MONTHLY REPORT
NOVEMBER 2006

Statistics

GLB Access (includes Divinity Library):
54,076 entrances at Library Lawn (42% increase from Central turnstile entrances in Nov. 05)
19,313 entrances at Breezeway

Circulation:
11,359 charges at circulation desk (7% decrease from Nov. 2005)
362 renewals at circulation desk (52% increase from Nov. 2005)
12,591 online renewals (14% decrease from Nov. 2005)
288 laptop charges (1% decrease from Nov. 2005)
432 reserve charges (6% increase from Nov. 2005)
9,363 books discharged
3,177 books received from other libraries (9% increase from Nov. 2005)
675 recalls (14% increase from Nov. 2005)
39 faculty delivery requests (116% decrease from Nov. 2005)
14,106 books shelved (31% increase from Nov. 2005)
867 bound periodicals shelved (16% increase from Nov. 2005)
842 unbound periodicals shelved (4% increase from Nov. 2005)
441 newspapers shelved (38% increase from Nov. 2005)
7 booktrucks sent to Annex
63.2 hours spent shifting
26 sets of serials sent to the bindery

Reference:
688 questions at Reference desk (74%)
169 by e-mail (18%)
79 by telephone (8%)
13 email off-desk questions
15 email search questions
8 consultations

Government Information/Media Services:
503 items charged (9% increase from Nov. 2005)

Instruction:
17 sessions for 230 participants

General

Facilities:
We opened two group study rooms, one on the fourth floor and one on the sixth floor. Our initial plans are to reserve the fourth floor room, which holds four students, informally through a sign-up sheet at the room and to reserve the sixth floor room, which holds six to eight students, through a web-based reservation form.

Enhancements to our Leisure Reading collection and adjoining area continue. We have added bulletin boards to post best seller lists and other information about popular literature. Our Leisure Reading Committee has also created a blog, Books4Fun, to promote the collection.

Circulation (Janet Thomason)

Circulation:
November is traditionally a busy month for circulation leading up to the Thanksgiving break period. This year November circulation statistics were 7% lower than the same period last year, which may be due to Thanksgiving being earlier than usual. On the other hand, re-shelving statistics were 43% higher than the same period last year, so it is difficult to discern the cause of this discrepancy.

We continued to find ourselves in the position of losing trained students and hired two new students. Robert Wright and Matt McKee held down the fort as the only circulation staff the day after Thanksgiving. Janet revised the evacuation plan for Central and conducted an evacuation training class for all staff new to the building or who were interested in attending. The class included an introduction to the fire alarm system and a tour of the evacuation routes as well as an explanation of the roles of staff involved in evacuating the library in an emergency. Ben Darling continued working on his student training manual and was given authorization to add it to the Central staffweb.

Periodicals:
Staff completed the following tasks:

100 replacement labels made for the Periodicals Reading Room.
122 bound periodicals returned from the bindery and prepared for shelving.
122 periodical volumes sent to the bindery.
25 microfilm titles received from Marking/Binding.
Notations made for newspapers to be pulled for recycling.
Shelf reading done for titles beginning with I-L.

Reserves:
LaRentina Gray sent letters for spring semester reserves. The deadline is Dec. 8. She received some requests and began scanning the materials.

Stacks Maintenance:
Students Travis Owen and Jenny Crapser began smaller shifting projects on the eighth and fifth floors, respectively. Jenny and Moriah Scarbrough continued the periodical barcoding project for bound periodicals transferred to the Annex. Abhay Karandikar, Travis Owen, and Ryan Cook continued shifting on the eighth floor, and Stephanie Madden and Erika Walston continued shifting on the seventh floor.

Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)

Electronic Resources:
The ERC met on Nov. 8 and 29. We approved a subscription Cambridge Companions Online and approved trials for Bibliography of German Language & Literature, Black Studies Center (includes Schomburg Collection), Blackwell Reference Online, China Data Service, ECHO (Blackwell and ebrary), and Primary Sources of the Women's Movement. Trials will take place after classes begin in the spring. We will reevaluate UNSTATS after changes to the interface and pricing structure are completed in May 2007. We did not approve subscriptions for Opinion Journals Archives and Praeger Security International. Committee members are Janice Adlington, Yvonne Boyer, David Carpenter, Sue Erickson, John Haar, Susan Widmer, and Mary Beth Blalock. As a general rule we meet on the second and fourth Wednesdays each month. We welcome your suggestions of electronic resources you think will enhance our collection.

