MONTHLY REPORT
OCTOBER 2006

Statistics

GLB Access (includes Divinity Library):
31,143 entrances at Library Lawn (23% increase from Central turnstile entrances in Oct. 05)
13,765 entrances at Breezeway

Circulation:
10,764 charges at circulation desk (5% increase from Oct. 2005)
204 renewals at circulation desk (including reserves)
10,644 online renewals (11% increase from Oct. 2005)
213 laptop charges (46% increase from Oct. 2005)
387 reserve charges (23% decrease from Oct. 2005)
8,034 books discharged (7% increase from Oct. 2005)
3,072 books received from other libraries (5% decrease from Oct. 2005)
664 holds placed (24% increase from Oct. 2005)
15 faculty delivery requests
(18% decrease from Oct. 2005)
10,560 books shelved (21% increase from Oct. 2005)
684 bound periodicals shelved (4% decrease from Oct. 2005)
785 unbound periodicals shelved (4% increase from Oct. 2005)
371 newspapers shelved (2% decrease from Oct. 2005)
17 booktrucks sent to Annex
147.4 hours spent shifting
15 sets of serials sent to the bindery

Reference:
699 questions at Reference desk (72% of total; 27% decrease from Oct. 2005)
158 by e-mail (16%)
114 by telephone (12%)
20 email off-desk questions
15 email search questions
4 consultations


Government Information/Media Services:
465 items charged (29% increase from Oct. 2005)
164 reference questions

Instruction:
28 sessions for 390 participants

General

Facilities:
New carpeting was installed in the lobby during the fall break, making a dramatic improvement in the appearance of our entrance. Here are some before-and-after photos.

Training:
John met with student assistants who work at service desks to emphasize the importance of providing outstanding customer service. The sessions included discussions of students' reaction to two videos they were required to view: Give 'Em the Pickle and What Do You Say?

Circulation (Janet Thomason)

Periodicals:
We completed the following tasks:

126 replacements labels made for the Periodicals Reading Room
146 bound periodicals returned from the bindery and prepared for shelving.
27 boxes of microfilm received from Marking/Binding. Notations made for the newspapers to be pulled for recycling.
157 periodical volumes sent to the bindery.
Shelf reading done for titles beginning with A-H.

Stacks Maintenance:
The Annex transfer project continued, with Kelly Lockaby pulling several carts a week. Student workers Jenny Crapser and Moriah Scarborough again helped out by barcoding the periodicals to be transferred.

There was more shelving to do as the semester progressed, an eight percent increase over September. Students Patrick Boyer, Tom Rosen, and Travis Owen completed extensive shifting on the fifth floor in the old and new wings respectively. Shifting continued on the seventh and eighth floors by students Abhay Karandikar, Stephanie Madden, and Erika Walston.

Kelly made use of stacks student workers, with Merlyssa Prince continuing a periodical relabeling project and Ryan Cook joining Matthew Charles in shifting on the sixth floor. Kelly also showed Erin Bazar how to clean the library computers, a task Erin now performs weekly.

Circulation:
Janet and Debra Stephens volunteered to review the old Circulation Advisory Group website and decide what information should be moved to the Circulation and Access Committee wiki with the intention of removing the CAG site. They met twice during the month to work on the project.

Central purchased a new 3M sensitizer/desensitizer, and we put it to good use in Circulation. New carpet for the Central Lobby was installed during the fall break and Janet opened the Library on Saturday, Oct. 14, at 7am for the carpet layers. They were able to complete the job over the weekend, and it looks great. We hired and began training four students to replace three who resigned. LaRentina Gray was honored for her 25 years of service at the Staff Service Awards.

Reserves:
We received and processed five new lists, which brings the semester total to 62 lists. LaRentina is currently preparing the e-mail letter to faculty requesting their reserve lists for the spring semester.

Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)

Electronic Resources:
The Electronic Resources Committee met on Oct. 11 and 25. We approved trials for Blackwell's Compass journals (History Compass, Literature Compass and Philosophy Compass), Ethnic Newswatch: A History (1960-1968), Oxford Scholarship Online, ebrary, Sabin Americana (1500-1926), and Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspaper Digital Archive. We also approved two free resources, Public Opinion Poll Question Database and American Jewish Committee Archives, for the Articles & Databases page. Committee members are Janice Adlington, Yvonne Boyer, David Carpenter, Sue Erickson, Susan Widmer, John Haar, and Mary Beth Blalock (Chair).

Outreach:
Yvonne met with several faculty members including Jinah Kim (History of Art) regarding the Southeast Asia art collection, Pat Ward (French and Italian) regarding the Baudelaire "Fleurs" web exhibition, and Elizabeth Moodey (new faculty in History of Art) regarding the library art collection.

