Directors meeting

The Luther L. Gobbel Library at Lambuth University hosted the fall meeting of the West Tennessee Academic Library Consortium November 16, 2002. Those present included Scott Cohen, Steve Baker, Steve Rogers, Darlene Brooks, Lan Wang, Pam Dennis, Annette Hunt, and Margaret Cardwell

Steve Baker reported that the subcommittee (Steve Baker, Scott Cohen, Sylverna Ford, Margaret Cardwell) charged with examining the constitution and by laws of the organization will have the review completed and ready for discussion by the spring meeting. At this point there are six recommendations from the committee that will help give better direction to the Board. Some of these recommendations will broaden the nature of the board. The committee recommends the creation of an executive board that can meet between the spring and fall meetings to conduct business for the organization. Another task the committee completed was to more clearly define the duties of the officers. During the discussion of the website, Steve Baker suggested that webmaster be addressed in the constitution/by-laws.

Scott Cohen reported that the Board of Regents has implemented guidelines for system members to host websites. He asked if there would be interest from another member of the group to host the WETALC site should his president ask him to remove the WETALC site from Jackson State. The new site is http://library.jscc.edu/WTALC. Scott asked for suggestions about what should be on the site. It was recommended that a link to the job site list in TN be added as a link.

The discussion of the possibility of public libraries joining WETALC that had been tabled at the previous meeting was dropped.

Pam Dennis reported that she, Steve Baker, and Lan had attended the TICUA meeting in Nashville. Each of the three state divisions has an organization similar to WETALC. Some are doing such things as document sharing and grant applications. The Eastern region has received a grant for digital preservation of the Appalachian materials. TICUA may also be useful in terms of volume purchasing for its membership.

Pam also reported that Lambuth will house a Holocaust collection from the Jewish community in Jackson. That also will open up grant seeking opportunities.

Steve Rogers reported that the museum at UTM has been relocated to the library. They are looking into grant possibilities involving museum and special collections.

Both Steve Rogers and Annette Hunt reported that their gate counts are up.

A discussion regarding encouraging students’ use of scholarly resources instead of Google included mention of the Net experts at UTM. Pam said they have set up appointments with individual faculty and met them in their offices to show them databases in their fields of interest. Darlene reported that some faculty at Rhodes insist on doing library instruction themselves; oftentimes with confusing results for the students.

Pam, Annette, and Lan all endorsed the idea of eating in the cafeteria as a good way to encourage use of the library by faculty.

There was a discussion of Legislative day in Nashville in January. Pam will write a letter to our legislators from the group thanking them for their continued support.

The print serials list was discussed. It is heavily used by the Jackson community of colleges. Should it be published electronically was debated. UTM reorganized their journal collection by LC class number. Steve Rogers notes that its use is down.

The discussion of serials brought up the question of housing older paper issues and what the library community can do about this continuing problem.

3M and Checkpoint security systems were briefly discussed.

Steve Rogers handed out a checklist of things to watch for in SACS accreditation. The library came through their review with no written recommendations for which they are very thankful due in part to their good preparation.

The directors adjourned with Pam nominating the U of M who was absent to hold the spring meeting.

Respectfully submitted,

Margaret Cardwell

11/20/2002

Joyce Johnston was recently hired as Catalog/Reference Librarian. Joyce came to Jackson State from Auburn University in Montgomery. Joyce received her MLS from the University of South Carolina.

Jill Daniel was hired as Library Public Services Assistant. She has a degree in computers from the Tennessee Technology Center in Lexington.

Mary Ellen Pozzebon will start as Reference and Instruction Librarian on December 2.

She comes to us from Sacramento California and received her Master's Degree online from San Jose State University.

The JSCC Library sponsored a reception for students during the second week of classes this semester. The students enjoyed the food!

The JSCC Library is now opening at 7:30 AM to accommodate student needs.

The new library web page is nearing completion. It will have the same basic design as the new college web page.

The library is finalizing its policies and procedures manuals. The college has mandated that every area have policies and procedures finished by December 2.

The JSCC Library has several new databases, including EBSCO's Academic Search Elite.

In addition the JSCC Library now has E-subscribe, which provides full-text of recent ERIC documents and also has Serials Solutions which provides access to full-text journals in the databases to which the library subscribes.

Rhodes College will have the official groundbreaking for the New Library on December 12, 2002.  Plans are for the new library to be completed by Summer 2005.  The Library is no longer under the Academic Affairs department, but is in the Division of Information Services.  The Dean of Information Services handles both the Library and the Computer Center (Information Technology Services), with both the Director of the Library and the Director of Information Technology Services reporting to him.  Both departments will move into the new Library.  At this time both departments have been assigned to work together on committees.  These committees consist of:  Public Services, Public Relations, Training, Security, and Divisional Mission Statement.