Grant Update:
Paula Covington met with the Director of the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies concerning the National Resource Center grant and the upcoming visit from a consultant. She developed plans for expending this year's materials funds and met with the consultant from DC to discuss progress to date.

Outreach:
Yvonne Boyer met with the History of Art Department library representative and provided a tour of the library for a faculty candidate in the department. She also provided a library tour for a group of visiting professors from National Taiwan University.

Sue Erickson met with Lynn Clarke, newly appointed library liaison for Communication Studies, to learn more about the department and their needs and to respond to some of the questions Professor Clarke had collected from her colleagues.

Peter Brush provided a library instruction session for History Professor Henning Grunwald.

Paula prepared statistics on the Latin American Collection for the 2005-06 annual Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) survey.

Susan Widmer met with an Econ 226 student.

Training:
Bryan Kurowski conducted four training sessions in November: Mulberry training for Brian Boling in GIMS, Collection Manager and WorkFlows funds sessions for Sara Byrd, and Corporate Time sessions for Teri Bante and Brian Boling.

Gifts:
Paula worked on the Davis gift collection and visited the Annex to see the Arbena collection. The collection includes 552 items.

Bryan received 165 gift items including 135 items from Susan Bell.

Committee and Other Activities:
Yvonne attended the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS)/Southeast Conference, and she was elected Vice President/President-Elect of ARLIS/SE. She also prepared for two sections of French 103, which were held in the Bandy Center.

Sara Byrd and Mary Beth met several times to discuss collection development issues relating to Film Studies and Theatre. Sara will be assisting with collection development for these two areas.

Paula worked on descriptions for the Cuban Digital Collection and participated in several activities including CAWG Humanities Research Seminar, Cuba Roundtable, and the Publishing History and the Crisis of the Book lecture.

Mary Beth met with Yuh-Fen Benda to discuss the process for review and purchase of electronic resources and a databases of interest to East Asian Studies faculty. She also attended a Blackwell-ebrary webinar regarding ECHO.

Government Information/Media Services (Amy Stewart-Mailhiot)

Larry Romans, Teri Bante, and Amy attended the Tennessee Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) annual fall meeting in Sewanee at the University of the South. The meeting included a discussion of the new program at the Tennessee State Library and Archives devoted to capturing 'born digital' Tennessee state publications.

Amy attended the ESRI/ArcGIS training session in Birmingham.

The new GIMS staff blog was launched in November as a training and communication tool for our student workers.

We also unveiled a new video resource page that includes lists of Media Center films by genre and foreign language.

Larry and Amy attended bibliographer candidate Ramona Romero's presentation. Amy then took Ms. Romero on a tour of the GLB.

A large part of Brian's first full month in the department was devoted to learning WorkFlows and becoming familiar with the equipment and procedures related to his position. He updated the online list of CDROMs, filling in some unexplained gaps, and drafted a letter to be sent to A&S faculty regarding spring semester video reserves.

In addition to her regular processing tasks, Teri spent considerable time providing Brian's training. She also updated the student training aids for department printer/toner maintenance and the guidelines for processing our collection of statistical microfiche.

Instruction (Melinda Brown)

Central librarians presented a total of 16 course-related sessions to 187 students and 15 professors.

