MONTHLY REPORT
MAY
2007

Statistics

GLB Access (includes Divinity Library):
12,274 entrances at Library Lawn (25% increase from Central turnstile entrances in May 2006)
5,666 entrances at Breezeway

Circulation:
5,912 charges at circulation desk (14% decrease from May 2006)
209 renewals at circulation desk (19% increase from May 2006)
127 charges at self-check
9,040 online renewals (4% decrease from May 2006)
135 laptop charges (16% increase from May 2006)
99 reserve charges (14% decrease from May 2006)
4 reserve renewals (75% decrease from May 2006)

13,811 items discharged (9% decrease from May 2006)
4,017 items received from other libraries (2% decrease from May 2006)
353 holds placed (22% decrease from May 2006)
20,244 books shelved (24% increase from May 2006)
614
bound periodicals shelved (4% decrease from May 2006)
934 unbound periodicals shelved (14% increase from May 2006)
440 newspapers shelved (61% increase from May 2006)

Reference:
178 questions at Reference desk
92 by e-mail
47 by telephone
7 email off-desk questions
2 research consultations


Government Information/Media Services:
188 items charged
177 items discharged

102 service activities/reference questions
46 video reserves processed
300+ video reserves removed
139 depository items processed
7 non-depository items processed
150 items reshelved

Instruction:
3 sessions for 60 participants

General

Self-Check:
3M installed our new self-check machine adjacent to the Circulation desk. We are developing signage and a promotional campaign to encourage users to try it.

Circulation (Janet Thomason)

Circulation:
We hired two new students and trained them to assist in staffing the circulation desk during the summer. Janet met with Deborah Lilton, our new English bibliographer, to give a brief tour of Circulation and discuss our responsibilities. Janet also participated in planning for the surprise retirement party that Central held for John Haar on June 5. We held a Circulation staff meeting on May 22, and Debra Stephens from Science and Engineering staffed the circulation desk. All staff were given their summer shelf reading assignments.

Stacks Maintenance:
Down to only a few student workers at the beginning of the month, Matt McKee and Kelly Lockaby spent most of their time sorting books. Everyone else pitched in with shelving, including Janet, Daisy Whitten, LaRentina Gray, and the circulation desk student workers. Kelly also performed periodicals duties for most of the month. By the middle of the month the stacks student work force was supplemented by the return of Vanesa Miseres, who worked in periodicals last summer, and the hiring of two new student employees, Shahrul Ramli and Thom Dawkins. At the end of the month Vanesa and Shahrul were doing periodicals four days a week, with Kelly covering Fridays. Annex transfers increased, with Kelly pulling and barcoding books and periodicals, and Ben Darling, LaRentina, Janet, and Matt processing them.

Reserves:
LaRentina had two courses for Maymester reserves. One was posted to OAK, and the other was print reserves. We received a few reserve lists for the fall semester.

Periodicals:

243 volumes of periodicals sent to the bindery
23 boxes of microfilm received from Marking/Binding
200 bound periodicals returned from the bindery and prepared for shelving.
21 replacement labels made for the Periodical Reading Room. Although the major task of replacing labels was completed, new labels will be made to make corrections as needed.
2 boxes of duplicate issues sent to Absolute.

Janie King handled both stripping and shelving for most of the month while Kelly and the student worker helped Matt shelve books. Shelf reading commenced in the Periodical Reading Room for titles beginning with R - Z.

Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)

Personnel:
Deborah Lilton, bibliographer (English, Film Studies, and Theatre) and reference librarian, joined the staff on May 1. During the month she worked closely with Mary Beth, David Carpenter, Bryan Kurowski, and bibliographers to learn more about our collections, services, and procedures as well as the departments she serves. She, along with Mary Beth, visited Order Services and Cataloging to meet her subject liaisons and learn more about the workflow in these units.

