MONTHLY REPORT
JANUARY 2007

Statistics

GLB Access (includes Divinity Library):
22,675 entrances at Library Lawn (44% increase from Central turnstile entrances in Jan. 2006)
9,701 entrances at Breezeway

Circulation:
8,280 charges at circulation desk (no change from Jan. 2006)
232 renewals at circulation desk (29% decrease from Jan. 2006)
9,388 online renewals (4% increase from Jan. 2006)
186 laptop charges (46% decrease from Jan. 2006)
447 reserve charges (46% increase from Jan. 2006)
8,172 books discharged (11% increase from Jan. 2006)
3,526 items received from other libraries (10% decrease from Jan. 2006)
616 recalls (8% decrease from Jan. 2006)
1,464 overdue notices sent (10% increase from Jan. 2006)
288 rush requests processed (25% decrease from Jan. 2006)
39 bills for non-returned items (44% increase from Jan. 2006)
54 faculty delivery items (17% increase from Jan. 2006)
262 searches (50 found; 79 withdrawn; 3 declared lost)
12,015 books shelved (7% increase from Jan. 2006)
622 bound periodicals shelved (44% increase from Jan. 2006)
829 unbound periodicals shelved (5% decrease from Jan. 2006)
572 newspapers shelved (43% increase from Jan. 2006)
14 booktrucks sent to Annex
20.8 hours spent shifting
22 sets of serials sent to bindery

Reference:
443 questions at Reference desk (68%)
163 by e-mail (25%)
47 by telephone (7%)
10 email off-desk questions
9 email or other search questions
1 off-desk phone question
6 research consultations

Government Information/Media Services:
176 reference questions and service transactions (36% decrease from Jan. 2006)
322 items charged at GIMS desk (26% decrease from Jan. 2006)
532 DVDs charged at all locations
17 items used in-house
127 items discharged

Instruction:
21 sessions for 376 participants

General

Group Study Rooms:
We publicized the availability of our two group study rooms on the 4th and 6th floors. An online request form for the 6th floor room is now posted at several locations, including the Heard Library request forms page and the Central Library homepage. The 4th floor room can be reserved using a signup sheet posted at the door. A news item about the rooms ran on the Heard homepage ticker. We posted signs about the rooms at our service desks on the 4th floor, and bibliographers notified academic departments about the rooms' availability.

Circulation (Janet Thomason)

Circulation:
Robert Wright, Daisy Whitten, Yolanda Campbell, Ben Darling, LaRentina Gray, and Matt McKee attended reference training conducted by Sue Erickson and David Carpenter. The response to the training was very positive.

Daisy, LaRentina and Matt gave Joell Smith-Borne, a member of the Annex staff, a tour of Central Circulation, Reserves and stacks. On Jan. 18, Prof. Emeritus Richard Porter took Daisy, LaRentina, Johnnie Anthony, Robyn Harris, and Janet to lunch at the University Club. What a treat!

We weeded the Leisure Reading Collection for the first time in over a year. We transferred low-use CD audio books to GIMS and withdrew 13 audio book cassettes. We also transferred 85 books to the stacks and withdrew 73 books.

Janet and John met with a 3M representative to go over our specifications for the self-check kiosk to be installed near the circulation desk.

We hired and trained one new student, Lindsey Hammonds.

We had our new exit gate serviced because it was giving false alarms for iPODs and cell phones.

Stacks Maintenance:
Four students chose not to continue working this semester. We hired a new student worker, Bill Robertson, to share Periodicals duty with Scott Pierce. Both students will do periodicals tasks two days and stacks maintenance two days. Kelly Lockaby will continue doing periodicals on Thursdays. Erika Walston and Abhay Karandikar continued shifting where they left off last semester, on the seventh and eighth floors respectively. Patrick Boyer dedicated several shifts to stacks maintenance in the Arts and Arts Oversize sections. Jenny Crapser spent several hours placing barcodes on periodicals so that they could be processed and sent to the Annex.

Reserves:
Faculty continued to submit items, but the majority were additions to existing courses. The total for print reserves received and processed is 54 courses, and the total for ereserves requests is 71 courses.

Periodicals:

124 bound periodicals returned from bindery and prepared for shelving.
17 replacement labels made for the Periodical Reading Room.
48 boxes of microfilm received from Marking/Binding. Notations were made for the newspapers to be pulled for recycling.
161 volumes of periodicals sent to the bindery.

Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)

Electronic Resources:
The Electronic Resources Committee met on Jan. 10 and 24. We approved a subscription for the Bibliography of German Language and Literature Research (BDSL). We approved trials for International Trade by Commodity Statistics, International Strategic Analysis, CQ Supreme Court Collection, House and Senate Journals, Series I and Senate Executive Journals, Series I. We discussed several other items, including the availability of the Wiley Psychology backfile, EconLit Full-Text from EBSCO, the Oxford reference ebook sale and the trial databases blog created by Janice Adlington.

