MONTHLY REPORT
SEPTEMBER 2004

Statistics

Circulation:
9,482 charges and renewals
6,965 web renewals
221 laptop checkouts
890 reserves charges and renewals
12,450 books shelved
1,076 bound periodicals shelved
996 unbound periodicals shelved
510 newspapers shelved

Reference:
1,395 questions
1,154 (83%) at Reference desk
133 (9%) by e-mail
108 (8%) by telephone

Microform Media Center:
105 reference questions

Web: 28,666 visitor sessions, 191,537 hits

General

The provost and the College of Arts and Science have approved hiring an architectural firm, Johnson Johnson and Crabtree, to design plans for renovating several areas in the Central Library. The Central Renovation Group (John Haar, David Carpenter, Janet Thomason, Martha Young, Sue Erickson, Dale Manning) met with JJC architect Julie Covington on August 31, when Julie presented proposed floor plans with some initial ideas for changes in the building. Ed Belbusti, Vanderbilt's campus architect, also attended the meeting.

The long range plan calls for renovating several Central areas over a series of years. We have targeted the lobby, service desks, Circulation office, and the corridor leading from the lobby to the main elevators for the first renovation segment.. The Renovation Group met again on September 9 to discuss the proposed floor plan for these areas and agreed on revisions. We presented our ideas to Julie on September 13. She will reformulate the floor plans for our approval.

When we are satisfied with the plans, Julie will forward them to an engineering firm for cost estimates, which we will submit to the College for funding. The College has not committed to funding any renovations to this point.

Circulation (Janet Thomason)

Periodicals:
We sent 202 periodicals to the bindery in September. Periodical binding has decreased somewhat after the midyear binding surge. We are now devoting the extra time to making new shelf labels for more than 200 titles that bibliographers have cancelled or converted to online access only. The labels are meant to inform patrons of the last print volume we will receive so they can plan accordingly. On September 29 Rachel Gray, along with Kelly Lockaby and Jo Bilyeu, attended a meeting with the Marking and Binding Taskforce discussing new procedures in sending periodicals, serials, and reference materials to the bindery.

Mary Beth Blalock identified ten periodical titles which can be transferred to the Annex. Ben Darling has been working on transferring these titles during the weekend. Each periodical must have an item record created before it can be transferred, so it is a time-consuming process.

Reserves:
Print reserves: processed 20 lists, which brings the semester total to 95 lists received.
Electronic reserves: 6 ERes requests, 73 OAK requests.
Reserve staff resumed the shelving of oversize materials. They pulled one truck of oversize materials for Annex transfer. LaRentina Gray worked on transferring several trucks while working her circulation desk shifts.

Circulation:
Daisy Whitten attended the Acorn Virtual Task Force meeting on Sept. 2. In addition to working with Collection Maintenance in pulling books in the PN section for Annex transfer, Janet has been withdrawing books designated for withdrawal by the bibliographers as part of the Annex transfer project. We have withdrawn over 100 books this month. Janet and Daisy attended the CAG meeting on Sept. 9, and Janet attended a renovation meeting on the same day. Janet is also serving on the CAG task force to finalize preparations for the 28-day grace period for items which currently have loan periods of 28 days or more. Training of newly-hired students continued. One student has left, and we are currently looking internally for a replacement for those hours. Initial problems with photocopying on the VU Card have subsided, and the process seems to be running smoothly. Many patrons are still using vendacards.

Collection Maintenance:
We currently have shifting projects taking place on the 3d, 5th and 7th floors. These shifts are the results of the Annex transfer project.

Students are continuing with shelf reading as well as straightening each floor when time allows, after the sorting area is cleared.

Jo and Kelly are really pleased with the group of workers they have this semester. They are doing a great job.

Collection Development (Mary Beth Blalock)

Electronic Resources:
The Electronic Resources Committee met on September 8. We approved trials for World Biographical Information System Online, Dictionary of National Biography (web version), and Index Islamicus. We also approved adding three free resources relating to the Presidency from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia to the Articles & Databases page.

After much discussion, the Committee acknowledged the worth of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy project, but given the requested contribution and our materials budget, decided we could not commit to $15,250 to be paid at some future date.

Outreach:
In addition to two instructional sessions for Introduction to French Literature, Yvonne Boyer also meet with Professor Martine Prieto to discuss specific databases relevant to her research.

Yvonne joined Paul Gherman, Professor Pat Ward, and Professor Marshall Eakin for a photograph for an Acorn Chronicle article regarding the Friends of the Library purchase of Les Fleurs du Mal (our 3,000,001 volume).

Paula Covington provided library orientation for Dinorah Azpuru, a new Latin American Political Scientist, and provided a session for Center faculty on her trip to Cuba. She also held graduate orientation sessions for Latin American Studies and Spanish students as well as meetings with several doctoral students relating to their dissertation topics. Paula continues to write articles for the Acorn Chronicle and is currently working on an article about book buying in Latin America and Cuba.

