Stack Maintenance:
During the month of November, we worked on keeping the sorting/shelving area
cleared as much as possible to be ready for the onslaught of books returned
before and after Thanksgiving Break.
We did notice an increase in return activity, but I think it has been handled quite well and will be cleared out before the Christmas Break rush begins.
Seven carts were sent to the Annex this month. A collection assessment has been requested on several periodical and one oversize serial title for possible annex transfer as well.
Reserve Room:
A total of 4 lists were received and processed for the month of November, which
brings the grand total number of lists received to 115. Letters requesting Spring
2003 Reserves materials have been mailed to the faculty. All of the hours for
next semester have already been filled with no gaps in the schedule.
Periodicals:
Sharon has started working on the cancellation of the 2003 print subscriptions
for the selected titles from Academic Press and Blackwell with Mary Beth Blalock,
Chris Waldrop & Janet Thomason. There are approximately 120 titles. As these
titles are taken from the reading room to go to bindery,a brief note directing
patrons to find these titles online will be attached to the reading room shelf
label.
Sharon & Janet compiled some problems and questions with the claiming procedure. Janet & Mary Beth then met with Mary Ellen Wilson & Chris Waldrop at Baker to try & help resolve these problems and get answers to questions about how the claim process works.
114 titles were sent to
bindery.
Circulation:
Several staff attended their regular meetings.
Robert and Daisy attended the LITS monthly liaison meeting.
Daisy attended the Acorn Virtual Task Force meetings on 11/6,and 11/20 and the CAG meeting on 11/14.
Yolanda attended the CAG meeting on 11/14 and met with Scott McDermott on 11/8 to see how Divinity is using the hand held scanner to do carrel checks. We are hoping to utilize this for the arduous carrel renewal process during the summer months.
Robert attended the monthly meeting of the Task Force that is examining the Request forms.
Janet attended the Management Group meeting on 11/5, met with Mary Beth and Sharon on 11/7 and 11/12 regarding periodical cancellations, met with the Fisk group on 11/12, John on 11/13, CAG on 11/14, Signage committee on 11/19 and met with Mary Ellen Wilson and Chris Waldrop and Mary Beth on 11/21 regarding periodical claiming.
Circulation held its monthly
staff meeting on 11/15 and Debra Stephens covered the circulation desk for us.
Kudos to Debra!
The Friday before Thanksgiving break was busy but not as horrible as in years past. Marking and Binding aided us immensely by not bringing us any trucks of newly labeled books on that day because of our expected onslaught.
Several staff took some time off during the Thanksgiving break schedule. Some downtime was experienced during the break when we were on the backup server, and we experienced some delays in reports for notices being run. We also dealt with duplication of notices.
Extended hours begin on
12/2 .
Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)
Electronic
Resources:
The Electronic Resource Committee met on November 13; November 27th meeting
was cancelled. The committee approved the acquisition of three new databases
including Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, British
and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries, and Gale's Literature Resource
Center. The Committee also supported the purchase of Evans Digital Edition
(Early American Imprints, Series I-Evans 1639-1800) which is of interest
to Central and Divinity as well as the ASCII text files for EEBO (Michigan Text
Partnership) which provides text searching of Early
English Books Online.
The Past Masters database was also reviewed and recognized as an important resource. However, instead of purchasing the entire database, we are compiling a unique list of titles that we think will be more useful to our users and will request a quote for these titles.
Cooperative Collection
Development:
Susan Widmer (German), Paula Covington (Latin America), and Mary Beth Blalock
along with John Haar attended the Information Alliance Collection Development
meeting in Rugby Tennessee on November 1.
The German Studies Discussion Group agreed to continue the shared collection agreement for the acquisition of contemporary German writers as identified by the Harrassowitz Contemporary Authors List (new authors will be assigned as they are added to the List in order to avoid collection gaps), explored the possibility and feasibility of building a joint German DVD film collection (potential to serve both German Studies and inter-departmental interest), decided to contact ProQuest to request a quote on a consortia subscription to the Brecht and Kafka electronic collections, and agreed to share journal lists and to consult with each other in the event of a journal cancellations.
This was the initial meeting of the Latin American Studies Group. They shared material budget information, a breakdown of countries for literature, and talked about LASER group for "big ticket" purchases.
Work will continue on identifying serial titles suitable for inclusion in a shared collection and determining the library of record for "approved" titles.