Personnel:
The Search Committee for the Bibliographer/Reference (English, Film Studies and Theatre) position met on Jan. 11 to discuss all the candidates and identify candidates for reference checks. The committee met again on Jan. 29 to review references and select the top candidates. Four candidates--Glenda Insua (Feb. 19), Maura Mandyck (Feb. 23), Sara Franks (Feb. 26), and Deborah Lilton (March 7)--will interview. The presentations will be held from 11:30 to 12:30 in the Electronic Classroom. Search Committee members are Susan Bell, Melinda Brown, Mark Schoenfield (English Dept.), Lisa Shipman, Susan Widmer and Mary Beth Blalock (Chair).

Bryan Kurowski conducted two interviews to replace the student assistants who did not return to work this semester

Departmental Meeting:
With the growth of the Film Studies Program, we are purchasing more films at the request of faculty, and use of the film collection has increased. Issues of classroom viewing and performance rights of films purchased by the library arise from time to time. January's Collection Development meeting focused on these issues, how we might educate our users about copyright guidelines for films, and the information we should make readily available on our web pages and Acorn records.

Outreach:
Peter Brush met with three professors who are candidates for a Chinese literature faculty position in the East Asian Studies Program.

Paula Covington and Sue Erickson provided an orientation for Pierre Colas, a new Anthropology faculty member. Paula also attended a meeting of the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies Steering Committee, a presentation by a candidate for Chair of Anthropology, and a meeting with the Center for LAIS director to review grant issues.

Susan Widmer met with a visiting German professor to give a tour and orientation to German resources.

Mary Beth met with Professor Bushra Hamad several times to discuss Arabic materials that should be purchased for the collection.

Training:
Bryan provided basic training on WebCat and WorkFlows searching for Sara Godchaux, Reference student assistant. He also gave Joell Smith-Borne a tour of Collection Development and the GLB.

Gifts:
Bryan, Peter and Susan met with Jean Wright at Richland Place to view the Richard L. Smith Collection. The collection includes 771 items on World War II, the Civil War and the history of trains.

Bryan also received the Ann Jennalle Cook Collection of 1,055 items on Shakespearean literature and criticism and other English literature. Included in the collection were over 100 playbills/programs from stage productions of Shakespeare's plays performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and other groups.

Paula completed the review of five boxes of the Davis gift collection.

Total gifts for January numbered 1,854 items.

Committee and Other Activities:
Peter attended meetings of the Heard Library Collection Development Staff Webpage Revision Committee and revised the webpage. He also attended ALA Midwinter in Seattle.

Mary Beth met with Eileen Crawford, Mary Ellen Wilson, Monica Sanchez and Ibtisam Latif about purchasing Arabic titles for the Central and Divinity Libraries.

Government Information/Media Services (Amy Stewart-Mailhiot)

Larry Romans worked on collection development, web pages, and the Leisure Reading Collection. He attended ALA Midwinter in Seattle and was elected to the ALA Executive Board. Amy also attended ALA Midwinter, where she served on the Government Documents Roundtable Legislation Committee.

Larry and Amy gave a bibliographic instruction session to PSCI115.

Teri Bante continued her work on bindery projects, focusing on Census Bureau and Department of State publications as well as our run of Catalog of Copyright Entries for music.

Teri also oversaw the start of a new inventory project for our Depository/Sudoc collection. She created instructions and a flow chart for the project that have been added to the blog. The goal of the project is to decrease the number of records in Acorn for items that we no longer own or never received, as well as to bring in records for items that we do own but were never cataloged. As part of this project, Teri cataloged 47 items in January; Amy cataloged 4.

With the start of the new semester, January was a heavy month for course reserves. Brian Boling processed 199 video reserve items. He also assisted faculty members with 25 requests for reserve materials to be added to the video collection. As these items (and other new purchases) arrived, he updated our media-related web pages accordingly.

Brian also began an examination of the videotape collection with an eye towards weeding those items which we own in DVD format. Other considerations for this project include focusing on items that appear to be of questionable origin, as we ramp up our attempts to be fully compliant with video copyright laws.

Amy met with Sara Byrd and Sue Erickson to discuss a project to improve access to newspapers in Central. She worked on updating the various Genre and Foreign Language video pages. She also met with Penny Pierce at the Learning Resource Center to discuss copyright issues surrounding the video collection. Further work in this area will be needed.

Instruction (Melinda Brown)

Central librarians presented a total of 17 course-related sessions to 327 students and 13 professors.

