Circulation
Exams ended on May 2. Circulation made it through yet another hectic semester
end with no casualties! Janet attended the Sirsi User's Group meeting in Huntsville
(UUGI) on May 2-4. Mary, Jo, Daisy and LaRentina all took some vacation time
during the month of May. Yolanda had to serve what ultimately turned out to
be a few hours only on jury duty this month. On May 8, Janet conducted a workshop
on the General Library Building's current fire alarm system and its security
system for those staff in the GLB responsible for Central Library's evacuation.
Revised evacuation plans were handed out and a tour of the evacuation routes
and procedures to evacuate were discussed. On Thursday, May 9, Janet and Daisy
attended the CAG meeting. Daisy has been appointed as CAG's representative to
the iLink taskforce and will have weekly meetings with that group. In addition
she is chairing a subcommittee within CAG to review messages in iLink that patrons
receive when they try to renew books, check their record and do other transactions
to make sure these message are clear and concise. Janet has agreed to serve
on a Central Library signage committee and has met 3 times this month. In addition
to Janet, this group includes Sue Erickson as Chair, Jim Webb and Dale Manning.
In preparation for the circulation of the Dell laptops, all circulation staff
attended training on the laptops at Baker. On Thursday, May 30th, Anne came
over to Central to do a trial checkout demo. Procedures for checkout and checkin
have been written up by Janet. Peter has added the information about laptop
availability to the Central Library webpages and has updated the circulation
policies. Everything is in place to begin circulation on June 3. Several staff
took the Memorial Day holiday. Jo, Rachel, Robert and LaRentina staffed the
circulation desk that day and all other staff took the holiday.
Stack Maintenance
Stack Maintenance workers continued the battle of clearing out the sorting area.
Finally toward the end of May, it began to look like a sorting area once again.
If you were looking for a book, you didn't have to search through 10 carts of
books to find it.
Toward the end of May, work was resumed on the Annex Transfer Project. Janet met with LaRentina, Jo and Mary to discuss the project. 3 carts were sent to the Annex in the last week of May. LaRentina, Rachel and Janet will work on the project as time allows with Mary and Jo.
The next step will be to identify and begin additional summer projects. We have several in mind and now that the sorting area is cleared we can begin on those. Additional student help will need to be hired.
Reserves
May 2nd was the last day reserves was open. On May 3rd, LaRentina started dismantling
reserves. She began with the books making sure they were returned to the correct
library from which they were borrowed. Now she is working on deleting the item
records for the personal copies created during the Spring semester and returning
those items to the rightful owners. E-Reserves are already being received for
the fall. John Haar sent out an email to all A & S faculty suggesting that
they try E- Reserves this fall.
Electronic Resources
The Electronic Resources Committee met on May 8th and 22nd to discuss various
databases. Three databases-Oxford Reference Online, World Shakespeare
Bibliography Online, and JSTOR Language and Literature Collection-were
approved for purchase. Ebrary and ISI Proceedings (Social Sciences)
were discussed but will not be purchased at this time. Reference Universe
and new HarpWeek segments were placed "on hold" and may be
reconsidered after vendors have more time to enhance content and search capabilities.
This month also marked a change in ERC membership. After several years of excellent
service on the Committee, Peter Brush and Dale Manning completed their "terms"
at the May 8th meeting. New members, Janice Adlington and Yvonne Boyer, were
welcomed at the May 22nd meeting.
Transfer Project
All bibliographers continued to devote time and energy to the Transfer Project.
During May an additional 8,065 volumes (112 of these for withdrawal), were identified
bringing our total to 40,923.
Gifts
Paula Covington met with several faculty members who are retiring and donating
their collections to the Library. She also reviewed some of the titles in the
Pupo-Walker gift collection. Julie Loder documented a total of 394 new gifts
this month. Given the priority of ordering new materials before the end of the
fiscal year, gift titles were not sent to RS for processing.
Committee and Other Activities
David Carpenter, Peter Brush, and Mary Beth Blalock met on May 21st to discuss
procedures for ordering and processing Central's CDs. Mary Beth also met with
Larry Romans on May 20th to discuss needed changes in Government Information
CDs. The Procedures Committee will meet again on June 11.
Julie Loder attended a Training Coordinator's meeting and an Image Scanning class presented by Rick Stringer-Hye.
Mary Beth Blalock attended meetings of the Staff Development Coordinating Committee on May 7th and 28th. She also attended the GLB Evacuation/Security session presented by Janet Thomason, met with John Laraway, Blackwell Approval Plan representative, on May 29th, and worked with Jean Wright on the non-Acorn titles project.
The month began with congratulations and farewells. We had three senior student assistants graduate. Rey Alvarez, Matt Levay, and Michael Moreland are greatly missed. Julia Movtyakova was our capable student assistant this month. We have hired Kendra Murray, Lu Zhang, and Zhang Yong for the summer.
Gretchen Dodge sent out Patent offers to other libraries and has been at the annex sorting out the Official Gazettes for Patents and Trademarks to send to the libraries who have responded to her offer.
