MONTHLY REPORT
MARCH 2004

Statistics

Circulation:
11,045 charges and renewals
10,823 online renewals
227 laptop checkouts
7,429 discharges
3,775 items received from other libraries
630 recalls/holds
13,855 books shelved
610 bound periodicals shelved
1,149 unbound periodicals shelved
474 newspapers shelved

Reserves:
436 charges and renewals

Reference:
1,282 questions
1,021 (80%) at Reference desk
160 (13%) by e-mail
91 (7%) by telephone

Government Information: 154 reference questions

Microform Media Center: 21 directional questions, 106 reference questions

Web: 33,760 visitor sessions, 199,092 hits

Circulation (Janet Thomason)

Circulation:
All Circulation staff completed performance self evaluations and received performance evaluations during the month of March. Janet met several times with the Strategic Planning Committee looking at service to undergraduates. She also attended the Unit Heads meeting on 3/2, the Staff Forum on 3/4. She also attended a CAG subgroup meeting looking at Demand Management software on 3/24. Daisy Whitten attended an ACTF meeting on 3/4, and she and Robert attended a Tech Support meeting on 3/9. On 3/11, she attended the CAG meeting. Several laptops were loaned out for extended loans to various university student groups including the Student Finance Committee, Student Life, and two different times to the Student Government Association. Circulation activity was down about 8% from last year. Revenue from fines continue to decline as a result of increased loan periods and most patrons now having email notices. This month revenue from fines was down 45% as compared to March of the previous year. Transmittals for fine income to Student Accounts was down 37%, so it is apparent the changes initiated in our service policy have directly impacted our clientele in their pocket books.

Reserves:
For the month of March, reserves continued to trickle in. Items are also being added to current lists. The total of lists received is 92. There were no new requests for ERes. Total number of oversize books shelved was 150. LaRentina Gray is doing some spring cleaning of old reserve items. A lot of the old materials have been discarded.

Stack Maintenance:
David Manny completed the shift of the PR's on the 7th floor before leaving for his study abroad program in Japan.

With March came the students' Spring break and, as always, when the student workers have been out comes catch up time. This has become our top priority to have the sorting area cleared out in time for the end of the semester rush.

To hinder this achievement, two student workers quit and several were out for various reasons. This means that full time staff will be picking up the slack and helping to get things in order (broken down even further. Janet will help in sorting while Jo Bilyeu and Kelly Lockaby work on shelving). This is in addition to regular duties.

Twelve trucks were sent to the Annex for the Annex Transfer project. It is a goal of Jo's to have the "pulling" part of this project done by this time next year, if not all of it.

Jo has started helping Marking and Binding with the pattern recognition of bound monographs. This is to save that unit the time that it takes to go to the shelves and check out these titles and see how they are bound. Jo receives a list from Machelle and checks on these titles as she is out in the stacks doing her searches once a week.

Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)

Electronic Resources:
The Electronic Resource Committee met on March 10th; March 24 meeting was cancelled. Trials were approved for Bibliography of Asian Studies Online and History Compass. Three free resources-CARINDEX, Agricola, and Das Bonner Kant-Korpus were approved for the Articles & Databases page. The Commentary Magazine Archive was not approved for purchase because of the cost and limited projected use. The Committee will meet again on April 14. If you have resources you would like to recommend, please send a note to Mary Beth or any member of the Committee. Committee members are: Janice Adlington, Yvonne Boyer, David Carpenter, John Haar, Larry Romans, and Mary Beth Blalock.

Serial Cancellation Project:
Due to the rising cost of serial publications (journals, other serials, electronic resources) and the 4% increase in our materials budget for 2004/05 year, Central must cancel subscriptions effective with 2005 publications. Bibliographers met on March 17 to discuss the cancellation project and the process by which we will identify titles for cancellation in order to reduce our overall annual serial expenditure by approximately $150,000. Bibliographers are currently contacting department Library Liaisons, and they are working with faculty to create proposed cancellation lists. Faculty responses will be returned by the end of this semester. During the summer months, we will review proposed cancellation titles, request comments from other divisional libraries, work to resolve "objection" titles, and finalize the cancellation list. The final list must be submitted to Order Services no later than the end of August. Thanks to Julie Loder, who devoted a lot of time and effort compiling title and pricing information (all subjects) for the bibliographers.

Strategic Planning Committees:
Several Collection Development staff members serve on Strategic Planning Committees. Paula Covington (Graduate Services), Sue Erickson (Undergraduate Services), Julie Loder (Information Management) and Dale Manning (Faculty Services) participated in weekly meeting and "assignments". Dale arranged and conducted interviews with five faculty members from English and Communication Studies.

Gifts:
The Library is planning a reception honoring Frieda and Sol Shaviro for their gift of the Morris Wachs Book Collection (18th Century French books.) The reception will be April 20 from 2:00-4:00 p.m. Invitations have been sent to library staff members who worked with the Collection. Thanks to Yvonne Boyer, who was instrumental in securing this fine collection and her continued work in getting the books processed and in our collection.

