Statistics
GLB
Access (includes Divinity Library):
21,377 entrances at Library Lawn (19%
increase from Central turnstile entrances in Dec. 05)
8,101 entrances at Breezeway
Circulation:
7,185 charges at circulation desk (7%
decrease from Dec. 2005)
157
renewals at circulation desk
(45% decrease from Dec. 2005)
10,286 online renewals (12%
decrease from Dec. 2005)
288 laptop charges
(17% decrease
from Dec. 2005)
131 reserve charges (86% decrease
from Dec. 2005)
14,717 books discharged (<1% decrease from Dec. 2005)
3,080 books received from other libraries (4%
increase from Dec. 2005)
383 recalls (26% increase from Dec. 2005)
51 bills for non-returned items (22% decrease from Dec.
2005)
$2,733.51 in fines (minus credits) transferred to student accounts (17%increase
from Dec. 2005)
20,731 books shelved (32% increase from Dec. 2005)
588 bound periodicals shelved (50% increase from Dec.
2005)
613 unbound periodicals shelved (12% decrease from Dec.
2005)
342 newspapers shelved (8% increase
from Dec. 2005)
5 booktrucks sent to Annex
13.6 hours spent shifting
8 sets of serials sent to bindery
Reference:
317 questions at Reference
desk (74%)
80 by e-mail (19%)
32 by telephone (7%)
9 email off-desk questions
4 email or other search questions
1 off-desk phone question
Government
Information/Media Services:
234 items charged (18% decrease from Dec. 2005)
General
Personnel:
Larry Romans officially rejoined the library staff. With his return we
redistributed responsibility for management of the Government Information-Media
unit.
Larry returns as Head, Government Information Services, and as bibliographer for political science and leisure reading. He will focus on GI public services, including GI web pages, and management of our documents collection. He will also be primarily responsible for instruction in political science, and he will participate in instruction for communications studies and some of our First Year Writing Seminars to help us shoulder our growing instructional obligations.
Amy Stewart-Mailhiot will serve as Head, Media Services, with responsibility for managing our media collection and web pages. She will continue to serve as Government Information Services Librarian. Her focus will be GI technical services, and she will participate in instruction. She will be the office manager for the entire department.
Facilities:
December's enhancement to the Leisure Reading
lounge area was the installation of poster art. We thank Ann Ercelawn for donating
posters depicting the Nashville area.
Equipment:
Recently LITS replaced all the public workstations in the card catalog area
with Dell GX620s, which have no floppy disc drives. Some patrons, many of them
non-VU patrons, still need to print from floppy discs, however, and they have
to print at the card catalog area in order to pay at the VUPrint station. To
solve this problem, we acquired three external floppy disc drives to held them
at the circulation desk because they're small enough to fit into a pocket.
Circulation (Janet Thomason)
Circulation:
December is always a busy month with lots of books returned at the end of the
semester. This year statistics indicate that circulation of materials and returns
were somewhat lower than in previous years. It will be interesting to see if
the January statistics are higher.
We hired two new students, Hafizah Sinin and Xinghua Luo. Several of the graduate students hired at the Job Fair are not coming back for spring semester but are taking other positions on campus.
Central will install a self-check unit funded by Heard Library reassessment reserves. The unit will enable patrons to charge out books without staff assistance. Janet and John Haar met with 3M representatives about the unit. Accommodating the various placements of barcodes in our collection was once an obstacle to making a self-check unit feasible, but new technology should make it possible for the unit to read our barcodes.
Stacks
Maintenance:
Students
mostly sorted and shelved at the end of the semester, although Abhay Karandikar
continued his shifting project on the eighth floor. While most students finished
working for this semester by the second week of the month, special notice needs
to be given to Scott Pierce for working during the break. Working four
hours per day every day the library was open and shelving over 500 books each
day, Scott was indispensable. His work, along with Kelly Lockaby's sorting
and shelving, allowed Stacks Maintenance to stay caught up throughout the break.
The sorting area remained in wonderful condition during the period leading up
to the break as well. Matt McKee and Kelly worked diligently to keep
it caught up. Preservation came down over several days and selected items needing
book repair, which was also extremely helpful.
