and prepared a syllabus for LAS 290 Interdisciplinary Research Methods in Latin American Studies.

Transfer Project:
A few bibliographers are still working to complete the selection of volumes to be transferred to the Annex. Paula completed the project for Spanish and Portuguese Literature, Latin American Studies and Latin American Anthropology.

Gifts:
Yvonne Boyer reviewed the Morris Wachs Book collection. Paula completed the transfer of the remainder of Professor Collier's collection to the Library. She also wrote a brief article for the Acorn Chronicle on Professor Collier and his collection (primarily tango music and Chilean history) and selected illustrations, photos from the collection.

Committee and Other Activities:
Peter Brush, Paula Covington, Susan Widmer, and Mary Beth Blalock attended the Broadcast Searching and Reference Linking presentation on August 19.
Yvonne Boyer attended the "Customer Service 101" workshop as well as the TV News Archive presentation and tour. During a trip to California, she toured the Cerritos Library.
Peter Brush attended a VU 2004 MLK Jr. Commemorative Series Committee meeting, and the "Customer Service 101" workshop.
In addition to attending the Job Fair (and hiring all work-study student assistants!), Julie Loder attended meetings of the Tech Support Coordinators, Tech Training Coordinators, and the Web Task Force.
Susan Widmer attended meetings of the Service Quality Improvement Team, and the "Customer Service 101" workshop.
Mary Beth Blalock attended the "Customer Service 101" workshop, meetings of the Electronic Resources Task Force, TV News Archive celebration, and a planning meeting for the fall meeting of the Nashville Library Club.

Government Information (Larry Romans)

Susan Timmons has taken over a number of office activities and has developed projects, such as cleaning up Acorn records, reducing duplicates, and binding. We really appreciate her many abilities and her initiative.

Gretchen Dodge has returned from leave just in time to deal with incoming students. She provides most training for both graduate and undergraduates.

We welcomed back four returning student assistants: Peter Humke, Mark Kirkland, Rachael Luthy, and Rob Taylor. We hired four new students: Taylor Brunson, Layne Burgett, Allie Higgins, and Ben Roosevelt. Three are graduate students who, after a training period, will provide public service during extended hours.

Larry Romans participated with Janice Adlington and Sue Erickson in providing three sessions of library instruction orientation on August 25. More than 75 freshmen attended the sessions. He has already scheduled a number of sessions in September.

Sue Erickson finished a project with Larry to identify basic governmental and international statistical sources that we receive. Sue also determined which were available online. We will prepare a handout for use by the reference staff.

Sue Erickson, Sue Widmer, and Larry are preparing a bibliographic instruction session for the Economic Development students. Sue Widmer is reworking the handout about how to use the International Financial Statistics database, which is now Internet-based rather than CD-ROM-based.

Susan Smith has been assisting in developing a retention plan for Ingram order receipts. She has also spearheaded a clean-up drive for the office.

Microform and Media Center (Peter Brush)

Patron activity at the Media Center was slow to moderate throughout August. The staff nonetheless had a very busy month. Carrie now devotes most of her time to maintaining the periodical collection. She has continued to work with ILL's Rachel Adams to refurbish and reorganize the old periodicals office. Carrie has also
switched her e-mail over to Mulberry, and has transferred the last of the Landmarks of Science microprint collection into archival quality boxes.

David Anderson hired and trained three new student workers. This was one more than expected, due to one worker's sudden departure after receiving an overseas study opportunity. The resolution of student workers' schedule conflicts has consumed an unusual amount of effort. David has also been busy with cataloging new videos from the Learning Resource Center, updating the Media Center's print and online title catalogs, processing increasing numbers of ILL requests for Media Center materials, and dealing with assorted minor projects and requests for information. New videos have been arriving from the Learning Resource Center and from the library's cataloging department at a record rate. Altogether 54 new videos were added to the collection.

