MONTHLY REPORT
JUNE
2007

Statistics

GLB Access (includes Divinity Library):
10,039 entrances at Library Lawn
4,771 entrances at Breezeway

Circulation:
5,445 charges at circulation desk (2% decrease from June 2006)
240 renewals at circulation desk (22% increase from June 2006)
176 charges at self-check
6,160 online renewals (5% decrease from June 2006)
99 laptop charges (12% increase from June 2006)
17 reserve charges
2 reserve renewals

5,613 items discharged (16% decrease from June 2006)
3,266 items received from other libraries
352 holds placed (5% decrease from June 2006)
267 searches for missing books (57% increase from June 06)
32 bills created (50% decrease from June 06)
10,517 books shelved (1% increase from June 2006)
543 bound periodicals shelved (9% decrease from June 2006)
732 unbound periodicals shelved (22% decrease from June 2006)
505 newspapers shelved (46% increase from June 2006)

188 periodical volumes sent to the bindery
167 periodicals volumes returned from the bindery and prepared for shelving

29.9 hours spent shifting

Reference:
120 questions at Reference desk
110 by e-mail
50 by telephone
12 email off-desk questions

1 research consultation


Government Information/Media Services:
206 items charged (30% decrease from June 06)

185 items discharged
102 service activities/reference questions
6 video reserves processed
4 reserve purchase requests submitted
36 items cataloged
404 depository items processed
2,491 non-depository items processed
104 items reshelved

Instruction:
2 sessions for 17 participants

Circulation (Janet Thomason)

Stacks Maintenance:
Matt McKee assigned shelf reading tasks for circulation and stacks maintenance student workers as well as staff. Janet, Thom Dawkins, Shahrul Ramli, Lin Yuan and Banks Lyons completed their initial assignments and were given additional areas to shelf read. Kelly Lockaby, who is shelf reading the periodicals along with Janie King, pulled a large number of books and periodicals to be transferred to the Annex. Matt, Janet, LaRentina Gray, and Ben Darling processed these materials. Stacks maintenance student workers Thom, Shahrul, and Scott Pierce performed regular stacks maintenance tasks as well as individual shifting projects on the seventh and eighth floors.

Reserves:
We removed May term reserves, and there were no reserve requests for the first summer session. Requests for the fall semester began to arrive. Those to be posted on OAK were processed and sent to Copyright Clearance.

Circulation:

Everyone in the department attended John's surprise retirement party in the Bandy Center on June 5. Prof. Richard Porter treated Janet, Johnnie Anthony, Daisy Whitten and LaR
entina to lunch before he traveled to Europe for the summer.

Janet worked with Yolanda Campbell on cleaning a backlog of "in transits". Yolanda worked on carrel renewals, completing the first phase (clearing all carrels that did not get renewed and setting up the carrel notebook so that staff can know which carrels are available for incoming graduate students). We hope to use the staff laptop to do most of the carrel renewals this year.

Interlibrary Loan's new document delivery service began handling faculty delivery requests beginning June 13. Circulation processed 20 faculty delivery requests prior to the changeover.

Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)

Electronic Resources:
The Electronic Resources Committee met on June 13. Discussion focused on the possibility of year-end money for some of the electronic resources on our "Want List". Since we were dealing with an unknown dollar amount, we identified first priority (Making of a Modern World) and second priority (Congressional Hearings Digital Collection: part B) as the top choices in the major expense category. We also identified three less expensive titles: Oxford Social Science Journal Archive, House & Senate Journals and Senate Executive Journal, and Papers of George Washington. Although we were not able to purchase either of the major expense titles, we were able to purchase the three other titles plus the Black Studies Center, a resource requested by faculty.

Collection Development Meeting:
Bibliographers met on June 29 to discuss ideas and possible ways to streamline the gift review process. Although it proved difficult to agree on general guidelines across subject areas, it was useful for us to discuss gift review issues again. We did get some ideas that will be helpful to bibliographers as they review the titles. Once I receive responses from bibliographers regarding the general guidelines I proposed in relation to their specific subject disciplines, Bryan Kurowski and I will review these comments and see if we can implement the guidelines for some of the subject areas. All agreed that we needed to reduce the gift backlog and to devote more time to reviewing books before fall classes begin.