Periodicals:
We completed the following tasks in December:
53 replacements labels made for the Periodicals Reading Room.
247 bound periodicals returned from the Bindery and prepared for shelving.
19 boxes of microfilm received from Marking/Binding. The newspapers were pulled for recycling.
119 volumes of periodicals sent to the Bindery.
Reserves:
LITS assisted in running a report of scanned items to remove books from fall
reserve. LaRentina Gray used the hand-held scanner borrowed from Divinity.
During December we received only ten lists for print reserves and fifteen ereserve
requests. One of the student workers hired for Circulation, Hafizah, helped
LaRentina pull books for reserve, and LaRentina taught her how to scan and transfer
to OAK.
Collection
Development (Mary Beth Blalock)
Electronic
Resources:
The Electronic Resources Committee met on Dec.
13. The Committee approved a subscription to China Online Journals (current
and backfiles) and added Ethnic Newswatch Archive to our wish list for
purchase when funds are available. We also discussed Oxford Scholarship Online;
Mary Beth will explore the possibility of purchasing the Economics and Finance
module. We approved trials for Fuente Academica and EBook Library.
Committee members are Janice Adlington, Yvonne Boyer, David
Carpenter, Sue Erickson, John Haar, Susan Widmer and
Mary Beth Blalock (Chair). We welcome your suggestions and comments.
Personnel:
The
Search Committee for the Bibliographer/Reference Librarian for English, Film
Studies, and Theatre met on Dec. 8. The group discussed general procedures,
position qualifications, and a proposed timeline. Notebooks containing letters
of application and resumes for twenty candidates were distributed. The Committee
will meet again on Jan. 11 to discuss and rank the top candidates. Members are
Susan Bell, Melinda Brown, Mark Schoenfield (English faculty),
Susan Widmer, Lisa Shipman, and Mary Beth Blalock (Chair).
Outreach:
Yvonne met with a candidate for a position in
the History of Art Department.
Paula
Covington responded to a survey of the CRL/ARL Latin
Americanist Distributed Resources Project.
Grant Update:
Paula, after discussions with Mary Beth, planned
and determined budgets for funds for the National Resource Center to build our
Andean and Mesoamerican collections.
Gifts:
Bryan
Kurowski received 35 gifts.
Paula
worked on the Davis Colombian gift collection. She also sent a new exchange
list of available Latin American Studies materials (not added to our collection)
to all partners.
Projects:
Yvonne continued her work on the Les Fleurs
du Mal web exhibit.
Committee
and Other Activities:
Sara Byrd met with Mary Beth twice during the month to discuss purchases
for Film Studies and Theatre.
Mary
Beth and John met with our Sage representative to discuss a special ASERL offer
for Sage ejournals Mary Beth also met with Mary Ellen Wilson followed
by a meeting with Peter Brush and Sue Erickson regarding approval
funding of titles which might be funded by Anthropology or History. We identified
some changes in the profiles that we think will reduce the problems for Order
Services staff.
Government Information/Media Services (Amy Stewart-Mailhiot)
The staff took advantage of the downtime between semesters to focus on a number of cleanup projects.
Larry Romans devoted much of his time to collection development. He also worked with his students on both the Government Information and the Political Science database projects.
Teri Bante completed processing and organizing about two-thirds of a large State Department project and sent it to the bindery. Teri also conducted training and review sessions for graduate students on processing our United Nations and statistical microfiche collections.
As always, the holidays result in an increase in the number of titles ordered through Ingram. Larry and Teri worked together to handle these requests. Teri also drafted a letter to the Ingram representatives regarding the return policy and media items.
As we work to improve our policies and procedures in the department, the written procedures for many tasks have been rewritten and added to our staff blog. Teri drafted a new comprehensive instruction manual for her position.
Brian Boling was busy conducting a "State of the Microfilm" survey in the Media Center. His used his survey to determine which reels might need to be reboxed or relabeled. He also began the task of relabeling/reboxing those items.
Brian spent a considerable amount of time working on reserves. He removed all of the fall reserve videos from WorkFlows and also processed 59 video reserves for the spring semester. Requests came from faculty in the European Studies, Film Studies, Jewish Studies, Sociology, English, Psychology, French, and Philosophy departments.