Paula identified materials for the Latin American Exchange Program and worked with students who sorted and prepared the shipments from the exchange lists. She also worked on the database exchange project with FIU (part of LASER).

Outreach:
The W.T. Bandy Center welcomed a scholar from Washington State who spent a week doing research at the Center.

Peter Brush introduced two History faculty candidates to the library. Peter and Janet Thomason were acknowledged by Professor Michael Bess for their assistance while he was writing a recent publication, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technical Modernity in Modern France, 1960-2000. He said, "Two librarians at Vanderbilt University merit special mention. Joe Mount, and his successor Peter Brush, the history librarians at Central Library, generously allocated funds for the acquisition of several hundred essential new books on environmental topics; their assistance in ferreting out monographs and articles, and their general zeal in helping me find information for this project, made a significant impact on the shape of the final product. My thanks also to other library staff at Vanderbilt, particularly to Janet Thomason, for allowing me to renew a ridiculously large number of books from home, year after year."

Sue Erickson met with an Anthropology faculty candidate to discuss library resources and services.

Paula Covington selected and displayed Brazilian posters from Special Collection for Nashville Symphony Concerts at TPAC during the Brazilian festival. Paula also continued to work on the 3,000,000th volume and another rare book and wrote or edited two articles about the books for the Acorn Chronicle.

Library Book Sale:
Julie Loder led the planning and preparation for the Book Sale scheduled for April 2. Bibliographers made a special effort to review and make retention decisions in order to increase the number of titles available at the sale and reduce the backlog of gift books that would not be added to our collection. Numerous staff members volunteered to help during the sale. Watch for more details in our April report. [Editor's note: the book sale was a great success, netting over $4,000 for the library. More in the April report.]

Committee and Other Activities:
Everyone spent time completing the evaluation process--self-evaluations, supervisor evaluations, and evaluation discussions. Some bibliographers expressed a need to review and revise the process as well as the evaluation forms.

Yvonne Boyer attended the WESS Paris Conference on "Migrations in Society, Culture, and the Library". She served on the program and local arrangements committees and organized and moderated the "Migrations in Art" session. In addition to the conference, Yvonne attended a development meeting with University officers, library, and French department representatives regarding the W. T. Bandy Center and attended the Baudelaire/Poe seminar.

Susan Widmer attended the Euromonitor database demonstration as well as the database demonstration by Gale representatives. She also attended a CAAG meeting.

Julie Loder attended a Technology Support Coordinators meeting, presentation by Dale Poulter on proxy servers at the Web Spiders Group meeting, and the Central Staff Forum.

Dale Manning met with Gale representatives after the general demonstration to discuss the Arden Shakespeare resource, separating the Twayne's Authors and Scribner Writers products as distinctly searchable resources in the Literature Resource Center, and faculty interest in the 18th Century Collection.

Sue Erickson met with Gale representatives to discuss the Sociometrics Data Library and Virtual Reference Library. She also participated (along with Larry Romans) in a conference call with Diane Smith (LexisNexis) regarding their U.S. Serial Set product.

Paula Covington attended the Latin American Studies Southeast Region Librarians (LASER) conference in Miami. During the conference she helped plan a program for the SALALM conference and developed priority projects for LASER. The conference also gave her an opportunity to visit Cuban American and Haitian bookstores in the area and meet with several publishers.

March proved to be a popular meeting time for vendor representatives. Mary Beth met with Brian Aertker (Alexander Street Press), Marsha Brecker (BBC Audiobooks America), John Laraway (Blackwell), Elaine Roegge and Eduardo Moura (Gale), Scott Eller (LexisNexis) and Roy Burnett (ProQuest). She also met with a student who has proposed a Global Media Center for the new Student Center. The idea is to provide access to current issues of national and international newspapers in an informal, discussion environment. She is also exploring the possibility of faculty incorporating course assignments that will require use of these resources. (Using the current issues, of course, will lead students to the Library for further research).

Government Information (Larry Romans)

Peter Brush and Larry Romans provided a bibliographic instruction session for Erwin Hargrove's HIST295: Modern American Presidency. Susan Timmons and Gretchen Dodge worked with Sue Widmer to prepare the class handout for Economics 222 for using the World Development Indicators Database.

We said farewell to Susan Timmons on the 11th and welcomed back Nancy Dolinger on the 15th as our assistant. Susan left everything so well organized that Nancy had no trouble in taking up where she left off last summer. Her refresher training has expanded to include other areas beside document processing.

Gretchen attended the LITS Support Coordinators meeting.

Larry discussed possible cuts in the Political Science Periodicals and Serials budgets with Neal Tate, department chair, and George Graham, department library representative. He scheduled a meeting for April 1 to make preliminary recommendations.

On March 23, Larry and Nancy attended the census workshop held by Cyndi Taylor of the Census Information Center (CIC), which is now located in the Peabody library. The workshop was excellent.

He also talked with Rose Mary Dorris about being the Political Science Bibliographer and about major reference sources in Political Science. Gretchen had already discussed Government Information with Rose Mary.

