MONTHLY REPORT
NOVEMBER 2003

Statistics

Circulation:
12,311 charges
8,536 discharges
12,790 online renewals
3,809 items received from other libraries (including TS new/rebound books)
186 laptop transactions
1.104 unbound periodicals shelved
396 newspapers shelved

Reserves:
365 charges and renewals

Reference:
1,403 questions
1,193 (85%) at Reference desk
157 (9%) by e-mail
53 (4%) by telephone

Government Information: 127 reference questions

Microform Media Center: 31 directional questions, 164 reference questions

Web: 29,696 visitor sessions, 185,567 hits

Circulation (Janet Thomason)

Janet returned to work from Medical Leave on a part-time basis on 11/10/03. Activity at the desk continued to be quite brisk as fall break approached. Several staff commented on how serious and studious the students seem to be this semester.

Reserve Room:
Eight new lists were processed, and course materials continue to trickle in to be added to an existing list. Letters for the spring semester were sent out on November 14th. Since the students have returned after the break, the computers are in constant demand.

Stacks Maintenance:
November was consumed with sorting and shelving books,working to get the chaotic flow under control. We thought at one time we had it, but nope..so..we continue to try to empty more carts than are wheeled over from Circulation.

Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)

Electronic Resources:
The Electronic Resource Committee met on November 12th and 25th. The committee approved the acquisition of two new databases including CQ Voting and Elections Collection and Women in Social Movements in the U.S. World War I Unit Histories, a part of the Digital History Archive, was initially discussed at the Nov. 12th meeting; Peter Brush joined us for further discussion on Nov. 25th. Since much of the website is "under construction", we decided to renew our subscription at the current level and reevaluate the database in a year to determine if the content justifies broadening our subscription. The JSTOR Arts & Sciences Collection III was not approved since Central already has access to the currently available titles via our subscription to the JSTOR Language and Literature Collection, A&S I and A&S II; the Music Library plans to subscribe to the Music Collection, which contains many of the titles in the A&S III Collection. A proposed shared fund resource-Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems-failed to gain support because of content and search retrieval problems. Gale Virtual Reference Library was discussed, including issues raised in the November Collection Development meeting. Two titles were identified as possible purchases for Central, but there seemed to be very little support from other divisional libraries. The next step is to identify multi-library print standing orders to evaluate advantages in canceling these subscriptions and sharing the cost of the e-books.

Information Alliance Activities:
Yvonne represented Vanderbilt in an Information Alliance conference call with UTK and UK to discuss the next step in the art subject area Alliance timetable. Areas for possible collaboration, database information, serial and reference materials as well as projects were discussed.

Sue Erickson scheduled and completed sociology counterparts' conference call as part of our follow up to September's Rugby meeting. She also reviewed the report of Sociology's discussions that will be included in the full report for the Rugby meeting.

Departmental Meetings:
The monthly bibliographers' meeting was held on November 19th in the Goldberg Conference Room. Discussion focused on the proposed changes of Technical Services procedures and Gale's Virtual Reference Library. A joint Collection Development and Reference meeting was held on November 4th to discuss the Staff Time Allocation Study in preparation for the actual study during the week of Nov. 17th. Everyone participated in the study; Julie also captured time allocation data for our student employees.

Outreach:
Dale Manning researched available resources to support Professor Sam Girgus's spring semester film studies course and submitted purchasing requests for 36 films to enhance our collections.

Paula Covington met with three faculty members about collection needs. She also met with a Latin American history faculty candidate and a Spanish and Portuguese faculty candidate regarding our collections.

Yvonne Boyer attended the Goldberg lecture by Professor Johns.

Janice Adlington gave a library tour for a prospective Philosophy faculty member.

Gifts:
Yvonne continued discussion with the donor and appraiser regarding the Wachs Collection.

Paula reviewed the remainder of the Helguera gifts and approximately 500 other Spanish gifts, especially the Ruiz-Ramon Spanish drama collection.

Sue Erickson reviewed gifts from the Collier gift collection.

Julie Loder received 34 gift titles.

Committee and Other Activities:
Paula participated in a national-level Latin American collection survey.

Julie attended Technical Support Coordinators and Training Coordinators meetings.

Susan Widmer attended the Cut 'n' Paste Plagiarism class presented by Sue Erickson and Melinda Brown.

Mary Beth attended a meeting of the Electronic Resources Task Force on November 18th. She also met with Roy Burnett, our new ProQuest representative, to discuss ProQuest resources.