Amy focused on developing a more comprehensive understanding of the responsibilities involved in running the Media Services Department. Of special interest was learning more about copyright restrictions and exemptions, public performance rights, and the availability of out of print videos.
Amy also worked on a Census
project that involved cataloging a number of older Current Population Reports
and having them bound.
Instruction (Melinda Brown)
There were
no course-related classes reported for December.
Paula finished up her semester long, for-credit course, LAS 290. Larry Romans,
Amy Stewart-Mailhiot and Amia Baker were guest presenters for two
different class sessions.
Including all types of instruction (course-based sessions, Paula's LAS course, open house tours, graduate student orientations, special groups such as International Baccalaureate high school students, etc.), Central librarians provided a total of 168 instruction sessions for 1,835 participants in the fall semester. Of these, 105 were course-based sessions presented for 1,526 students and 72 professors. Compared to fall 2005 our totals increased by 28 course-based sessions, 299 students, and 31 professors.
Melinda, with Flo Wilson and Patricia Armstrong, met with Frank Wcislo, Dean of Commons, to discuss the Committee on Undergraduate Information Literacy.
Reference (David Carpenter)
Classics/Philosophy/Psychology
Bibliographer/Reference Librarian Search Concluded:
On Dec. 7 all staff members of the Central Library Reference and Collection
Development departments participated in one or more of the interview sessions
with Aaron Bowen, a bibliographer/reference librarian candidate, as did other
Central Library colleagues. Many other Heard Library staff members attended
Mr. Bowen's presentation. A special thanks to all library colleagues who participated
in the interview-related activities with Mr. Bowen.
As noted in the Heard Library staff newsfeed, a candidate who interviewed in November, Ramona Romero, accepted an offer to become our newest reference and collection development colleague. Ramona will begin her new job in late February. With Ramona's hiring, David (chair), Peter Brush, Lisa Shipman, and Zora Breeding concluded their service as members of the search committee for this position.
Committee
Meetings and Other Activities:
David met with Lee
Ann Lannom (Peabody Library) to discuss how the Peabody Library and Central
Library could work together to seek funding to acquire a new edition of The
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics in electronic format--a new edition
of a publication that users of both libraries and other members of the Vanderbilt
community would find useful.
David and Sue Erickson met to plan and discuss the content for January training sessions focused on providing reference tips and training for circulation staff, who often receive reference questions during those hours when the Central Library reference desk is closed.
Sue Erickson attended a meeting of the Nashville Survey Research Taskforce on Dec. 20. At the meeting Dan Cornfield (Chair of the Department of Sociology) announced to the group that he had decided to make Sue a regular, rather than ex officio member of the taskforce because the more he thought about it, the more he realized the value of having a librarian actively involved in such an effort.
David arranged a tour of the Library Annex for Sara Byrd and Jacob Thornton.
Sue Erickson met with Jacob Thornton and Francisco Estrada-Belli (Department of Anthropology faculty member) to learn about the Department of Anthropology's use of GIS.
Meetings, Conferences, Training
Many staff members attended and enjoyed the Central Library holiday reception held in the Bandy Center.
Brian Boling: Circulation and Access Committee meeting.
Yvonne Boyer: Reference Forum.
Sara Byrd: Reference Forum; Leisure Reading Committee meetings; tour of Biomedical Library; Heard Library New Employee Welcome Session.
David Carpenter: Digital Library Steering Committee meetings; Reference Forum; Farewell party for Amia Baker; Primo GetIt! Committee meeting.
Paula Covington: Reference Forum.
Ben Darling: Leisure Reading Committee meeting.
Sue Erickson: Reference Forum; Primo teams meting.
Bryan Kurowski: Leisure Reading Committee meeting; Technology Support Coordinators meeting; Training Support Coordinators meeting; OCLC webinar on ILL enhancements to WorldCat Collection Analysis
Matt McKee: Faculty Delivery Project Team meeting.
Daisy Whitten: Circulation and Access Committee meeting; Staff Development Committee meeting; Technology Support Coordinators meeting.
Susan Widmer: University Staff Advisory Council meeting.
Robert Wright: Technology Support Coordinators meeting.