Sue Erickson and Larry spent considerable time talking long-distance with the development teams of both the Readex and the Lexis/Nexis versions of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set about possible product improvements.

Larry participated in a conference call of the ACRL Ad Hoc Task Force on Advocacy, of which he is a member. He also wrote a recommendation letter for a colleague applying to library school.

We participated in the Staff Time Allocation Study at the beginning of the month.

Microform and Media Center (Peter Brush)

Patron business was slow to moderate for most of March at the Media Center. There were notable spikes in activity later in the month. Computer room use has increased significantly. We have had a lot of patrons bringing Interlibrary Loan microfilms to the Media Center to use, and have sent a number of microfilms out on ILL. About 20 new videos were added to the collection.

Reference (David Carpenter)

Instruction Report:
Librarians in Central Library taught the following instruction session in March:
Art History 293 - Senior Seminar: Gender & Sexuality in American Art / Sue Erickson and Melinda Brown
Economics 222 - Latin America Economic Development / Larry Romans and Sue Erickson
Economics 355 - Seminar in Research on Economic Development / Sue Erickson and Susan Widmer, with preparation help from Larry Romans
History 295 - The American Presidency 1960-2000 / Peter Brush and Larry Romans
Humanities 108w - World Fiction: Short Stories / Melinda Brown
Sociology 115W -- Social Construction of Hip Hop / Sue Erickson

Peter spoke to Prof. Carole Bucy's class, History 275: Recent America Since 1945, on the topic of the Vietnam War.

Melinda Brown provided a library tour and library orientation for a high school class from St. Cecilia Academy.

Sue Erickson offered six research consultations and seven data consultations during March. She also met with a Department of Anthropology faculty candidate on March 5th.

Peter provided an introduction to the Central Library for two Department of History faculty candidates.

TLA Presentation by Sue Erickson:
Sue Erickson attended the Tennessee Library Association meeting in Knoxville on March 18-19. Sue presented a session on Using American FactFinder to Learn About Your Community with Ellie Read, Sociology & Data Services Librarian at UTK. The session was sponsored by TLA-GODORT, and had a standing-room-only audience. While at TLA, Sue attended sessions on the Tennessee Newspaper Project and on a project conducted at UTK, in which they systematically reviewed database interfaces. Sue found the meeting also provided a nice opportunity for her and Ellie Read to share ideas about data services.

Other Activities, Meetings, Training Opportunities or Accomplishments:
David Carpenter devoted considerable time in March to preparing annual evaluations for the four library staff members for whom he is the primary supervisor, and writing reference/instruction evaluations for the four bibliographers for whom he is not the primary supervisor--for a total of eight evaluations. As a part of this process, David met with each of these eight staff members to discuss their self-evaluations and his annual evaluation of them during March. He also completed and submitted a mid-term practicum evaluation for Rose Mary Dorris. Without exception, all the library staff members supporting Central Reference worked very hard during the past year and made substantial contributions to the library and the university through their work in reference and instruction related activities.

David Carpenter, John Haar and Deborah Sommer met on March 4th to discuss how to improve reference collection resources (including online databases) for students seeking career information resources. This is a concern for all Heard divisions to some extent. It is also important to consider the resources provided by the Vanderbilt Career Center. With the demands of the Strategic Planning initiative and other current time commitments, it seemed best to delay further discussion on improving career information resources until May.

Janice Adlington and Sue Erickson attended a Census Information Workshop with information about the Vanderbilt Census Information Center on March 23.

Sue Erickson created a new lobby PowerPoint slideshow to announce the Central Library book sale and the new floor plans. She also coordinated the installation of new floor plans on levels four and six.

Reference staff attended database demonstrations presented by Euromonitor and Gale Group representatives.

In reference database related activities, Sue Erickson met with Gale Group representatives to talk specifically about the Sociometrics Data Library and Gale's electronic reference collection on 03/31; she announced the iPOLL (Roper Center for Public Opinion Research) database to the Sociology faculty and graduate students; and on March 9th she participated in a conference call, along with Larry Romans and Diane Smith, to talk with LexisNexis regarding the company's serial set product.

Janice Adlington, Peter Brush, Melinda Brown and Sue Erickson attended a Web Spiders meeting on March 26th at which Dale Poulter described proxy servers.

Sue Erickson prepared an "Acorn Help" project for Rose Mary Dorris and met with her about it. This project supported the work of ISAG's Acorn and Virtual Catalog Development subcommittee toward improving the online Help with Acorn information. Sue later remarked that Rose Mary "did a fantastic job, catching many little (but important) errors we all missed."

At an LMC meeting in March, Melinda Brown and Jody Combs co-presented information about the library's involvement in the Blackboard training effort.

Sue Erickson continued work on ACRL Dues Task Force, ACRL Membership Committee, and Sociology Librarians Discussion Group in preparation for the Annual ALA meeting.

Many reference staff members attended the farewell reception for Susan Timmons on March 11th.

Sue Erickson helped to monitor the Ask Us service while David was on vacation, to ensure that referred questions received responses in a timely manner and that the QuestionPoint software was functioning as it should.

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.