Susan Widmer met with Professor Seven, German Dept. Chair, and two graduate assistants to discuss the organization of the departmental library and to explore the possibilities of creating a small, online searchable catalog that would be accessible from the department's website.

Film Acquisition:
The Central Library assumed responsibility (formerly handled by the Learning Resource Center) for acquiring the films requested by faculty for use in their classes. Dale Manning is our bibliographer for this service and has met with faculty, staff of the LRC, Order Services staff, and Cataloging staff to coordinate the process of acquiring these resources. Although the LRC had already ordered films (videos and DVDs) for this year, Dale continues to receive requests and is ordering titles quickly. He has received several positive comments from faculty regarding the smooth transition and the rapid receipt and processing of the films.

Collaborative Collection Development:
The Information Alliance (VU, UTK, UK) met at Lake Cumberland State Park in Jamestown, Kentucky, on Sept. 28 and 29 to discuss collaborative collection development projects and to "chart our course" for the next five years. Yvonne Boyer (Art), David Carpenter (Reference), and Sue Erickson (Sociology) reported on projects in their subject areas. Other attendees were Janice Adlington, Peter Brush, Paula Covington, John Haar, and Mary Beth Blalock as well as librarians from other divisional libraries. A special "thank you" is in order for all of the librarians who volunteered to miss the meeting in order to provide reference services for our users.

Departmental Meeting:
Bibliographers met on September 1 to discuss the results of our cancellation project and the materials budget for 2004/05. Projections indicate that we cancelled about $100,000 of orders for periodicals, other serials, and electronic resources. Actual savings will depend on the increased cost of materials, publisher approaches to providing online access to resources, and the value of the dollar. Initially, we have designated 5% of our assigned monograph dollars to use for new electronic resources. If actual savings from the cancellation project permit, these dollars will be redistributed among the monograph funds before the end of this fiscal year.

Committee and Other Activities:
Yvonne arranged a meeting with our Casalini Libri representative, Kathryn Paoletti. Janice Adlington, Mary Beth Blalock, and Monica Sanchez participated in the meeting. Yvonne also attended the Oversight Committee meeting for the W. T. Bandy Center.

Julie Loder attended a Technology Training Coordinators' meeting. She was also busy this month training new and returning students for Collection Development work, including some Workflows training for the Latin American Studies students. She also oriented Jim Toplon to Blackwell's Collection Manager so he could access information for ILL requests.

Paula attended the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies faculty meeting, receptions for the new director of the Center for the Americas, and the Women's Faculty Organization meeting.

Cindy Evans, CSA representative, gave a demonstration of Refworks, (a web based bibliographic program) on September 15. Several Central librarians as well as librarians from other divisional libraries attended the session. Some interest has been expressed in having a trial of this program.

Scott Eller, LexisNexis, met with several bibliographers to discuss available resources including the LexisNexis version of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set.

Government Information

September is always highlighted by library instruction classes. Larry Romans and Amy Stewart-Mailhiot provided instruction for seven CMST100 - "Introduction to Public Speaking" sections, as well as provided two sessions for debaters. Larry prepared a handout to assist with Peter Brush's session for Bill Longwell's class on "The Arab-Isaeli Conflict." Amy discussed government information resources for the class in Larry's absence. In all, Amy assisted with eight bibliographic instruction courses.

Nancy Dolinger continued to train student workers on a variety of projects. She also checked in GPO and UN documents and worked on collecting items for binding. Nancy has been getting the office organized. Some desk surfaces are visible for the first time in years.

Amy received authorization and training from Zora Breeding to allow her to download catalog records from OCLC. She also continued training the Graduate Library Assistants in the use of legislative and candidate information sources.

Larry and Amy attended a meeting with Linda Tesar, Roberta Winjum, Jean Wright, and Zora Breeding to discuss the current procedures and location categories for the Marcive records.

Amy attended the Information Alliance seminar in Kentucky. This allowed her to meet with the documents librarians from UK and UT, as well as to learn more about Vanderbilt's current collection development strategies.

Amy contacted Deborah Broadwater at the Biomedical Library to discuss our current housing agreement for publications from the Dept. of Health and Human Services. For a few years we have discussed how to maximize access to these documents, and after discussion they agreed that the items would no longer be sent to Biomedical.

Larry finished the list of categories and subcategories for expanding the Government Information database to include Political Science. Larry and Amy will meet with Suellen Stringer-Hye next month to determine how to implement this expansion.

Microform and Media Center (Peter Brush)

The Media Center had an extremely busy month. Several boxes of new videos arrived from the Learning Resource Center for cataloging. The library also acquired additional videos. In all we added 139 new videos in September.

The Media Center also received new combination videotape/DVD players to support the A&S Film Studies program. DVD use has already begun to increase noticeably.

We have experienced some difficulty in covering the schedule due to student workers quitting unexpectedly after the semester began. We now have all student worker hours filled.