Peter Brush taught a session of HONS 184, Honors Seminar: U.S. and the Vietnam War.

Paula Covington and Professor Jane Landers held a Humanities Research Seminar on the uses of the Ecclesiastical Sources for Slave Societies Project. She also prepared displays for the Central Library lobby on the visit of President Eurico Gaspar Dutra of Brazil to Vanderbilt in 1949 and on Brazilian special collections. Two student assistants worked on the project using materials from the University Archives. Paula also consulted with a Brazilian student who was here on a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant and several visiting scholars from Brazil who were here for the Brazilian Studies Association conference.

Personnel:
Jill Hollingsworth joined our staff as Bibliographer/Reference Librarian on Oct. 2. Everyone was involved in her training, and she had introductory meetings with Cataloging and Order Services. Unfortunately and for various reasons, Jill resigned her position after two weeks. We have reopened the search and hope to interview candidates in February and March.

Paula interviewed and hired two student employees to assist with collection development, evaluating the Andean collection for our National Resource Center grant, and other projects.

Gifts:
Bryan Kurowski worked with the Gaby Hoffmann collection. The collection includes 827 items. About half of the collection is classical and contemporary German literature; the remainder consists of novels, biographies, and other various works. We received 14 other titles, making a total of 841 gift items for October.

Paula received a gift collection from Guatemala.

Meetings, Conferences, Training:
Bryan met with Janice Adlington to discuss his work with electronic resources for her white paper on an electronic resources management system (ERMS).
He also met with Kathy Smith to review some titles from the Poggenburg and Brown collections.

Paula attended a meeting to discuss a future joint grant proposal with Brown University. She was also active with local arrangements activities for the BRASA conference.

Sue Erickson worked with the Anthropology faculty regarding a gap in our coverage of Anthropology News because of a 10-year moving wall archive for institutional subscribers to the AnthroSource database.

Yvonne attended sessions of the Southeastern College Art Conference including the session on "The Art of Bookmaking in the 21st Century". She also completed her work on the Faculty News Project, a project of the Communications Committee.

Mary Beth met with Deborah Hodges (ProQuest), Michael Poynter (Recorded Books), and John Laraway (Blackwell Approval Plan). She also met with Yuh-Fen Benda to discuss issues relating to East Asia faculty requests for Chinese materials.

Government Information/Media Services (Amy Stewart-Mailhiot)

Larry Romans continues to volunteer in the department and will come back officially in December. He is the Leisure Reading bibliographer and a member of the Leisure Reading Collection Committee (LRCC), which is developing a weblog and trying to improve both publicity for the collection and the space near the collection. We have made the decision to rent many of our Leisure Reading books from McNaughton/Brodart. Larry also is working with his students on the Government Information and Political Science web pages.

We completed interviews for our open LA III position. We were very happy to have Brian Boling join our department on Oct.30. Brian comes to us with five years of circulation experience at Nashville Public Library and three years of customer service experience at The Great Escape. Brian's main responsibility will be handling our video collection, specifically video reserves.

Larry and Amy conducted a library instruction session for Paula Covington's LA 290 class.

Amy did a brief presentation of the HeinOnline products at the Reference meeting.

Teri Bante continued to update the handbook for student assistants, rewriting the section on UN documents to reflect changes to the department. In just six months, Teri has become an expert in handling the processing of our Federal Depository items. Our backlog of items has been erased, and she has moved on to clean up of existing records.

Instruction (Melinda Brown)

In October, Central librarians presented a total of 27 course-related sessions to 359 students and 20 instructors.

AADS 115 - Race & Sports in American Culture (Whiting), Peter Brush, 13 students
ANTH 115 - Conquest of Mexico (Fowler), Paula Covington, 11 and the professor
ART 102 - Drawing (Aurbach), Yvonne Boyer, 18 students
CLAS 115 - Women, War and Human Rights from Antiquity through the Modern Day (Gaca), Melinda Brown, 14 students and the professor
ENGL 100 - Composition (Fusco), Melinda Brown, 12 students and the professor
ENGL 100 - Composition (Menne), Melinda Brown, 11 students and the professor
ENGL 100 - Composition (Menne) 2nd session, Melinda Brown, 11 students and the professor
ENGL 102 - Forbidden, Frustrated Desires (Choi), Sue Erickson, 8 students and the professor
ENGL 102 - Literature: Forms & Technique (Hagood), Melinda Brown, 13 students and the professor.
ENGL 115 - The Suburbs (Kreyling), Melinda Brown, 11 students and the professor.
ENGL 290 - Honors Thesis Colloquium (Schoenfeld), Sue Erickson, 13 students and the professor
GER 314 - Introduction to Germanics as a Discipline (McCarthy), Susan Widmer, 6 students and the professor
GER 314 - Introduction to Germanics as a Discipline (McCarthy) 2nd session, Susan Widmer, 6 students and the professor
HIST 115 - Destruction of the Indies (Landers), Paula Covington, 12 students and the professor
HIST 300 - Introduction to Methodology of History (Molineux), Peter Brush, 8 students
PHIL 115 - Music, Self & Society (Neufeld), Sue Erickson, 13 students
PHIL 115 - Nature of the Political (Simmons), Melinda Brown, 15 students and the professor
PSCI 211 - European Union (Hancock), Amy Stewart-Mailhiot, 35 students.
PSY 115 - General Psychology (Fox), Sue Erickson & David Carpenter, 11 students and the professor
RLST 115 - Women of the New Testament (Hylen), Melinda Brown, 13 students and the professor
SOC 220 - Population & Society (Donato), Sue Erickson, 32 students and the professor
SOC 279 - Contemporary Mexican Society (Donato), Paula Covington, 8 students and the professor
WGS 115 - Women in Law & Literature (Fesmire), Melinda Brown, 12 students and the professor.
WGS 291 - Senior Research Seminar (Casper), Melinda Brown, 6 students