Reference (David Carpenter)

Library Instruction (Melinda Brown):
The big event for August is always the return of students. This is the time we try our best to reach our incoming freshmen. This year we offered library tours and information sessions to anyone who wished to attend. We sent information to freshman advisors and had flyers in all incoming freshman and transfer student orientation packets. We had a total of 130 participants. The Central Library instruction staff who participated were: Janice Adlington, Yvonne Boyer, Melinda Brown, Peter Brush, David Carpenter, Paula Covington, Sue Erickson, Dale Manning, Larry Romans and Susan Widmer. Additional volunteers, whose contributions were much appreciated, were: Mary Beth Blalock, John Haar, Julie Loder, Michael Scott, Janet Thomason, Martha Young and Celia Walker.

Melinda Brown provided a library resource table at the Information Fair held during the Graduate Student orientation. Additionally Central bibliographers have been meeting with new graduate students and faculty in A&S to provide a personalized orientation for each department.

The students involved in the Franklin High School International Baccalaureate Program came for a library orientation on August 4th, which was conducted by Melinda Brown.

Janice presented two of the classroom library orientation sessions (on August 25th), along with Sue Erickson and Larry Romans. She also met with the Philosophy and Classics graduate students to introduce them to the library. Although Janice was not able to arrange a group orientation for Psychology, she took folders and invitations over to the department.

Sue Erickson rewrote last year's library orientation information session script for use this fall. She conducted the information sessions on August 25th, with Larry and Janice.

Sue also provided orientations for four new graduate students (08/26) and one new faculty member (08/28) in the Department of Sociology. She contacted the two other new Sociology faculty members; one new Anthropology faculty member; and two new Anthropology graduate students to schedule library orientations. Sue provided research consultations for two Sociology graduate students on 08/12 and 08/29.

Sharon Chilton Leaves Reference:
Sharon Chilton resigned from her position as Reference and Stacks Maintenance Assistant in August. Sharon had worked in Central Reference since May 27, 2003.

Other Activities, Meetings or Accomplishments:
Reference staff members who were not able to attend the Customer Service 101 training last fall (including Peter Brush and Melinda Brown) attended a second offering of this training in August.

Reference librarians joined their other library colleagues to attend the TV News Archive 35th Anniversary Celebration on August 5th.

Janice Adlington met with Leslie Boyd (Peabody Library) about faculty interests in Psychology and the collecting responsibilities of Central and Peabody.

Reference staff attended a presentation and demonstration of Broadcast Searching and Reference Linking products on August 19th provided by Marshall Breeding.

Janice Adlington did much of the work behind the re-design of the new version of the Heard Library Articles & Databases Web page.

Sue Erickson continued working in the Government Information Department in the afternoons--daily through 08/14 and all day on 08/15.

Sue created signs for the GLB's pressure washing days.

Melinda attended a Web Spiders presentation on streaming video presented by a representative from tappedinto.com.

Sue Erickson discovered and reported several problems with Acorn after the new interface went live on August 4th. She also reported to LITS several problems brought to her attention by Central Library staff members.

David Carpenter attended Mulberry e-mail training sessions and successfully migrated to the Mulberry software in August, so that he could staff the reference desk while his other reference colleagues became Mulberry proficient in September.

Melinda Brown worked with the ISAG Web-based Instructional Support sub-committee, with Marshall Breeding's help, to retool the "Find an Article" Web page. The revised Web page is now accessible from the main Heard page under "Research Assistance."

Reference staff (along with Yvonne Boyer, John Haar and other colleagues, spouses and friends) met at Bosco's in Hillsboro Village after work on August 25th to toast the successful completion of our Library Information Fair activities and the beginning of the new academic year.

Central Reference librarians attended various other regular departmental, staff, and task force meetings during July. These included meetings of the following groups: Central Library Reference, Central Library Bibliographers, Heard Web Group, Acorn and Virtual Catalog Task Force, Central Library Instruction, Electronic Resources Committee, ISAG Web-based Instructional Support Subcommittee, Technology Support Coordinators, Central Library Staff Forum and Central Library Unit Heads.