Nancy Dolinger processed incoming documents, gathered materials for binding, worked with Chris Benda cleaning up Education Sudoc records, and trained one student worker. She also attended the Central Library Evacuation meeting lead by Janet Thomason.
Larry updated many web pages, especially the census page, changed the structure
among the pages, and has learned how to use Dreamweaver to make URL corrections
simultaneously to all of his web pages. He added a search function to the government
information page with the help of Dale Poulter. George Anglin provided automatic
redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs, and Kay Pothisiri has provided
timely web reports. Thanks to all three. Marshall Breeding and Kay are working
on a record format so that the pages can be changed from html to a database.
Microfilm and Media Center
Patron business was slow as expected in the Media Center for most of May. This
freed staff time for end of semester duties, such as clearing the reserve shelves.
The staff also carried out the annual spring inventory of the Media Center's
video collection. All titles not checked out were present and accounted for.
May also saw the permanent transfer of current reserve periodicals (current issues of "Consumer Reports," "Panorama," "Playboy," and "Rolling Stone,") to the Media Center. So far there has been very little use of any of these titles.
Periodicals
Periodicals welcomes a new summer employee, Teara Robinson (niece of Yolanda
Campbell).
Periodicals sent 472 titles to bindery.
Carrie has temporarily joined the Preservation team. She will work one day a week in that department through the summer.
Information Alliance Presentation
David Carpenter gave a presentation on the development of an Information Alliance
Shared Expertise database at the May 13th meeting of the Information Alliance
at Cumberland Lake State Park in Kentucky. (This is a project proposed and approved
at the November 12, 2001 Information Alliance planning meeting.) David is a
member of an I.A. work group (chaired by Gayle Baker at UT-K) charged with designing
the content and coordinating the development of this new resource for the Vanderbilt,
University of Tennessee, Knoxville and University of Kentucky libraries.
The Information Alliance Shared Expertise database will allow librarians and other staff at each of the three IA institutions to quickly identify their counterparts, with contact information, at the other IA institutions. It will also support searches based on subject, language expertise and other data fields. Marshall Breeding agreed to set up the Shared Expertise database to support this initiative. He created a working prototype of the Shared Expertise database (using DB/TextWorks software) that David described at the IA meeting. Attendees at the May Information Alliance meeting offered suggestions for minor changes and/or enhancements to the IA Shared Expertise database.
Lipscomb University Presentation
In response to a request from Carolyn Wilson, Director of the Lipscomb University
Library, David Carpenter gave a presentation entitled "Virtual Reference
Experiences at Vanderbilt" on May 16th to a group of librarians attending
a Christian College Librarians conference there. David's presentation followed
Paul Gherman's presentation that explored the status and future of electronic
books. David and Paul joined Ms. Wilson and the other librarians for lunch following
the morning session. A brief article was featured on the Lipscomb University
Web page.
Ask a Librarian LIVE Virtual Reference Service Trial Completed
The Ask a Librarian LIVE virtual reference service trial ended on May 2nd. Cooperatively
staffed by 23 librarians from Central, Divinity, Science/Engineering, Education
and Management libraries, the virtual reference trial began on October 22nd
2001.
David Carpenter and Bill Hook, members of the Cooperative and Virtual Reference Services (CVRS) subcommittee of ISAG, presented some preliminary conclusions about the trial of this virtual reference service at a meeting of the larger ISAG group on May 1st for the group's consideration. David Carpenter gave a brief report to the Library Management Council on May 8th offering the recommendations of ISAG regarding further virtual reference service initiatives. He also provided summary statistics on the use of the Ask a Librarian LIVE service and gave examples of some of the questions received. Bill Hook and Marshall Breeding (fellow members of ISAG/CVRS) contributed comments about the virtual reference service at the same LMC meeting.
Other Activities
On May 1st, Janice Adlington, Peter Brush, and David Carpenter and Sue Erickson
attended a virtual QuestionPoint demo.
Janice Adlington, Melinda Brown, David Carpenter, and Sue Erickson attended the Building Evacuation Procedures presentation offered by Janet Thomason on May 8th.
Peter Brush, David Carpenter and Mary Beth Blalock met on May 22nd to continue their work to set up and document CD-ROM processing procedures for Central Library.
Melinda Brown attended the LOEX Conference: Integrating Information Literacy Into the College Experience.
Sue Erickson attended a scanning class conducted by Rick Stringer-Hye.
Melinda Brown taught a session for the English for Internationals class.
Sue Erickson corresponded with a faculty member regarding strategies for detecting plagiarism.
Sue Erickson and Dale Manning attended three Central Signage Committee meetings.
Several staff members attended a farewell party for Rich Murray. We are sad to see Rich leave, but wish him all the best at Duke.
Janice Adlington and Sue Erickson attended the Open House in Special Collections on May 30th.
New Offices: On May 14th, Sue Erickson moved to room 902 and Melinda Brown
moved to room 801.