Government Information (Larry Romans)

The Tennessee Government Documents Round Table held its annual fall meeting at the University of the South on Friday, November 7. This was Susan Timmons' first GODORT meeting. During the morning session Larry Romans gave a legislative issues update from his perspective on ALA Council.

Gretchen Dodge spoke about how we created an electronic form to survey the physical condition of our collection in the Central Library. Rob Taylor created the backbone of the database. Allie Higgins and Ben Roosevelt also entered the data. Two depositories, MTSU and the Chattanooga-Hamilton Public Library, requested copies of the file for their own survey. A formal report of the data collected and conclusions has also been written.

Gretchen attended the LITS Support Coordinators meeting on Tuesday, November 11, and the Central Staff Forum on Thursday, November 20.

As a member of the ALA Committee on Legislation, Larry also attended a weekend retreat in Washington about recent, pending, and proposed legislation that affects libraries.

All of us participated in the staff-time allocation study.

Microform and Media Center (Peter Brush)

The Media Center had strong video, reference, and computer room activity in November. All of our student workers faithfully kept records for the Time Allocation Survey. Near the end of the month it became necessary to replace yet another worker who chose to leave in mid-semester, making a total of three unexpected
replacements for this fall.

We added 21 videos to the collection this month.

Reference (David Carpenter)

Instruction Report (Melinda Brown):
Central librarians taught class related instruction sessions to a total of 73 students in November. Sessions included: History 115W: America Since 1860 (Brush); Sociology 115W: Salem and Other Witch Hunts (Brown/Erickson); and three English 100W Composition classes (Manning and Brown/Manning).

Additionally, Sue Erickson and Melinda Brown planned and taught a Center For Teaching sponsored workshop, Cut 'n Paste Plagiarism, which had 18 participants. This course is offered on a semi-regular basis for faculty and graduate students.

Melinda Brown met with Peter Felten from the Center for Teaching (CFT) to discuss potential library/CFT collaborative projects.

Paula Covington continued teaching LAS 290 and created two of the course's three major assignments.

Dale Manning assisted an English Honors Colloquium student in constructing a research strategy for his spring semester thesis. Dale also created a preliminary reading resources list for Prof. Shawn Salvant's 19th century African American Literature class, in response to a request from Prof. Salvant.

Sue Erickson provided a follow-up research consultation with a student from Gary Jensen's "Salem and other Witchhunts" class (SOC115W) on 11/19.

Other Activities, Meetings, Training Opportunities or Accomplishments:
At the Nov. 7th reference meeting, Sue Erickson reported on her training and experiences while providing reference service in Government Information during the summer. That same afternoon, Sue covered the Government Information reference desk for a few hours while the G.I. staff were away at a TLA/GODORT meeting.

David Carpenter responded via telephone conversations to answer questions and offer suggestions following requests for information on our Ask Us e-mail based reference service from two different public libraries in Indiana. Librarians there were considering setting up cooperative e-mail based reference services.

Sue Erickson attended several Acorn and Virtual Catalogs Task Force meetings (11/05, 11/06, 11/13, 11/19, 11/20) including those of the "Acorn Help" and "Tabs Display" work groups. Sue also responded to an Ask Us query (week of 11/10) from the University of Southern Mississippi about our experience migrating to iLink. They are considering making the switch and have been very impressed with our customization of the OPAC and our help pages for Acorn.

Janice Adlington provided a library tour for a prospective faculty member in the Philosophy department.

Reference staff members attended a Time Allocation Study information session on Nov. 5th and participated in the Time Allocation Study recording process during the week of Nov. 10-16.

LITS reghosted our public workstations in Reference, and those computers now offer: an Acrobat file viewer option, Secure Oasis software, and Microsoft Imaging software. All public workstations will now also accommodate the use of USB storage devices. Public workstations now give access to: A:, D:, E: and V: drives. (E: is for USB devices and V: is for VUSpace.)

David submitted a request to John Haar for new computers to replace: our standalone CD-ROM workstation; the old Zenith computer formerly used as a second standalone CD-ROM workstation (to become another, general public workstation); and the computer used with our flatbed scanner. Mills Bell is checking to see if the latter computer could be configured to provide access to both our flatbed scanner and our slide scanner, thus eliminating the need for two computers in our Scanning Room.

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, Acorn and Virtual Catalog Task Force, Information Services Advisory Group, Central Library Instruction, Electronic Resources Committee, ISAG Web-based Instructional Support Subcommittee, Technology Support Coordinators, Central Library Staff Forum and Central Library Unit Heads.