MONTHLY REPORT
FEBRUARY 2004

Statistics

Circulation:
9,279 charges and renewals
8,101 online renewals
10,644 discharges
9,0670 books shelved
1,018 bound periodicals shelved
1,071 unbound periodicals shelved
425 newspapers shelved

Reserves:
528 charges and renewals

Reference:
1,097 questions
857 (78%) at Reference desk
151 (14%) by e-mail
89 (8%) by telephone

Government Information: 115 reference questions

Microform Media Center: 14 directional questions, 89 reference questions

Circulation (Janet Thomason)

Circulation Services:
Janet attended a group mailbox meeting on 3/3 and a Unit Heads meeting as well. On 3/5, Daisy Whitten attended an Acorn Virtual Task Force Meeting. Group mail for Central Circulation was switched to Mulberry beginning at the end of January. For a few days, we were receiving the same messages in both accounts but by the 3rd of February, we were no longer receiving any web mail in the Pegasus account. A record 54 faculty delivery requests were received and processed this month. Materials requested were primarily going to the Music and Peabody libraries. On March 6, Central received four new laptops, bringing our total to nine laptops for circulation. The new laptops are a great addition and come in a nice backpack, making them easier to handle and carry around. They also have other added features such as built in wireless cards and a removable and interchangeable floppy or CD-ROM drive. This month, Central provided four laptops to the Interhall office and four to the Honor Council on two separate occasions to help those campus groups with their elections. We've also been approached about loaning laptops to the Student Government on 3/23 and 3/30.

On Feb. 11, John Haar and Peter Brush met with Janet to discuss loan periods for Microform-Media materials. Some of those loan periods were changed as a result of that meeting, and Janet submitted an Inform request to get those changes implemented. Cassettes, slides, CDs and CD-ROMs now circulate for two weeks with a seven day grace period. Videotapes and DVDs continue to circulate for seven days to faculty only but now there is a seven day grace period before fines begin to accrue. There used to be no grace period. Peter has updated all of the circulation policies on the web. On 3/12, Janet attended the strategic planning kickoff. She will be serving on the group charged with looking at services to undergraduates. So far, she has attended two meetings with this group. On 2/13, several staff attended the unveiling of the new staff web in the E-classroom. On 2/17/04, Daisy completed the deposit preparation report, which John had asked us to prepare for the auditors. It is a step-by-step document outlining activities performed in the preparation of a deposit. Janet and Daisy attended CAG on 2/19. Janet prepared the minutes for the meeting, which have been posted on the CAG web page. On 2/20, Janet attended a demo of a new microform reader/printer in the Microform-Media Center. Janet also attended a meeting of the CAG training subcommittee on 2/20 and 2/25. The week of 2/22 Robert Wright was on vacation. Janet, Mary Kelley Stapleton and Yolanda Campbell all worked different shifts that week to cover in his absence. Janet opened the library on Sunday 2/22 and closed on Monday night. Yolanda closed on Tuesday and Friday nights and Mary closed Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday as well as her usual Saturday evening shift. Several staff attended the short term disability information session on 2/26. At the request of Yvonne Boyer and Mary Beth Blalock, the item type oversize-f was changed to arts-over effective 3/3/04. This will hopefully be much clearer to our patrons.

Reserve:
The total number of electronic reserves processed in February was ten, which brings the total for the semester to 50 course lists. Some of these are additions to existing courses already on the web. Twelve manual reserve requests were submitted bringing that total to 85 course lists processed. A Reserves group mailbox was established to receive web reserve requests. Prior to the mailbox being established, all requests were going to LaRentina Gray's mailbox. If she was out on vacation or out sick, they were not handled, so at least now Janet has access to the box as well and can process e-reserve requests. LaRentina has spent the month doing database cleanup on materials from fall semester. Reserve staff continue to shelve the oversize material as well.

Stacks Maintenance:
February consisted of sorting and shelving and starting on a cleanup project for Stacks Maintenance. Each student worker has been assigned a section in the stacks and is responsible for keeping it straightened. This includes removing dangling bookends, books turned the wrong way, mini shifting projects and letting Jo Bilyeu know of other problems in their section. A new student was hired to work Monday, Wednesday and Friday in periodicals and reference. A student worker also resigned, so we're still not up to quota on hours. 8 trucks were sent to the annex. Work continues on the annex transfer project. The last lists from the bibliographers have been received, so their part is done and the rest is up to us to get the books pulled and transferred. Mary and Rachel Gray still continue to assist Jo on this project. David Manny has continued shifting on the 7th floor, however he has been out quite a few days due to illness and has not made the progress we would have hoped.

Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)

Electronic Resources:
The Electronic Resources Committee met on February 11th. The Committee approved trials of the New York Review of Books, Empire On-line, and PsycINFO from ISI as well as an upgrade of our current Oxford Reference Online subscription to the ORO Premium Collection. The license for the Tennessean (1999- ) changed from Gale to Newsbank. Unfortunately a large price increase accompanied the vendor change, and funding for the subscription is not available at this time. Janice Adlington is leading a reevaluation of SilverPlatter interfaces so we can select the most appropriate interface for our databases. Trials are currently active for the Internet versions.

Special Acquisitions:
Paula Covington and Yvonne Boyer prepared special acquisition proposals for the Library's 3,000,000th volume. Monuments Anciens De Mexique: Palenque et autres ruines de L'Ancienne Civilisation de Mexique (1866) was selected as the Library's 3,000,000th volume. The Wills family has agreed to purchase this volume for the library. Les Fleurs du Mal (original 1857 ed.) by Charles Baudelaire was selected as the 3,000,001st volume and will be an important addition to the W. T. Bandy Center. The Friends of the Library are purchasing this volume. (Watch for more details in the next issue of the Acorn Chronicle.) Paula Covington made a book-buying trip to Guatemala. This year her purchases focused on Guatemalan anthropology and archaeology as part of a commitment to national level collecting in this area. She also purchased titles in El Salvador and Honduras.

Outreach:
Peter Brush introduced several faculty candidates-African History, Mexican History, Jewish Studies History--to the Library during February.

Susan Widmer introduced two German faculty candidates to the resources and services of the Library.

Janice Adlington met with John Stuhr, a new faculty member in the Philosophy department to discuss library resources and his research interests.

Paula Covington met with Michael Buckland, Director of Marketing and Communications of the Nashville Symphony, about Brazilian collections they might use for an exhibition for their Brazilian festival in March. Paula and Kathy Smith (Special Collections) selected a number of Brazilian posters of interest before his visit. Paula also met with a Latin American history candidate to discuss library resources in this area.

Gifts:
Yvonne Boyer continued to work with the Morris Wachs collection; books are now being processed for our collection. She and Celia Walker met with Judy Orr at Vanderbilt Creative Services regarding the design of special bookplates for the collection.

Transfer Project:
This month marked the completion of the selection phase of the Transfer Project. During the past 22 months, bibliographers selected 134,866 volumes for transfer to the Annex and 1,760 for withdrawal for a total of 136,866; this exceeded our target by 22,601 volumes. We celebrated the completion of the project at Amerigo on February 20.

Committee and Other Activities:
Yvonne participated in conference calls with Information Alliance Arts counterparts at UTK and UK regarding collaborative projects. She also attended the Poe/Baudelaire Seminar, a seminar associated with the W. T. Bandy Center.

Julie Loder attended meetings of the Technology Support Coordinators and Training Coordinators and worked with a subcommittee to refine a basic skills checklist that is being designed to help Training Coordinators and staff members assess basic training needs. She also planned for Central's Book Sale that will be held on April 2.

Susan Widmer attended a CAAG meeting.

Several bibliographers attended the Strategic Planning Kickoff as well as the SFX training open session.

Government Information (Larry Romans)

On February 3 Gretchen Dodge gave Rose Mary Door's, the Reference Intern, an introductory tour of our area. As part of the orientation, Gretchen prepared sample reference questions for Rose Mary to answer as a way to become familiar with our most frequently consulted databases and web pages. Gretchen attended the Library Information Technology Support Coordinators meeting on February 10.

In other areas of activity, two offers of deselected documents were completed. Forest Service monographs were sent to the UT Ag/Vet Library, and the Energy Department conference series was accepted by the University of Memphis. Recent Census Bureau gifts were added to our holdings. Corrections were made in our catalog for class number changes announced by GPO during the last six months.

Susan Timmons has begun working with Interlibrary Loan to obtain numerous missing volumes to fill gaps in our State Department holdings needed for binding. She is happy to report that the United Nations binding project is nearly complete, thanks to the hard work of Ann Ercelawn and the great folks in Binding and Marking!

Larry Romans provided bibliographic instruction sessions for two Political Science courses and a Communications Studies course, and he helped Peter Brush with two History classes. Gretchen Dodge presented a bibliographic instruction session on February 24 in the Electronic Classroom to fourteen nurses from the NURS 249 class on how to find Census tract information for their community health assessment assignment.

Larry and Gretchen updated the NURS 249 handout, and Larry, Sue Widmer, Sue Erickson, Gretchen Dodge, and Susan Timmons created the ECON 222 handout. Gretchen, Sue, and student Mark Kirkland updated the World Development Indicators handout for the ECON 222 class. Larry also updated the POL 244 handout on The Legislative Process for Prof. Bruce Oppenheimer, but did not provide an instruction session.

