MONTHLY REPORT
OCTOBER 2004

Statistics

Circulation:
10,586 charges and renewals
9,131 web renewals
316 laptop checkouts
574 reserves charges and renewals
7,555 discharges
2,785 books received from other libraries
9,515 books shelved
823 bound periodicals shelved
1,046 unbound periodicals shelved
387 newspapers shelved

Reference:
1,313 questions
1,045 (80%) at Reference desk
151 (11%) by e-mail
117 (9%) by telephone

Microform Media Center:
114 reference questions

Government Information:
170 reference questions

General

Growth in the number of materials on ereserve has caused an increase in students' need to print ereserve documents at public workstations. The print function on Word and Excel readers on the workstations was cumbersome and very slow. We added Microsoft Office to all workstations in the south lobby (card catalog area) and in the Reference Room to better facilitate printing. We will monitor the use of Office to see if an increase in users' composing documents at workstations results in denial of workstation access for other users.

Circulation (Janet Thomason)

Circulation:
On Monday Oct. 4, Janet gave a tour of Circulation to visitors from Tulane. On October 8, at the request of John Haar, Janet submitted an INFORM to get the circulation policies updated for videos, DVDs and videodiscs so that graduate students could borrow this material for the same loan period as faculty (7 days). The policies went into effect on Oct. 12. Peter Brush updated the circulation policy webpage to reflect the changes.

Janet and Daisy Whitten attended a CAG meeting on Oct. 14. CAG approved implementing the 28 day grace period for all items that currently circulate 28 days or longer. Overdue notices were customized for all divisions so that notices are now printed on the same cycle and each division, with the exception of Biomedical, now has the same number of notices. The new policy went into effect Nov. 1. CAG also approved libraries billing Interlibrary Loan directly for any books lost by borrowing libraries. In the past, each division has manually billed the borrowing library, and each Library has collected those bills. With the procedural change, ILL will be billed directly, pay the bills, and take on the responsibility of collecting the bills. Janet had asked if this new policy could be made retroactive for all currently outstanding ILL bills, but was told the new policy would be implemented on Nov. 1 and it would not be retroactive.

Yolanda Campbell and Jo Bilyeu took some vacation during the month of October. Janet also attended a renovation meeting on Oct. 20 and then met with John and David Carpenter to discuss the service desk arrangements and specifications needed to send to the architect. Janet, Jo and LaRentina Gray met with Julia Covington from the office of Johnson Johnson and Crabtree (Central renovation architects) to discuss the Circulation office area and each unit's specific space requirements in that area. Janet submitted an outline to Dale Poulter for the Reports Training Module to be developed. She also continued pulling for Annex transfer and withdrawing items from the collection that bibliographers chose to withdraw in lieu of transfer. We withdrew 125 items.

Periodicals:
Rachel Gray sent 187 items to the bindery. Rachel trained with Linda Davis on the new binding procedures. Item records now must be created for all items going to the bindery, and check-in records of pieces going to the bindery must be deleted. Rachel will now do this step prior to binding. Rachel also trained with David Anderson to be a backup in the Microform and Media Center.

Reserves:
Activities in the Reserve Room were slow but steady. Print reserves continue to trickle in. So far we processed 12 lists for the month of October, which brings the overall total to 106. Professors continue to bring in materials they're adding to existing courses. LaRentina is in the process of sending out letters via email to the A&S faculty requesting Spring 2005 lists. Reserve students have shelved approximately 300 books in the Oversize section.

Stack Maintenance:
Work is continuing on shifting on the fifth, seventh and third levels as we pull materials for transfer to the Annex. Student workers are also continuing on the sorting/shelving and doing some shelf reading as well.

The students enjoyed a few days off for fall break.

Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)

Electronic Resources:
During meetings held on October 13 and 27, The Electronic Resources committee approved subscriptions for five databases. Middle Eastern & Central Asian Studies is now available on the Articles and Databases page; licenses are under review for Dictionary of National Biography Online and Gallup Brain; and access to Bibliography of Asian Studies Online is now active. The committee also approved a subscription to Index Islamicus, but this database was on hold until the CDAG meeting on November 10 to decide on funding for special acquisitions requests [CDAG agreed to fund the database for one year]. We approved trials for Empire On-Line, History of Science, Technology & Medicine, Consulta and Early American Imprints: Shaw-Shoemaker. We approved adding three free resources--American Women's History, American Memory from the Library of Congress, and FRASER-- to the Articles & Databases page. We did not approve subscriptions to Corbis Images for Education and ebrary and did not approve retrials for RLG Cultural Materials and xreferplus. The ERC meets the second and fourth Wednesday each month. If you have resources you would like to recommend, please contact any member of the committee. Members are Janice Adlington, Yvonne Boyer, David Carpenter, John Haar, Larry Romans, and Mary Beth Blalock.

Outreach:
Yvonne Boyer and Paula Covington prepared displays and discussed the importance of our 3,000,000th volume, Monuments anciens du Mexique by Count Frederic de Waldeck, and our 3,000,001st volume, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, at the Friends of the Library annual dinner.

Yvonne Boyer's article, "Wings to Paris: WESS European Conference 2004" appeared in the fall issue of the Western European Studies Section Newsletter. During the month, she met with the new library representative for French & Italian and assisted a visiting scholar from Ireland in the W.T. Bandy Center.

Peter Brush's book review of Marines in Vietnam appeared in the October issue of Vietnam Magazine.

Paula met with Vera Kutzinski, the new Director of the Center for the Americas, about the Center, the Library and funding proposals. She also met with Amparo McNuett, Center for the Americas visiting scholar, about her research and provided an orientation to Andean resources for a new Anthropology graduate student. Paula worked with Professor Tung and Atlantic Productions, a London-based company, filming in the library on October 24 as part of an Andean archeological research project for the Discovery Channel. As a participant in a mentoring program about Latin American librarianship, Paula had three conference call interviews with a graduate student from the University of South Florida. She also prepared library sections of an NEH grant proposal for digitizing Cuban colonial archives, attended several Center lectures and the Byrne history lecture, and prepared an exhibit, "Artists' Books from Cuba," for a display in the Center lobby.

Sue Erickson met with a research assistant from the Anthropology Department to orient her to the electronic resources for Anthropology.

Gifts:
Dale Manning is working with Dr. Eva Touster, Professor Emerita and founder of the Cumberland Poetry Review to secure the journal's archive. The CPR has had a number of Vanderbilt connections during its history, including Donald Davie and Laurence Lerner, two highly important British literary men of letters of the last half of the twentieth century, who spent the last years of their teaching careers here at Vanderbilt. The CPR archive, along with a collection of Professor Davie's papers previously left to Vanderbilt, will be housed in Special Collections & University Archives.

Paula met with a potential donor regarding Spanish literature materials.

Julie Loder received 455 gift titles in October.

Committee and Other Activities:
Several bibliographers--Janice Adlington, Yvonne, Peter, Paula, Sue, Susan Widmer, David Carpenter, and Mary Beth--attended demonstrations of LexisNexis and Readex versions of the U.S. Serial Set.

Dale Manning met with Kahl Rudin of Adam Matthew Publications to discuss products of interest to several English professors. He also met with Mike Poynter to discuss new initiatives at Recorded Books.

Julie attended Technical Support Coordinators and Training Coordinators meetings.

Peter, Julie, Janice, Sue Erickson, and Mary Beth Blalock attended the ARL Webcast, "Usability: Designing for User Success".

Susan Widmer met with our EIU representative to discuss WorldData, another EIU statistical database and the possibilities of a consortial agreement. She also attended a Cataloging & Authorities Advisory Group meeting.