Electronic Resources:
The Electronic Resources Committee met on May 9. Several members could not attend the Apr. 25 meeting, so this meeting began with a quick review of decisions reached at the earlier meeting. Discussion then turned to new agenda items. We approved a subscription for Communication & Mass Media Complete, but decided not to subscribe to China Data Service. Members of the ERC are Janice Adlington, Yvonne Boyer, David Carpenter, Sue Erickson, Susan Widmer, John Haar, Bill Hook, and Mary Beth Blalock. The committee meets twice a month on the second and fourth Wednesdays. We welcome your suggestions of electronic resources you think we should add to our collection.

Trip to Peru:
Paula Covington traveled to Peru with archaeologist Tiffiny Tung to purchase books for the library. The trip was funded by the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies as part of the National Resource Center grant and was aimed at developing the Andean Studies program, especially in the areas of archeology, anthropology, and colonial history. The trip included visits in Lima, Arequipa and Cuzco to export vendors, institutes, university presses, bookstores, antiquarian booksellers, and retired faculty selling collections.

Outreach:
Paula consulted with a Spanish Ph.D. student working on dissertation research.

Yvonne assisted Professor Philip Clark, a Bandy Center visiting scholar from the University of Manitoba. She also provided a bibliographic instruction class for Professor Vivian Fryd's class, Art History: Issues in Contemporary Art, and a tour of the Library for Virginia Allison, Watkins College of Art & Design.

Mary Beth met with Professor Bushra Hamad to discuss the acquisition of Arabic materials. She also participated in a meeting with John Haar, Bill Hook, and Eileen Crawford to discuss library resources and services for Jewish Studies faculty. A second meeting was scheduled for June.

Training:
Bryan provided training for Deborah on several essential tools/software including Mulberry, WorkFlows, Blackwell's Collection Manager and Corporate Time.

Gifts:
Bryan received 817 gift items including collections from William Longwell, David Viera, and Carol Swain as well as the Communication Studies department. Susan Widmer finished reviewing and selecting items in the Jonsson gift collection. Bryan met with John and Mary Beth to discuss "fuzzy" areas in our gift acceptance procedures.

Projects:
The Bandy Center's Rachel Nisselson, French graduate student, continued working on the Felix Leakey files.

Committee and Other Activities:

All bibliographers were busy this month selecting and submitting orders prior to the year-end order deadline.

Sara Byrd met several times with Larry Romans about the Leisure Reading Collection. She also met with the Recorded Books representative.

Sue Erickson met with Mary Beth to discuss the possible impact of Peabody's Blackwell education approval profile on anthropology and sociology. Work will continue to identify subject and non-subject parameters in the profile that might be problematic.

Mary Beth met with Yuh-Fen Benda to discuss issues relating to Chinese language resources.

Government Information/Media Services (Amy Stewart-Mailhiot)

Larry Romans focused on collection development. His Leisure Reading Collection activities with Sara Byrd included negotiating for money from the English funds for (1) fiction that will remain in the collection after taken off the LRC and (2) books on CD. He also talked to Mary Beth Blalock and John Haar for authorization to purchase $1,500 of playaways, which are audio books about the size of an iPod.

Amy and Larry took part in an online ACRL-sponsored web design course. They also continued to meet with the Central web revision team.

Teri Bante continued her work with the binding and catalog clean up of both our Sudoc and United Nations collections. Specific areas of focus this month were the County Business Patterns and the Official Records of the Economic & Social Council. She also completed a backlog project of administrative and technical notes supplements that involved locating and correcting call numbers for a large number of Sudoc publications.

We hired two new students to work for us this summer, and Teri has been busy training them and working on scheduling.

Brian Boling continued working on our copyright compliance project. We removed 31 non-compliant videotapes from the collection. For each of these, we already owned or have purchased a legal replacement copy. He also investigated the purchase of new multi-region DVD players for the unit and spent time 'test driving' a new microfilm scanner.

Instruction (Melinda Brown)

Central librarians presented a total of two course-related sessions to 23 students and 2 instructors.

