Statistics
Access:
26,071
total entrances
16,141 undergraduates
6,791 graduate students
1,804 faculty/staff
619 alumni,faculty/staff/student family members
716 visitors with no VU affiliation (includes NALA card entrances, Fisk entrances,
etc)
Circulation:
8,901 charges/renewals at circulation desk
8,217 online renewals
274 laptop charges
417 reserves charges/renewals
11,064 books discharged
503 recalls/holds
12,737
books shelved
834 bound periodicals shelved
907 unbound periodicals shelved
364 newspapers shelved
Reference:
1,143 questions
882 (77%) at Reference desk
158 (14%) by e-mail
103 (9%) by telephone
Microform
Media Center:
421
charges
81
reference questions
General
Periodicals Room:
Renovation of the Periodicals Room was completed with the installation of carpeting.
Circulation (Janet Thomason)
Reserves:
Mounting new reserves has slowed. By the end of February we had mounted approximately
58 courses on Blackboard/OAK. LaRentina Gray boxed and returned items previously
on reserve that were not picked up. She also cleaned the fall semester database.
Among the other clean-up projects were several shelves of course syllabi. Karen
Season in the Office of Greek Life authorized us to dispose of this material
since it has not been updated or maintained since it was placed in the Reserve
Room in 1998.
Janet worked with Dale Poulter to set up a new "reserve desk" in Acorn for Microform Media. Dale tested this feature for a few days and put it in production on Feb. 21. This seemed the most workable solution to identifying videotapes and DVDs placed on reserve in Microform Media. The Microform Media reserve desk will show patrons materials that are on reserve by professor and by course. It will also identify these materials as reserve items in the public catalog.
Janet trained Rachel Bankes on how to create courses and create reserves.
Periodicals:
We sent 213 periodicals to the bindery. Rachel Gray is shifting in the Periodicals
Reading Room to fill holes left from cancelled periodicals and to relieve tight
spaces.
Stacks
Maintenance:
Students continued working on shifting in HV on the 5th level and ML-P, PN,
and PQ on the 7th level. We sent 41
trucks to the Annex.
Circulation:
Ben Darling, Janie
King, LaRentina and Jo Bilyeu worked on Annex transfers while working at the
Circulation Desk. Robert Wright spent the month catching up on an unusually large
amount of billing. Yolanda Campbell continued working on in-transit cleanup
and on a weeding project in leisure reading. She also lined up student workers
for the spring break. Ben agreed to serve as an additional backup for opening
during bad weather should regular opening staff not be able to arrive on time.
Janet continued working on withdrawing LP's from the collection and pulling trucks for Annex transfer. Circulation worked cooperatively with several groups, including the Pan-Hellenic Council and the Student Finance Committee, to loan laptops for special projects
Meetings:
Yolanda and Daisy attended CAG.
Janet's meetings included: Julie Loder (to familiarize Julie with circulation
procedures, particularly demand management); Rodger Coleman, Debra Stephens,
and Marie Swearingen (to discuss further training strategies for Circulation
Advisory Group members); performance evaluation training for supervisors; Central
Library signage group.
Janet also attended the UUGI conference, representing CAG, on Feb. 27-Mar. 1.
Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)
New
Staff:
Mid-February marked the arrival of Bryan Kurowski, who assumed the responsibilities
of the Library Associate position. Because of his academic library
experience and his work in Order Services and Cataloging, Bryan is quickly learning
the various aspects of the position. As our Technology Training and Technology
Support Coordinator, he is also beginning to work with these groups and will
assist us as we implement technological changes.
Electronic
Resources:
The Electronic Resources Committee met twice. The Committee approved a subscription
to AnthroSource and trials for Book Review Index, GLBT Life,
NewspaperDirect PressDisplay, and Latin American Newsstand. Eldis,
a free resource, was approved for the Articles and Databases page. Several resources
were not approved for subscriptions including Central and Eastern Europe
Online, Daily Life Online, and Routledge Reference Online.
After much discussion of the Sage Full-Text Subject Collections, we determined
that the costs of the collections of interest to Central were greater than our
current access costs. Although Central elected not to subscribe, information
about the collections was shared with CDAG members. We discussed three JSTOR--A&S
III, A&S IV, and A&S Complement--collections. Since many of the titles
included in these collections related to several libraries, we decided that
additional data was needed before ERC and CDAG could make a decision.
Collaborative
Collection Development:
Bibliographers met to discuss new collaborative collection development
possibilities for the Information Alliance in relation to our approval plan.
Several subject areas--linguistics, journalism, social work, rural sociology,
forensic anthropology, women studies/India--were mentioned as possibilities.
We also shared general concerns about the project, including the
lack of a shared library catalog, the time it takes to get a requested book
to the user, the length of ILL loan periods, and marketing the collaborative
efforts.
Sue Erickson continued to review sociology titles for the IA Serials Archive project.
Yvonne Boyer continued discussions with IA arts counterparts.