AHST 115 - Mirror, Mirror on the Wall (Bloom), Melinda Brown, 10 students and the professor.
AMST 115 - American Singer, American Song (Masullo), Melinda Brown, 8 students and the professor.
CMST 101 - Interpersonal Communication (Kenner), Sue Erickson, 22 students and the professor.
CMST 101 - Interpersonal Communication (Kenner) 2nd section, Sue Erickson, 21 students and the professor.
CMST 101 - Interpersonal Communication (Kenner) 3rd section, Sue Erickson, 20 students and the professor.
ECON 222 - Economic Development in Latin America (Andrade), Sue Widmer & Paula Covington, 38 students.
ECON 222 - Economic Development in Latin America (Andrade) 2nd section, Sue Widmer & Paula Covington, 14 students.
ECON 226 - Economic History of the United States (Atack), Sue Widmer & Amy Stewart-Mailhiot, 18 students.
ECON 226 - Economic History of the United States (Atack) 2nd section, Sue Widmer & Amy Stewart-Mailhiot, 15 students.
HIST 115 - Jesus & the Quran (Messier), Peter Brush, 10 students and the professor.
HIS 115 - Women in the Civil Rights Movement (Brimmer), Peter Brush, 12 students and the professor.
HUM 107 - Food & Its Representation in Film & Text (Kevra), Melinda Brown, 14 students and the professor.
HUM 115 - Americans in Paris (Ward), Melinda Brown, 13 students and the professor.
PSY 115 - Memory and the Mind (Zbrodoff), Melinda Brown, 10 students and the professor.
PSY 208 - Principles of Experimental Design (Palmeri), David Carpenter & Melinda Brown, 73 students, 2 TAs and the professor.
SOC 115 - The Sixties (Isaac), Sue Erickson, 15 students and the professor.
THTR 232 - Shakespeare in Theatre (T. Hallquist), Melinda Brown, 12 students and the professor.

Additional instruction activities:
David Carpenter conducted two orientation sessions for 22 MLAS graduate students (and special thanks from Melinda to David for doing these at the last minute).

Melinda presented at a Faculty Writing Workshop for First Year Writing Seminar instructors.

Reference (David Carpenter)

"Reference Tips and Training" for Circulation Supervisors and GIMS Staff:
David and Sue Erickson developed a one-hour training session intended to provide Circulation supervisors and other public services staff with a range of tips, advice, and other information to assist them in providing basic reference assistance to patrons at times that the reference desk is not staffed. David and Sue co-taught one of these training sessions, and David offered a second session. At Amy Stewart-Mailhiot's request, Government Information/Media Services staff members were also invited to attend the training sessions. David and Sue received very positive comments from attendees, and the sessions helped them better understand the range of questions received at other service desks in the library. Thanks to Janet Thomason for originally suggesting that we offer this training to her staff members.

Reference Training for Amy Stewart-Mailhiot:
As Amy will be participating in staffing the Central Reference desk beginning in early February, David met with her several times to provide training on reference resources, policies, and procedures. Amy will also "shadow" reference librarians on the reference desk to gain additional training in our reference services.

Library Tours and Research Consultations:
Sue met with a doctoral student in the Dept. of Religion, an undergraduate honors student in Sociology, and an undergraduate from an Interpersonal Communication course.

Paula's research consultations included meeting with two honors thesis students and with two Brazilian students here this semester on Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grants.

David provided a library tour for a Dept. of French and Italian faculty candidate.

Committee Meetings and Other Activities:
Sue met with Prof. Carole Kenner to talk about her assignment for three sections of Interpersonal Communication and to plan library sessions.

David, Sue and Mary Beth Blalock met to begin work on updating Central CD-ROM procedures. (Many of these CD-ROMs are considered reference titles.) Mary Beth is leading the revision project. David and Sue met separately to discuss lingering problems in loading particular CD-ROM based reference works.

Sue met three times with Dan Cornfield (Chair of the Department of Sociology) to draft the questionnaire for the 2007 Vanderbilt Engaging Nashville Survey.

David and Melinda Brown met to discuss how to best make class handouts available electronically for use at the reference desk in assisting students working on assignments.

Meetings, Conferences, Training

Many staff members attended the doughnuts and coffee session on Jan. 31.

Mary Beth Blalock; Committee on Collections meeting.
Melinda Brown: Committee on Undergraduate Information Literacy meeting; English bibliographer search committee meeting.
Sara Byrd: Reference and Instruction Forum; Reference and Instruction Forum Planning Group meeting.
David Carpenter: Digital Library Steering Committee meeting; Reference and Instruction Forum; Central Unit Heads meeting; Staff Development Committee training session; OCLC E-Serials Webinar; Web Search lecture.
Paula Covington: Communications Committee meeting; Staff Development Committee training session.
Ben Darling: Primo GetIt! Committee meetings; Leisure Reading Committee meeting.
Sue Erickson: Reference and Instruction Forum; Staff Development Committee training session; Web Search lecture.
Bryan Kurowski: Reference and Instruction Forum; Staff Development Committee training session.
Daisy Whitten: Staff Development Committee meetings; Technology Support Coordinators meeting.
Susan Widmer: University Staff Advisory Council meeting; Heard Library Web Maintenance Group meeting.
Robert Wright: Technology Support Coordinators meeting.