ECON 224 - Russia in Transition (Supyan), Larry Romans & Amy Stewart-Mailhiot, 18 students and the professor.
HART 288 - Issues in Contemporary Art (Fryd), Yvonne Boyer, 5 students and the professor.

Additional instruction activities:

Larry Romans and Amy Stewart-Mailhiot gave a presentation sponsored by TLA/TSLA, "Government Information for Library Staff", to 35 Middle Tennessee library staffers.

Melinda presented on library resources and the First Year Writing Seminar library program at the Faculty Writing Workshop for First Year Writing Seminar instructors. She facilitated the group planning the Vanderbilt Visions session that will be presented to all incoming first-year students. Ramona Romero, Lee Ann Lannom and Jen Holt, Director of the Writing Studio, are other members of the planning group. She also met with Eli Moody and Patricia Armstrong, Center for Teaching, to discuss the video that will be produced for this session.

Sara Byrd, Robyn Harris and Melinda met to discuss plans to update the Central Library virtual tour.

Reference (David Carpenter)

Welcome to Deborah Lilton!
We were happy to have Deborah Lilton join us as a new colleague on May 1. While Deborah focused on collection development duties and training in May, she also received introductions to many of our reference resources, as described below.

Training and Professional Development Activities:
David met with Deborah during the first week of May to begin familiarizing her with the reference collection as well as our reference philosophy, policies, and common practices and procedures. David set Deborah up with a QuestionPoint account and provided an introduction to that software and our AskUs! reference service. Later in May each Central Library bibliographer/reference librarian met with Deborah individually to provide an overview of the most important reference resources (paper and online) in his or her subject areas of responsibility.

Sue Erickson attended the IASSIST conference in Montreal May 14-18. Sue reports: "In addition to attending numerous sessions, I took two excellent hands-on workshops. The first was on the American Community Survey, which will replace the long form of the Census. While I am familiar with creating basic tables in the ACS through the American Factfinder website, this workshop provided useful information about the overall plan for the ACS and covered some of the methodological issues. The second workshop provided an overview of the statistical packages SPSS, Stata, and SAS. These workshops provided practical training that is immediately relevant in my duties as Data Services Librarian."

Special Projects:
Sara Byrd worked on various special projects, participating in the following endeavors and/or groups: Central Library Tour web page project; Primo Usability Testing group; Central Web Revision group; checking URLs for networked CD-ROM databases; researching information for Cenref blog; meetings with Larry Romans about Leisure Reading; and much work on Leisure Reading collection development.

Meetings, Conferences, Training

Most staff members attended the library's spring staff outing.

Mary Beth Blalock; Alexander Street Press electronic resources demonstration.
Brian Boling: Primo TestIt Group meetings.
Yvonne Boyer: Central Library director search committee meetings.
Melinda Brown: Central Unit Heads meeting.
Peter Brush: Central Library Homepage Committee meeting; Britannica online training;
Webcast on Author Rights.
Sara Byrd:
Reference & Instruction Forum Planning Group meeting; Seating Sweep Group meeting; Newspaper Project Group meeting; Divinity Library candidate presentation; Meeting Management training; Webcast on Author Rights.
David Carpenter: Digital Library Steering Committee meetings; Primo TestIt Group meetings; Central Unit Heads meeting; Electronic Resources Committee meeting.
Paula Covington: Communication Committee meeting.
Sue Erickson:
Reference & Instruction Forum Planning Group meeting convener; Electronic Resources Committee meeting; Newspaper Project Group meeting.
Bryan Kurowski: Primo Usability Testing Group meeting; ERMS Project Team meeting;
Alexander Street Press electronic resources demonstration.
Amy Stewart-Mailhiot: Central Unit Heads meeting; Central Library director search committee meetings.
Janet Thomason: Central Director Search Committee meetings; Spring Staff Event Planning Committee meeting.
Daisy Whitten: Staff Development Committee meetings.
Susan Widmer: Electronic Resources Committee meeting; Web Maintenance Team meetings; University Staff Council meeting; Meeting Management training; Alexander Street Press electronic resources demonstration.