Special
Acquisition Trips:
Paula Covington spent three days in Guatemala purchasing books and ten days
in Cuba attending the Feria Internacional del Libro in Havana, an outlying regional
book fair, and digitizing colonial slave records in church archives as part
of an NEH-funded grant. She also participated in a ceremony in Matanzas by the
Archivo Historico to formalize the agreement to collaborate in an ongoing digitization
project.
Outreach:
Peter Brush met with Professor Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, the new head of African
American Studies, to discuss journal needs and current subscriptions. He also
introduced four History faculty candidates to the library and provided research
for the Toledo Blade newspaper for an article on Vietnamese-American mixed raced
children.
Paula revised her article on book buying trips and Cuba that first appeared in the Acorn Chronicle for an article in the Vanderbilt Magazine. She also submitted a brief report on issues and needs relating to the library and the Latin American collection for the visiting reviewer of the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies (as part of the Center's accreditation review).
Yvonne worked with Professor Pat Ward and Joseph Mella, Fine Arts Gallery Director, to prepare the Pascal Pia Exhibition in Special Collections and continued work on the design of the Pascal Pia web exhibition with Suellen Stringer-Hye and Henry Shipman. She also gave a library tour and Bandy Center orientation for two potential professors visiting from Paris. In addition to hosting a visit to the Bandy Center by Diane Josse, French Cultural Attachee, Yvonne participated in a seminar in the Bandy Center with distinguished Canadian visitors, including Professor Marc Angenot; Michel Pierssens, Director of the French Department at the University of Montreal and the co-founder of the journal, SubStance and Histoires Litteraires; and Josias Semujanga, author of six books on discourse theories as applied to the Rwandan genocide and literatures of the African lower great lakes region.
Susan Widmer gave a library tour for graduate candidates in German Studies.
Dale Manning met with an English graduate student, at her request, to discuss academic librarianship as a prospective career.
Projects:
Bryan is currently gathering information regarding our subscriptions and online
access to journals included in three JSTOR Arts & Sciences Collections.
This information will assist the ERC and CDAG in the decision-making process.
He is also providing documentation on the titles we are receiving via the World
Bank Print Archive subscription.
Janice Adlington continued to work on the draft pages for the Virtual Career Library web site.
Gifts:
Yvonne sold the Morris Wachs collection duplicates to book dealer Anthony Garnett.
Committee and Other Activities:
Bryan attended a Technology Training Coordinators meeting.
Peter attended "Marketing the Library" and the supervisor's training session.
Peter, Paula, and Mary Beth attended the Google/OCLC brown bag session.
Yvonne attended "Surrealism Still", Mary Ann Caws lecture and reception, which was followed by a visit to the Bandy Center and an open discussion session.
Dale continued to order films requested by faculty; he ordered twelve this month.
Susan attended a CAAG meeting.
Mary Beth met with Debbie Hodges, our new ProQuest representative. She also attended two PERC meetings and the training session for supervisors.
Government Information (Larry Romans)
Larry and Amy Stewart-Mailhiot conducted an instruction class for Nursing 249. The class focused on census and other statistical information, including health information collected by states. We worked with Susan Widmer and Sue Erickson on a Latin American Economic Development (Econ 222) class that we will give with Paula Covington.
Larry and Amy met with LITS staff (Dale Poulter, Jason Battles, and Suellen Stringer-Hye) and two Government Information student assistants, Peter Humke and Mark Kirkland, to discuss the progress on the Political Science database. Larry and Amy met with UT School of Information Science student Genny Carter to discuss a possible practicum.
Amy completed her initial reference training with the bibliographers. She attended the GIS Task Force meeting, the CAAG meeting, a Reference meeting, and the Google/OpenWorldCat brown bag. She also dealt with the Marcive monthly load cleanup--of the 576 records loaded, 283 required further examination. 44 of these required changes prior to reload.
Nancy worked on checking
in GPO and UN documents. She also worked on gathering UN items for binding.
Most of her time was spent on finding new homes for materials that have been
in the office for years with no Acorn records. She thanks everyone who has helped with this project. Nancy participated on the PERC committee and will
continue to work in the Microform Media Department.
Microform and Media Center (Peter Brush)
The short month of February was punctuated by spikes and lulls. The month started off rather slowly, but activity picked up quite a bit once midterms began to loom over students' heads. In addition to the usual in-house and reserve video usage (accounting for the bulk of activity), reserve slides also received their fair share of use this month, thanks to Professor Ljubica Popovich and her Art History 211 class.
We have begun to shift our LP collection out of the Media Center. We will be selling many of our LPs during the Central Library's book sale on Apr. 15, so be sure to come out if you want to pick something up for your music collection.
Finally, we have implemented changes to the course
reserve system in the MMC. MMC reserves will now be processed in
Acorn much like other library reserves, allowing patrons to track
materials that they may need to use.
Reference (David Carpenter)
Instruction Report (Melinda Brown, Instruction Coordinator):
We had eleven course-related instruction requests for February and provided sessions for 156 participants:
AHST 293 - African American Art (Kirschke), Yvonne Boyer
ANTH/AHST 245 - Art of Pre-Colombian America (Headrick), Sue Erickson and Yvonne Boyer
ANTH/AHST 257 - Art of MesoAmerica (Headrick), Yvonne Boyer and Sue Erickson
ENGL 272E - Literature of the English Reformation (Moore), Dale Manning.