ANTH 115 - Human Nature & Human Culture (Gregor), Sue Erickson, 13 students and the professor
ENGL 100 - Composition (Childress), Melinda Brown, 12 and the professor.
ENGL 100 - Composition (Neckles), Melinda Brown, 11 students and the professor.
ENGL 100 - Composition (Seymour), Melinda Brown, 11 students and the professor
ENGL 102 - Literature: Forms & Technique (Baca), Melinda Brown, 12 students and the professor
ENGL 102 - Literature: Forms & Technique (Hines), Melinda Brown, 9 students and the professor
ENGL 115 - Utopian Fictions (Kasibhatla), Melinda Brown, 13 students and the professor.
ENGL 115 - Women Poets in America (Bachmann), Melinda Brown, 14 students and the professor
ENGL 120 - Intermediate Composition (Hearn), Melinda Brown, 10 students and the professor
GER 115 - The Artificial Body: Cloning (Setje-Eilers), Susan Widmer, 15 students and the professor
GER 314 - Introduction to Germanics as a Discipline (McCarthy), Susan Widmer, 6 students and the professor.
HIST 115 - US Civilization Since 1945 (Fergus), Peter Brush, 13 students.
JS 115 - Gender, Sexuality & Desire in Jewish Literature (Schachter), Melinda Brown, 15 students and the professor
LAS 260 - Latin America, Latinos & the United States (Eakins and Partridge), Paula Covington, 11 students and two professors
PHIL 115 - Limits of the Human in Philosophy & Film (Oliver), Melinda Brown, 8 students
THTR 115 - Treasure or Trash (Hallquist), Melinda Brown, 14 students and the professor

Additional instruction activities:
Paula Covington continued to teach LAS 290, Research Methods in Latin American Studies, on Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:35-10:50.

Melinda offered a library orientation for 27 Hillsboro High School International Baccalaureate Program students and their instructor.

Reference (David Carpenter)

Congratulations to Sue Erickson! Sue was appointed an ex officio member of the Nashville Survey Research Task Force of the Vanderbilt Center for Nashville Studies by Dan Cornfield (Chair of the Department of Sociology).

David (chair) and Peter Brush continued their service as members of the Search Committee for the Classics/Philosophy/Psychology Bibliographer/Reference Librarian position, participating in various search committee-related meetings or other activities in November. These included a preliminary conference call interview session with a candidate and an on-site interview with another candidate (Ramona Romero). All staff members of the Central Library Reference and Collection Development departments participated in one or more of the interview sessions with Ramona, as did other Central Library colleagues. Many other Heard Library staff members attended Ramona's presentation. A special thanks to those colleagues (Melinda Brown, Paula Covington, Bryan Kurowski, Zora Breeding, and Sue Erickson) who hosted Ramona's lunches and dinner. We truly appreciate Yvonne Boyer's willingness to take time to give Ramona her inimitable tour of Nashville.

David met with Lee Ann Lannom to discuss cancellation of print versions of reference works of interest to both Central and Peabody in order to support the acquisition of the electronic versions of the same reference works. An example is the College Blue Book. We are purchasing the online version of the 34th edition of this six-volume set, as we continue to make a transition from paper to print for selected reference resources. Electronic editions offer many advantages, including the fact that such reference works can be made available in all the Vanderbilt libraries, across campus, and off-campus for Vanderbilt-affiliated individuals.

David also met with Eileen Crawford (Divinity Library) to discuss the collection development of psychology books for Central and Divinity Libraries, as David is temporarily responsible for selecting psychology books for Central. David mentioned the recent acquisition of several e-reference titles from Gale, including the Handbook of Death and Dying, a title also of interest to Divinity Library patrons.

Sue Erickson attended ArcView GIS software training in Birmingham on November 6-7.

Meetings, Conferences, Training

Several staff attended the findit@VU presentation.

Teri Bante: Evacuation training class.
Mary Beth Blalock: Committee on Collections meeting.
Brian Boling: Evacuation training class.
Melinda Brown: Screencasting webinar.
Peter Brush: VU Web Spiders meeting.
Sara Byrd: LexisNexis webcast; Evacuation training class; lecture "Publishing, History and the Crisis of the Book"; Leisure Reading Committee meeting.
David Carpenter: Primo Development meeting with ExLibris staff; Digital Library Steering Committee meetings; Primo GetIt! Committee meetings.
Paula Covington: Communications Committee meeting.
Ben Darling: Primo GetIt! Committee meeting; Leisure Reading Committee meeting.
Sue Erickson: Primo Development meeting with ExLibris staff; Research Services Committee meeting; GLB Signage Committee meeting.
Bryan Kurowski: Evacuation training class; Technology Support Coordinators meeting.
Matt McKee: Faculty Delivery Project Team meeting.
Amy Stewart-Mailhiot: Evacuation training class.
Janet Thomason: Circulation and Access Committee meeting.
Daisy Whitten: Staff Development Committee meeting.
Susan Widmer: University Staff Advisory Committee meeting.
Robert Wright: Technology Support Coordinators meeting.