Reference (David Carpenter)

Instruction Report (Melinda Brown, Instruction Coordinator):
September is typically one of our busiest instruction months. This September was no exception, with 27 sessions provided for 440 students. These sessions included:

CLT 351 -- Comparative Methodology, Comparative Literature (Paula Covington and Melinda Brown)
CMST 100 -- Introduction to Public Speaking, five sessions (Amy Stewart-Mailhiot and Larry Romans)
CMST 101 -- Interpersonal Communication, three sessions (Dale Manning)
CMST 200 -- Argumentation & Debate, two sessions (Amy Stewart-Mailhiot and Larry Romans)
CMST 201 -- Persuasion (Amy Stewart Mailhiot and Larry Romans)
CMST 204 -- Policy and Organizational Communication (Amy Stewart-Mailhiot and Larry Romans)
ECON 355 -- Seminar in Research on Economic Development (Susan Widmer, Larry Romans and Sue Erickson)
ENGL 100W -- Composition (Melinda Brown)
ENGL 115W -- African American Literature (Dale Manning)
FREN 220 -- Introduction to French Literature, two sessions (Yvonne Boyer)
HIST 115 -- Arab-Israeli Conflict (Peter Brush)
HIST 200 -- History Workshop, two sessions (Peter Brush)
HUM 115W -- Americans in Paris (Melinda Brown)
PSY 208 -- Principles of Experimental Design (Janice Adlington)
SPAN 202 -- Spanish for Communication, two sessions (Paula Covington)
SPAN 295 -- Spanish Sociolinguistics (Paula Covington and Dale Manning)

Additionally, we offered three graduate student orientation sessions: Latin American Studies (Paula Covington), Spanish (Paula Covington) and Sociology (Sue Erickson).

Paula reported that during one week in September she provided seven hours of library instruction, and all the sessions were new preparations, not classes she had taught before.

Sue Erickson provided a library orientation for new Sociology faculty members on September 1 and 9. She provided a follow-up database instruction session for one of these faculty members in his office in Garland on Sept. 14.

Melinda Brown provided a research library orientation session for fourteen students and an instructor from the Franklin High School International Baccalaureate program on September 8. Melinda also gave several individual tour/information sessions. In addition, she gave an orientation session for Monica Casper, the new director of the Women's Studies program.

On September 24, Dale Manning met with an English graduate student, at her request, for an hour-long session on print and electronic research sources relevant to her recently begun work on her doctoral dissertation. She contacted Dale as a result of recommendations from other English graduate students with whom Dale had met in the past for similar sessions focused on either comprehensive examinations preparation or dissertation work.

GLB Building Renovation Project:
David held a meeting with reference staff on September 2 to brief them on the information presented and discussed at the August 31 meeting with the architects, and to let them view the architects' initial proposals. David shared copies of the new floor plan proposals with his colleagues, asking them for reactions, suggestions and other input toward the hoped-for renovation of the Central Library lobby and the reference area, since changes there are likely to be dramatic.

Other Activities, Meetings, Training Opportunities or Accomplishments:
Many of us attended an Information Alliance Collection Management Seminar on Sept. 28-29 at Lake Cumberland State Park, KY. David Carpenter reported on the Information Alliance Reference Counterparts Project is designed to work out a plan for the three Information Alliance libraries to share a single backfile of selected reference serials, with one of the Information Alliance libraries agreeing to be the "library of record" for specified serials. An agreement and procedures for responding quickly to reference requests requiring information from these shared reference serial backfiles is an essential component of this project.

Thanks to Paula Covington, who arranged a tour of the University School of Nashville's new library on September 3. David, Paula, John, and Martha Young took the tour and were very impressed with the new USN library. USN librarians Jill Eisenstein and Martha Hooper made us feel very welcome and answered our many questions about the new facility.

Janice Adlington and Melinda Brown devoted considerable time and effort toward revising and improving the "Getting Started with your Research" web pages, which were completed and went live shortly before classes started. Janice and Melinda plan to meet with Suellen Stringer-Hye to get her help in improving the appearance of these webpages.

David provided QuestionPoint training for Robert Wright and Ben Darling.

Janice Adlington attended a demonstration of RefWorks bibliographic management software on Sept. 15.

Sue Erickson attended the Central Library Unit Heads meeting on September 7 as a guest, in order to explain the need for adding Excel software to public workstations to support library patrons using statistical databases or other sources of data.

September was Vanderbilt Employee Celebration Month, with a number of events scheduled. Congratulations to Kelly Lockaby, who participated in the Fun Walk/Run on Wed. Sept. 15. It took Kelly only 45 minutes to walk the approximately 2.5 mile route for the event, which had three check points. Kelly signed up for door prizes but did not win. However, Kelly reports that it was a beautiful day for a walk, and the walk helped her to learn more about the Vanderbilt campus. For others would like to walk this route on their own while the beautiful fall weather continues, here is a link to the Fun Walk/Run route.

Committee or Other Regularly Scheduled Meetings Attended:
Central Reference librarians attended various other regular departmental, staff, and task force meetings during June. 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.