HIST 200 - History Workshop (Eakin), Peter Brush
HIST 262 - Modern Mexico (Wright-Rios), Paula Covington
HIST 295 - U.S. & the Cold War (Schwartz), Peter Brush
HIST 297 – Junior Honors Seminar in History (Wcislo), Peter Brush
HUM 107 - Literature and the Interpretation of Culture (Weiss), Yvonne Boyer
HUM 108 - World Fiction: Short Stories (Smith), Melinda Brown
NUR 249 - Integration of Theoretical and Clinical Aspects of Nursing (Fogel),
Larry Romans and Amy Stewart-Mailhiot
WMST 302 - Gender and Pedagogy (Casper & Pingree), Melinda Brown
Melinda provided an additional library orientation session for students from the English Language Center.
Additional Instruction Related Activities:
Sue Erickson hosted Prof. Patricia Foxen's Crossing the Border: Anthropological Approaches to Migration class (ANTH 115.08) in the Electronic Classroom. Prof. Foxen led the students through an interactive website on refugee hearings entitled Well-Founded Fear .
Melinda provided research consultations for four students from the WMST 291 Senior Research Seminar class.
Sue Erickson revised the web guides for ANTH/AHST 245 and created a guide for ANTH/AHST 257. She updated the guide for the World Development Indicators database. She also sent an e-mail message to Anthropology and Sociology faculty promoting the integration of library resources in OAK and library instruction.
Janice offered an off-the-reference-desk consultation for a student.
Web Page Updates:
Sue Erickson updated the Data Archives & Related Resources Web page.
David Carpenter updated resources in three of the Reference Tools categories containing links to dictionaries and related resources:
Dictionaries and Thesauri: English Language
Dictionaries (Bilingual and Polyglot) ; and
Dictionaries (Other Specialized) .
He removed free dictionary resources that generate pop-up advertisements, while at the same time adding links to some of our newest online dictionaries. David acknowledges that the appearance of these Web pages needs to be refreshed, and will focus on that goal when he has the time to do so. He also updated the Reference Tools' Maps and Gazetteers Web page. Google Maps is one of the new resources added there, and is a very impressive and easy-to-use mapping tool that David highly recommends. Try it and see for yourself! Suggestions for additions to any of the Reference Tools Web pages are always welcome. There is a “mail-to” link at the bottom of each of the Reference Tools Web pages for comments or suggestions for additions.
Amy Stewart-Mailhiot's Reference Training Continues:
Amy met with Dale Manning for orientation to resources in English and communication studies; Sue Erickson for resources in anthropology and sociology; Janice Adlington for resources in psychology, philosophy, and classical studies; and Susan Widmer for resources in economics and German.
David arranged for Amy to begin observing reference colleagues at the reference desk during selected hours over the final week of February. She will continue to do so in March following spring break. Reference colleagues will allow Amy to observe how they respond to reference questions either in person or via Ask Us. Amy will be encouraged to field Ask Us questions or other reference questions that she feels comfortable answering. During this final phase of Amy's training, colleagues are encouraged to pass along tips, reference interview strategies and any other reference-related wisdom they want to offer.
Additional Activities, Meetings, Training Opportunities or Accomplishments:
At the request of John Haar, Melinda presented information about the new A&S writing component of the curriculum at a Science & Engineering Library staff meeting.
David and Janice attended the Brown bag session on the OCLC Members' Council meeting.
Sue Erickson created a web survey to ascertain GIS use in A&S. Sue Erickson and Melinda attended the ETS Information Literacy Assessment demo hosted by the Peabody Library.
With John Haar, Melinda met with the candidate for the Writing Center director's position, Amy Hodges Hamilton.
Sue Erickson and Janice Adlington attended the Open Access presentation by Malcolm Getz.
Janice attended the ARL Webcast on Library Marketing.
Sue, as a member of the search committee, met with a candidate for the Law Reference Librarian position and attended a meeting of the search committee. She also attended three February meetings devoted to library signage topics.
David, Melinda, Susan Widmer and Yvonne attended a welcoming lunch with Bryan Kurowski (hosted by Mary Beth Blalock) on Bryan's first day as a Central Library employee.
Committee or Other Regularly Scheduled Meetings Attended:
Central Reference librarians attended various other regular departmental, staff, and task force meetings:
Central Library Collection Development
Central Library Reference
Central Library Staff Forum
Central Library Unit Heads (David)
David and Melinda's Monthly Instruction Meeting
David's Monthly Meeting with John Haar
Electronic Resources Committee (David and Janice)
GIS Task Force (Sue Erickson)
Heard Web Task Force
Information Services Advisory Group ( David and Melinda)
Journal Club at Peabody Library (Janice)
MetaLib Implementation Group (Janice)
Technology Support Coordinators (Janice)