Larry talked with the Lexis/Nexis editor about ways to improve the LexisNexis Serial Set product, and Larry and Sue Erickson had a conference call with the Readex editor about how to improve their version.

We have hired Nancy Dollinger as our LAIII, a position she held before Susan Timmons. Susan’s last day will be March 11 and Nancy’s first day will be March 15. We feel blessed to have someone of Nancy’s experience filling the job.

We will hate to see Susan Timmons leave. We have appreciated her friendliness, her initiative, and her talent. We wish her much good luck.

Microform and Media Center (Peter Brush)

The Media Center saw light to moderate patron traffic in February. Use of microfilms and reserve slides was unusually light. Video circulation and reference activity were about average. Use of the Computer Room increased a good bit over last year. Eighteen new videos were added to the collection.

Reference (David Carpenter)

Instruction Report (Melinda Brown):
In February, Central librarians presented ten course-related instruction sessions to 138 students. The courses included: World Drama (HUM 105W), Race and Politics in Modern America (HIS 295), History Workshop: 19th Century European History (HIS 200), Human Variation (ANTH 272), Comparative Issues in Migration to the Americas (CLT 294), The South: Popular Culture (AMST 295), Art of Pre-Columbian America (AHST/ANTH 245), Native North American Art (AHST/ANTH 255), and two additional sessions of the History Workshop (HIS 200).

In addition, Sue Erickson and Melinda Brown offered another session of Cut 'n' Paste Plagiarism for faculty and teaching assistants.

Janice Adlington assisted Larry Romans with more of his BI classes--two for political science, and one for communication studies. She also keyboarded for Sue for an Anthropology class.

Sue Erickson created a Web guide for ANTH/AHST 245: Art of Ancient Mesoamerica (Headrick). She also offered a research consultation for a student from ANTH/AHST 255 (2/25)

Librarians met often during the month in groups of two or three to plan for various instruction sessions.

Rose Mary Dorris Works on Atlas Collection Review:
After discussing various practicum projects with David Carpenter, Rose Mary Dorris chose to complete a collection evaluation of the Central Reference Atlas Collection as her major practicum project. In part, Rose Mary will review the text collection and later make recommendations for new additions to it, based on standard selection tools and other resources. She will also help create a collection scope description and collection policy for the Atlas Collection, as well as checking the physical condition of each atlas. We welcome Rose Mary's assistance. She has also joined us at the reference desk on Tuesday-Thursday afternoons to assist with questions and gain experience in providing reference service. (Rose Mary has joined Central Reference during spring semester 2004 for a University of Tennessee, Knoxville School of Library and Information Sciences practicum.)

Other Activities, Meetings, Training Opportunities or Accomplishments:
Melinda Brown attended the first meetings of the library's Print Conservation Group and the Blackboard CMS Faculty Sub-team (training for faculty in the conversion from Prometheus to Blackboard).

Most Reference staff members attended the SFX overview presentation on 02/25.

Paula Covington met individually with several graduate students in Spanish to discuss their dissertation topics. Paula also reports that February was a busy month for reference and research assistance in Latin American Studies and Spanish literature. Students are finishing master's theses and a number of faculty are editing books this month and have many last-minute needs, questions, etc.

Our reevaluation of the interface to the Silverplatter databases is underway, with trials to the Internet versions of selected databases. Janice Adlington is chairing this effort. Since the majority of the Silverplatter databases are now of primary interest to Central, the Central Library bibliographers will be testing the Web interfaces to them. Janice has also invited input from librarians at the Science and Engineering and Peabody libraries.

Melinda Brown and Sue Erickson participated in an online course, Preventing Plagiarism Toolbox Workshop. The course was offered asynchronously from February 10-28 through the University of Maryland University College.

Reference staff attended the kickoff for the library's Strategic Planning 2004 initiative on 02/12, and also the Staffweb Open House on 02/13.

Sue Erickson met with the Strategic Planning 2004 Services to Undergraduates Working Group on 02/19.

David Carpenter is a member of the Strategic Planning 2004 Digital Library Programs Working Group. This group met twice during last month, on February 17 and 24, as it began its work.

David Carpenter joined other Central Library staff members to see a demonstration of a new microform reader/scanner/printer device on 02/20.

Committee or Other Regularly Scheduled Meetings Attended:
Central Reference librarians attended various other regular departmental, staff, and task force meetings during September. These included meetings of the following groups: Central Library Reference, Central Library Bibliographers, Heard Web Group, Heard Staffweb Focus Group, Acorn and Virtual Catalog Task Force (and its Tabs Working Group), Information Services Advisory Group, Central Library Instruction, Electronic Resources Committee, ISAG Web-based Instructional Support Subcommittee, Technology Support Coordinators, Central Library Staff Forum, SFX Implementation Group and Central Library Unit Heads.