Development Tour:
Susan Widmer, one of ten librarians from the US and Canada selected to participate
in the Western European Studies Section (ACRL) Study Tour, spent Nov. 8-17 touring
state libraries of Munich, Frankfurt, and Berlin as well as museums, publishing
houses, and the Reichstag. Marilen Daum, Librarian, Geothe Institute, escorted
the Group
Approval Plans:
Approval profile changes for Economics and Psychology have been submitted to
Blackwell in order to "fine tune" the profile for these areas. We
also deleted our Geography Forms profile but the Science and Engineering Library
will receive forms for GA 1-1776 (Math Geog/Cartography) and GB 3-5030 (Physical
Geography).
Paula Covington worked
with Latin American and Spanish vendors to set terms and deposit amounts for
these specialized approval plans.
Instruction:
Dale Manning conducted an instructional session for Professor Kate Daniels (Poetry
of Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich) on Nov. 16th. He also presented a session
for Professor Lynn Enterline's Senior Honors Colloquium on the 20th.
Paula continued teaching the LAS 290 Research Methods class.
Outreach:
Peter Brush gave a tour of the Library to two historians interviewing for a
Chinese History position.
Mary Beth Blalock and Paula Covington joined John Haar and Paul Gherman for lunch and discussion with several faculty members about library resources and services.
Paula Covington and her graduate student assistants worked with several LAS faculty on research projects. She also met with faculty to discuss instructional and research needs.
Departmental Meeting:
The monthly Bibliographers' meeting was held on November 20th in the Goldberg
Conference Room. Melinda Brown shared information from the UTK symposium, "Scholarly
Publishing and the Common Good: Changing our Culture" which she attended
in September. A discussion of the issues and perspectives presented at the symposium
followed her presentation. The new CD-ROM Procedures were distributed as well
as revised lists of the Academic Press and Blackwell journals that will be available
only in electronic format beginning in 2003.
Transfer Project:
Work continued on the transfer project. Melinda Brown and Mary Beth Blalock
met with Anne Martin to review the procedures for utilizing a new handheld scanner
for collecting data for the project. As of December 2, bibliographers had identified
62,380 volumes for transfer and 806 titles for withdrawal for a total of 63,186
volumes. We are well on our way to reaching our 110,000 volume goal.
Gifts:
Dale Manning is working with a former student of Professor Emerson Brown, who
is acting on behalf of Mrs. Brown, regarding the possible acquisition of the
late Prof. Brown's library.
Paula completed the Rayfield Colombian collection and Larry Romans completed the review of two gift collections.
Julie sent 146 titles to Resource Services for processing for the collection.
Committee and Other
Activities:
Peter Brush and Susan Widmer participated in QuestionPoint training for virtual
reference service.
Melinda Brown and Dale Manning met with Khal Rudin, Sales Representative, for Adam Matthew Publications.
Sue Erickson, Melinda Brown, and Mary Beth Blalock met with Kate Cassidy, Sales Representative for Scholarly Resources Publishing. Mary Beth also met with Jim Morris, ProQuest/UMI Representative. Paula Covington attended two Residential College Committee meetings.
Julie Loder attended a Technical Support Coordinators meeting.
Susan Widmer met with Eileen Crawford, Divinity, to plan a SDCC Brown Bag to share their experiences at libraries in Germany and Switzerland.
Mary Beth Blalock, Janet
Thomason, and Sharon Chilton met on Nov. 7 to discuss issues relating to the
migration from print to online subscriptions for Academic Press and Blackwell
journals as well as issues revolving around late/missing issues. Janet and Mary
Beth met with Mary Ellen Wilson and Chris Waldrop the following week to get
a better understanding of the SIRSI claims module and to explore possible options
for enhancing the process.
Government Information (Larry Romans)
Both Larry Romans and Gretchen Dodge went to the Quality Customer Service program held Nov. 19 at the Brentwood Public Library. On Larry's behalf, Gretchen attended the TLA Board meeting Nov. 2. She also attended the LITS Support Coordinators November meeting.
Lucinda Scanlon and Kayla Swoape, from the MTSU Government Documents Department, visited us twice this month. On their first visit Nancy explained how documents are processed and Gretchen gave them a tour of our department and the Central Library. They visited Special Collections and the Annex on their second visit.
Gretchen submitted a list to the Memphis/Shelby County Public Library of microfiche hearings we are requesting as part of our shared regional holdings. Working on this gave us the opportunity to inventory part of our collection of Congressional microfiche from 1980 through 1995. We are expecting to receive 33 boxes of hearings from them. This closes their offer to us.
On Nov. 7, Larry gave a bibliographic instruction session for the dreaded assignment for John Vasquez’ PSCI 220--Crisis Diplomacy. The students have only author's last names and the years and names of their crises and must come up with the complete citation.
The project to turn the Government Information web pages into a database is progressing. More than 600 entries have been created and are now being edited.