Mary Beth met with Jody Combs to discuss the possibilities of creating a "Free Resources" webpage for non-Vanderbilt users and attended two meetings of the Performance Evaluation and Review Committee. She also participated in an online seminar, "How do Librarians Manage Digital Assets?"

Government Information (Larry Romans)

Nancy Dolinger has been working on finding homes for lost documents she has found while trying to organize parts of the office. She checking in GPO and UN documents and has been gathering UN serials new to Acorn for binding. She is participating on the performance evaluation (PERC) committee.

Larry gave the government information session to Paula's LAS 290 - Interdisciplinary Research and Methods.

Larry and Amy attended the Item Type Task Force meeting with Linda Tesar, Zora Breeding, Rodger Coleman, Clint Grantham, Nancy Boggess-Korekach, and Debra Stephens to discuss the changes in the location codes and item types for the Government Information collection. Amy attended her first CAAG meeting and attended part of Mary Charles Lasater's NACO training on authority records.

Larry and Amy met with Deede Wang and Suellen Stringer-Hye about the expansion of the Government Information database to include Political Science categories and subcategories. The expansion is largely completed but is not yet operation.

Larry and Amy attended demonstrations and evaluated the Serial Set databases presented by LexisNexis and Readex. We hope a final decision will be made soon about which version we will purchase.

Amy received further training on how to access and update the static HTML webpages maintained by Government Information. She cataloged 37 items.

Amy's ongoing projects included working with students on the updates to the Public Policy pages, cleaning up location and holding information in Acorn records, reevaluating our HE (Health and Human Services) item selection.

Microform and Media Center (Peter Brush)

The Media Center received and installed new DVD players and new monitors to go with them. We now have five viewing stations with the new players and monitors in service. The new monitors made it possible to replace a number of very old monitors that had served us well for many years.

We began circulating videos and DVDs to graduate students.

Service volume was strong and steady, with a good deal of microfilm and interlibrary loan business. We added seventeen new videos to the collection.

Reference (David Carpenter)

Instruction Report (Melinda Brown, Instruction Coordinator):
Instruction in October generally slows down a bit. This October, the following class related sessions were given for a total of 125 students:
AMST 295 - Gender, Sexuality and Southern Culture (Melinda Brown)
CMST 115W - American Sex Controversies (Melinda Brown, Larry Romans and Janice Adlington)
ANTH 115 - Understanding Cultural Differences (Sue Erickson)
ENGL 115W - African American Literature on Film (Dale Manning)
ENGL 120W - Intermediate Composition (Dale Manning)
HIST 295 - US & Vietnam (Peter Brush)
PSCI 217 - Latin American Politics (Paula Covington and Larry Romans)
SOC/WS 224 - Women and the Law (2 sessions).(Sue Erickson, Melinda Brown and Amy Stewart-Mailhiot)

In addition, Melinda Brown provided a session called "Avoiding Student Pitfalls When Assigning Research Assignments" for the Center for Teaching's F2P2 Program. She also presented a session, "Queer Queries: Resources for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Research," for the Vanderbilt Graduate/Professional Student GLBT Group.

Paula continued teaching her twice-a-week LAS 290 class on Latin American research and graded research papers this month. She met with a new anthropology graduate student to provide orientation to Andean resources.

Janice Adlington helped Larry Romans and Melinda Brown with Rhetoric and Reason in American Sex Controversies.

David Carpenter met with Jonathan Bremer (Program Coordinator, Dean of the College of Arts and Science's office) on October 19 In Kirkland Hall to provide him with instruction on how to search the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). David also arranged access to AHCI for Mr. Bremer from his office, so that he could use the database in support of his current work projects.

Sue Erickson met with a research assistant from the Anthropology Dept. to orient her to the electronic resources for Anthropology on October 14.