Additional instruction activities:
Central librarians continued to meet with new A&S faculty.

Sue Erickson conducted a workshop, Finding Data for Research, for the Peabody Library that was attended by 11 participants.

Melinda facilitated a meeting for a new group, the Committee on Undergraduate Information Literacy (CUIL). It currently consists of representatives from the libraries that serve undergraduates, Flo Wilson, Kate Daniels (Associate Dean of A&S), the Writing Studio, the Center for Teaching and the Director for Undergraduate Writing.

Melinda attended the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network for Higher Education conference, "Theory and Research for a Scholarship of Practice", in Portland, OR. She attended a pre-conference workshop, "Supporting Faculty Who Teach First-Year Students", and co-presented a workshop, "Enhancing Student Information Literacy through Library and Faculty Development Partnerships", with Patricia Armstrong from the Center for Teaching.

Reference (David Carpenter)

Recruitment:
As members of the Search Committee for the Classics/Philosophy/Psychology Bibliographer/Reference Librarian position, David and Peter Brush participated in interviewing references for selected applicants and participated in a search committee meeting. David met with Lisa Shipman to discuss the status of the search committee's work. He also met with John Haar and Mary Beth Blalock to update them on the search committee's progress. The Committee hopes to begin interviews for this position in November.

Training and Orientation:
Continuing her training and orientation begun in August, Sara Byrd participated in the following training sessions and tours in September:

Workflows training (Bryan Kurowski)
Tour of Management Library (Amia Baker)
Tour of Music Library (Sara Beutter)
Meeting with Larry Romans about collection development

In her first month of regular service on the reference desk, Sara worked a total of 67 hours, including some weekend reference shifts.

Special Note:
My former colleagues at the Walker Management Library organized and held a "David Carpenter Appreciation Dinner" on Saturday Oct. 14 at the home of Flo Wilson and Bill Longwell. I truly appreciated and enjoyed the party, with its delicious food, the warm hospitality of Flo and Bill, and the excellent company of my former colleagues, family members, and other guests. I will enjoy using the Ingram or Baker & Taylor gift certificate given to me, and will always treasure my second gift from the party--a beautiful plaque, recognizing my service to the Walker Management Library last year.

Meetings, Conferences, Training

Many staff attended the Heard Library Staff Service Awards ceremony, the Oct. 16 coffee and doughnuts staff meeting, Divinity Library open house, and a reception honoring the past director of the Bandy Center (Pat Ward).

Mary Beth Blalock: Committee on Collections meeting.
Yvonne Boyer: Peabody Library Alumni presentations.
Melinda Brown: Research Services Committee meeting; Writing Advisory Group meeting.
Peter Brush: Data workshop; VU Web Spiders meeting.
Sara Byrd: Leisure Reading Committee meetings.
David Carpenter: Digital Library Steering Committee meetings; Walker Management Library Open House; Owen Graduate School of Management Construction Team meeting; Management Library Thank You Luncheon; Ex Libris/Primo GetIt! Committee meetings.
Paula Covington: Communications Committee meeting; Brazilian Studies Conference Advisory Committee meeting.
Ben Darling: Primo Get It Committee meeting; Leisure Reading Committee
meeting.
Sue Erickson: Primo Normalization Team meeting; GLB Signage Committee meeting; procurement card training.
Bryan Kurowski: Technology Support Coordinators meeting; Leisure Reading Committee meeting.
Janet Thomason: Circulation and Access Committee meeting.
Daisy Whitten: Staff Development Committee meeting; Technology Support Coordinators meeting.
Robert Wright: Technology Support Coordinators meeting.