Outreach:
Yvonne Boyer assisted a visiting scholar from the University of Georgia in the Bandy Center.

John Haar, Bill Hook, Eileen Crawford, Peter Brush, and Mary Beth met with Jewish Studies faculty to discuss resource needs and ways to provide assistance to faculty. As a starting point, we decided that one librarian should work directly with faculty and serve as a coordinator to make sure that requests are forwarded quickly to the appropriate subject bibliographers. Peter volunteered to serve as the Bibliographer for Jewish Studies.

Deborah Lilton worked diligently selecting titles for three upcoming fall courses: Black Multiculturalism; Black Women of the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean; and Jewish-American Literature.

Susan Widmer met twice with a professor in the German Department to discuss collection issues. She also consulted with an Econ 355 student.

Mary Beth met with Professor Bushra Hamad regarding Arabic titles he needs for his research. At this point we are utilizing ILL to get the books for him quickly while we search for available copies and vendors that can supply the titles within a reasonable time period.

Gifts:
Bryan met with Margie Smith at Richland Place to assess the size and scope of the second half of her husband's collection. After reviewing the collection, he spent two half-days boxing and transporting the collection (286 items) to the Library.

Yvonne and Kathy Smith (Special Collections) reviewed the Brussel gift book collection. Yvonne also spent time reviewing other gift titles.

Deborah began reviewing English, Film Studies, and Theatre gift titles.

The total number of gifts received during June was 312.

Projects:
The Felix Leakey Collection Finding Aid (materials relating to Baudelaire) is now complete and available on the W. T. Bandy web page.

Bryan and Mary Beth, along with other members of the ERMS Project Team, participated in two vendor webinars to get a better idea of the availability and quality of currently available management systems. The first session was given by Serials Solutions to introduce their 360 Resource Manager. The second session gave Innovative Interfaces Incorporated (III) an opportunity to show their Millennium management system.

Bryan attended a meeting of the Primo Usability Project Team and conducted three of the ten usability testing sessions. He and others involved with the development of Primo were honored at celebration held at the Black Cultural Center.

Susan completed selecting 3,234 Russian titles classed in PG1-4000 for transfer to the Annex.

Committee and Other Activities:

Yvonne met with Sue Davis to discuss preservation and digital projects. Mary Beth also met with Sue to discuss preservation and electronic resources. Sue, Charlotte Lew, Yuh-Fen Benda and Mary Beth met to discuss the binding of Chinese language materials.

Peter and Deborah assisted with Primo/AlphaSearch testing.

Sara Byrd and Larry Romans met with John and Mary Beth to discuss the possibility of purchasing a few titles in a new audio books format, Playaway, for the Leisure Reading Collection. As a result of the meeting, selected Playaway titles will be available this summer. It will be interesting to see how our users respond to this new format.

Deborah, Susan Widmer, and Bryan attended the ALA Annual Conference.

Government Information/Media Services (Amy Stewart-Mailhiot)

Larry Romans attended the ALA Annual Conference. He is chair of the Committee on Membership Meetings and a member of ALA Council. He was "inaugurated" at the annual ALA Inaugural Banquet as a one of two new members of the ALA Executive Board. He wore a tuxedo for the first time in 43 years. He now owns a tuxedo with no place to go!

Brian Boling assisted with updates to Circulation and Access Committee-managed pages concerning course reserves. He continued to learn more about copyright and related issues, such as Russian film piracy, while helping with searches for faculty-requested media. Brian also continued his active involvement with the Primo Testit team.

The entire department took part in evaluating new microform scanners. After site visits and trials of two machines, we selected the ScanPro1000. Special thanks to Brian for his thorough 'kicking of the tires' on the two machines.

Teri Bante worked with Chris Benda to finish the final draft of our AV/Microform equipment list. The list has been sent off to the web team for inclusion on the Heard Library page.

Teri and Amy joined Jean Wright for an Annex field trip. The trip included assessing the "Dewey Not on Acorn" section. Teri and Jean also completed an extensive barcoding project on the Catalog of Copyright Entries series 3. As a result of the visit, Teri was kept busy sending items off to other institutions.