Our student assistant Peter Humke has proposed to the Vanderbilt Computer Society that they work on a PHP program to make Census information more easily available from our web site. If the project is approved they will collect data from a select number of geographic levels in Tennessee and for certain variables so that customers can create tables on a web page on the fly and the tables don't have to be hand coded and changed constantly.
Students Peter Humke and Michael O’Malley helped Larry finish processing the last of a couple of gift collections. This included checking the shelves for condition for more than 100 volumes.
Microform and Media Center (Peter Brush)
The Media Center had a busy month in November. Microfilm and video business were strong, and the number of reference questions asked here continues to increase. Usage of paper in the Computer Room doubled over November of last year (64 reams of paper vs. 31 a year ago). Sixteen new videos were added to the Media Center's collection.
Carrie Sprouse completed the relabelling of all of the drawers of microfilm in the Media Center with clear, printed labels. David Anderson attended the library customer service workshop at the Brentwood Public Library as the Media Center's representative.
Reference (David Carpenter)
As usual, November was a very busy month for us, except during the Thanksgiving holiday period. In addition to the increased activity at the reference desk from patrons within the library, Central Library reference librarians either answered or referred 117 inquiries from the ?Ask Us virtual reference service. We also began receiving comments and questions via the new !Tell Us online suggestion and comments service.
PsycINFO Changes:
Users of the PsycINFO database recently found that the locally mounted
WebSPIRS version 4.3 software giving access to the database did not sort search
results properly by date. Janice Adlington reported this problem to ISAG, after
working with Kay Pothisiri (LITS) to learn more about why the problem was occurring.
Since Janice had chaired a special ISAG group earlier in 2002 charged with examining
options for providing local access to PsycINFO and other SilverPlatter
WebSPIRS databases, she was asked to reconvene the earlier group to make a recommendation
on how best to resolve the search results sorting problem with PsycINFO using
WebSPIRS version 4.3. David Carpenter also represents Central Library Reference
in the ISAG WebSPIRS group.
Janice convened the ISAG WebSPIRS group to discuss the best way to provide local access to PsycINFO and to make final decisions on display options. The preferred option was to provide access to the 5.0 version of PsycINFO, which did not have the search results sorting problem. The SilverPlatter company has discontinued support for the older, 4.3 version of the WebSPIRS software. Continued access to the older version of the software was preserved as well, at least temporarily, so as not to force PsycINFO users to move to the much different WebSPIRS version 5.0 software during a very busy time of the semester. Here is a link to an intermediate PsycINFO database selection webpage set up by Janice. Janice also gave a demonstration of the new PsycINFO 5.0 software to Central Reference librarians at our Nov. 21st meeting.
QuestionPoint Training
Sessions:
David Carpenter scheduled and coordinated two training sessions for the Heard
Library's use of QuestionPoint virtual reference software on November 4th. The
morning session included two hours of basic instruction in the use of the QuestionPoint
software. Attendees included librarians from Central Reference, members of the
ISAG Cooperative and Virtual Reference Subcommittee and other Vanderbilt librarians
currently staffing our Ask Us reference service.
Leslie Reynolds joined David for an afternoon training session focused on training local QuestionPoint administrators to implement QuestionPoint. Both the morning and afternoon QuestionPoint training sessions were provided as online "webinars" by OCLC. The sessions used PlaceWare software to present the Web (video) portion of the sessions, and used a conference telephone and a toll-free teleconference connection for the audio portion of the sessions.
Central Library Instruction
Report:
The number of instruction sessions typically decreases drastically by this point
of the semester, and this November was no exception. Three instruction sessions
were reported, with a total of 53 students.
Dale Manning provided bibliographic instruction sessions for two English classes in November. These were: English 115W, Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich (Nov. 16, Prof. Kate Daniels); and English 290A, Senior Honors Colloquium (Nov. 20, Prof. Lynn Enterline).
Melinda Brown offered an instruction session for Women's Studies 201: Perspectives on Women in the World. Melinda also chairs the newly formed Undergraduate Instruction subcommittee of ISAG, which held its first meeting in November.
Peter Brush gave an introduction to the library and a tour to two historians interviewing for a Chinese history position here at Vanderbilt.
Librarians responsible for instruction in the Central Library will begin having a regular monthly meeting to provide an opportunity to discuss instructional techniques, concerns and strategies. The first Central Library instruction meeting will be held on December 9th.
Other Activities:
Melinda Brown attended her second meeting with the Residential Colleges Academic
Services subcommittee. She also met with the Heard Web Task Force to participate
in that group's discussion of the results of usability testing of the library's
webpages.