Shared Services Initiative:
At Paul Gherman's request, David Carpenter began working in collaboration with Jeff Johnston (Assistant Director, Center for Teaching), Jonathan Blake (Office of Innovation through Technology), and Leslie Boyd (Peabody Library) to examine models for collaborative service centers at other institutions, including those known as Information Commons, Centers for Instructional Technology, and Centers for Teaching. The Shared Services Group will also inventory services already being provided to students at Vanderbilt through the libraries, CFT, OIT and computer labs. With the support of Paul Gherman, Allison Pingree (Director, Center for Teaching) and Andy Stricker (Associate Provost, Innovation Through Technology), it is hoped that that the library, OIT and CFT can join forces to design, create and support information commons or related resources for Vanderbilt students and faculty.

David met with Jeff Johnston and Jonathan Blake on October 26 for an overview of their work so far in support of the Shared Services initiative, and to discuss how the library could join in and contribute to the effort. A larger Shared Services meeting for the following week was planned. The next meeting will also include Paul Gherman, Leslie Boyd, Allison Pingree and Andy Stricker.

Information Alliance Collaborative Reference Serial Backfiles Project:
David Carpenter participated in an hour-long conference telephone call on October 26 to discuss and make preliminary plans to support an Information Alliance Collaborative Reference Serial Backfiles Project. He joined in conversation about this project with Linda Phillips (Head of Collection Development and Management, UTK) Rita Smith (Head Reference and Instructional Services UTK), and Mary Vass (Reference & Information Services, UK). David had met earlier (on October 22) with Zora Breeding to discuss technical services issues related to planning for this project.

David plans to meet with his reference/collection development colleagues later in November to discuss the aims and scope of the project. Its primary goal is to find a way for the three Information Alliance libraries to share older volumes of some specific reference serials (for example, Books in Print or Dissertation Abstracts), so that all three libraries do not need to retain the same sets of volumes, which consume considerable shelf space and are infrequently used. Such an agreement would also need to ensure quick delivery of information from such volumes in response to reference inquiries or to support research needs.

Other Activities, Meetings, Training Opportunities or Accomplishments:
Melinda was nominated to be on the advisory committee to oversee Vanderbilt's Project Dialogue for 2005-2006.

Sue Erickson met with Amy Stewart-Mailhiot on Oct. 1 to show Amy the basics of downloading data sets from the ICPSR database.

David met with Yvonne Boyer on October 25 to discuss subscription options for Les Livres Disponibles (French Books in Print), as this reference serial is no longer available in paper format. He also met with Sue Erickson to discuss a special acquisitions funding request for the soon-to-be-available Encyclopedia of Social Measurement.

Melinda Brown attended a planning/brainstorming meeting for a new freshman seminar initiative to establish an interdisciplinary bloc of seminars exploring topics under the broad theme of global citizenship.

David and Melinda met with Judy Carter on October 7 for an introduction to, and training in using, the new library facilities calendar software.

Janice toured the University School of Nashville Library.

David attended the annual Staff Service Awards ceremony on October 6.

Committee or Other Regularly Scheduled Meetings Attended:
Dale Manning, Sue Erickson, and David Carpenter, as Central Reference members of the Building Renovation Group, met on October 20 to examine, discuss and make recommendations for changes to the latest design proposals from the architects working on plans for renovation of the fourth level of the GLB. David also met separately with Janet Thomason and John Haar on October 22 to examine the plans for the placement of the proposed joint public services desk in the Central Library lobby, and to consider any changes we might want to make in the preliminary plans.

Central Reference librarians attended various other regular departmental, staff, and task force meetings during the past month. These included meetings of the following groups: Central Library Reference, Central Library Bibliographers, Heard Web Group, Heard Staffweb Focus Group, Acorn and Virtual Catalog Task Force, Information Services Advisory Group, Electronic Resources Committee, ISAG Web-based Instructional Support Subcommittee, Technology Support Coordinators, Central Library Staff Forum, SFX Implementation Group, ERL Migration Group and Central Library Unit Heads.