Teri also trained two new student assistants on processing our non-depository microfiche. As always, she also spent considerable time preparing items for binding.

Amy and Larry met with Sue Davis to discuss digitization and electronic resources. They also attended the Library Strategy & Planning Committee meeting to discuss the Government Printing Office's draft Guidelines for Establishing Shared Regional Depository Libraries.

Amy attended two preconferences in addition to the ALA Annual conference. One was on international government information; the other was on fair use of video resources.

Instruction (Melinda Brown)

Central librarians presented a total of 2 course-related sessions to 15 students and 2 professors:

ECON 222 - Latin American Economics Development (Andrade), Susan Widmer and Larry Romans, 9 students and the professor
ECON 355 - Seminar on Research in Economic Development (Andrade), Susan Widmer & Larry Romans, 6 students and the professor

Additional instruction activities:
The 6th floor classroom in the GLB received a new look with the replacement of the chairs in that room. The new chairs will better accommodate the use of laptops by class attendees and library staff.

Deborah Lilton and Ramona Romero attended an ACRL pre-conference at ALA, "Writing and Using Objectives to Improve Library Instruction."

Melinda and Ramona continued to meet with the Vanderbilt Visions session planning group.

Reference (David Carpenter)

Sara Byrd's Term Position Extended:
We are very pleased that Sara Byrd's reference librarian term position could be extended to allow Sara to continue working with us through the coming academic year.

Training and Professional Development Activities:
Ramona Romero and Sara Byrd attended the ALA Annual Conference. Sara served as an intern for the ALA Committee on Membership Meetings.

Deborah Lilton continued observing librarians at the reference desk. She read through many of the closed AskUs questions to learn how colleagues responded to past reference questions received via our virtual reference service. Deborah also observed several librarians conduct an instruction session for the Master's in Economic Development students. Sara offered an overview of Theatre/Film Studies reference training for Deborah. In addition, Deborah attended several valuable workshops offered within the library.

Special Projects:
Sara assisted with Primo/AlphaSearch usability testing.

Ramona participated in meetings via conference calls on the ETANA project.

David helped to locate and set up a closed-circuit monitor and text magnifier in a library carrel for use by a visually-impaired graduate student.

Best Wishes to John Haar:
Reference staff--along with an impressively large number of other staff members from across the library system--attended a retirement party for John on June 27. This was in addition to an earlier surprise party hosted by Central Library staff for John and Ann Carey on June 5. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with John as our Library Director. We will miss him very much.

Meetings, Conferences, Training

Mary Beth Blalock; ERMS Project Team meeting.
Melinda Brown: Central Unit Heads meeting.
Peter Brush: Central Library Homepage Committee meeting; Reference and Instruction Forum;
Asia Brownbag Session by Marshall and Zora Breeding.
Sara Byrd:
Central Library Homepage Committee meeting; Reference Blogs meeting; "What's New in Podcasting" webcast; Asia Brownbag Session by Marshall and Zora Breeding.
David Carpenter: Digital Library Steering Committee meeting; Primo TestIt Group meetings; Central Unit Heads meeting; Reference and Instruction Forum; R
eference Blogs meeting; "What's New in Podcasting" webcast; "Designing Effective Asynchronous Learning" webcast; Asia Brownbag Session by Marshall and Zora Breeding.
Sue Erickson: Reference and Instruction Forum.
Bryan Kurowski: Primo Usability Testing Group meeting; ERMS Project Team meeting.
Deborah Lilton: "What's New in Podcasting" webcast; Eportfolio webcast.
Larry Romans: Central Library Homepage Committee meeting.
Ramona Romero: Primo TestIt Group meetings.
Amy Stewart-Mailhiot: Central Unit Heads meeting;
Central Library Homepage Committee meeting.
Janet Thomason: Circulation and Access Committee meeting; Central Unit Heads meeting.
Daisy Whitten: Technology Support Coordinators meeting.
Susan Widmer: Web Maintenance Team meetings.
Robert Wright: Technology Support Coordinators meeting.