The purpose of these committees is to develop a basic strategy that would enable the two departments to become one and to coexist as a unit.

Attendees from Rhodes introduced:  Betsey Gates-- Archivist; Rachel Feinman—Cataloger/Collection Development/Reference; Kenan Padgett—Interlibrary Loan/Reference; and Darlene Brooks—Information Services &Electronic Resources Librarian.

HIGHLIGHTS FOR ACADEMIC YEAR 2001-2002 THROUGH THE FALL OF 2002

LIBRARY DOUBLES FUNDING FOR ONLINE DATABASES

The library doubled its support for online subscription databases

during 2001-2002. Beginning in the Fall of 2001,the library received

additional database funding support from both the Campus Technology

Fee and the Office of Online and University Studies. Due to this support,

in combination with library funds identified for this purpose, we were able

to subscribe to ProQuest full text expansion modules in areas of Education, Social Science, Applied Science, General Science, Agriculture and Nursing. We also subscribed to JSTOR archival backfiles, Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, New York Times & Wall Street Journal Historical Newspaper database, PsychInfo + Text, ERIC, Emerald Management Database, Oxford Reference Online, JSTOR Ecology and Botany Collection, CQ Researcher and the indexing databases MLA International Bibliography and MathSciNet. These additions have brought our total number of library databases to 100

(57 full text), which is above parity for similar-sized institutions in the state.

NEW ONLINE RESERVE SYSTEM

The library purchased and implemented a new "Docutek" online reserve service for all resident and extended campus students during the Spring Semester 2002. This system was funded with special equipment monies from Academic Affairs.

LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM UPGRADE FUNDED BY CAMPUS

The library’s proposed "Millennium" management system upgrade was funded through the Campus Technology Fee as approved by the Academic Computing Advisory Committee in April of 2002. The library began implementation and training procedures for the new automation system upgrade in August, 2002.

CREATION OF CATALOG AND DATABASE TUTORIALS

Instruction/Circulation Librarian Angie Widener and System/Reference Librarian Jim Nance have created a new database and OPAC tutorial system. They evaluated the web-based tutorials of other academic libraries and eventually decided to integrate the applications "RoboDemo" and "CrazyTalk" in the creation of this new offering. The tutorial was placed

online during October, 2002.

MUSEUM OPERATIONS TO MOVE TO LIBRARY

With the recent retirement of Dr. S. K. Airee as Museum Director,

the administration elected to move both University Museum

operations and programmatic responsibility to the Paul Meek Library.

Richard Saunders was appointed as Curator of Specials Collections and

Museum/Archives, while Library Associate Karen Elmore will assist

with displays and exhibits. The physical renovations to the Special

Collections Room were completed in late September and the new

University Museum began operations shortly thereafter.

LIBRARY COMPLETES SACS PREPARATIONS AND VISITATION

Virtually every member of the library faculty was involved in preparations

for the SACS visitation in April of 2002. These included a Library Self Study

prepared by Rogers during 00-01 and the writing of the Library component

of Section V (Educational and Support Services) by Nance and Rogers as part

of the campus-wide Self-Study Report. Library faculty members also served on the SACS Documents Committee (Downing, Grove, Nance, Saunders),

the Institutional Purpose Committee (Butler), the Faculty Committee (Moore) and the Financial Resources Committee (Bell). The initial report of the SACS

visitation team was extremely positive for UT-Martin, and the campus anticipates full reaccreditation in 2003. There were no formal recommendations or suggestions for the library, though the visiting librarian did informally recommend the creation of an online catalog and database tutorial system, which was recently implemented in October, 2002.

CREATION OF SYSTEMS/REFERENCE POSITION

HIRING OF REPLACEMENT INSTRUCTION/CIRCULATION LIBRARIAN

The Computer Center proposed the transfer of a Systems Analyst position

to the library. Jim Nance assumed the new position as Systems/Reference

Librarian, allowing his vacated post of Instruction/Circulation Librarian to

be searched nationally. The library’s search committee, chaired by Collection

Development Librarian Earlene Moore, ultimately selected Ms. Angie Widener of Abingdon, Virginia. This net addition to the library staff brought our total professional complement back up to ten, still two positions short

of Peer averages. The library also requested the addition of a media cataloger position in Technical Services during 2001-2002. The request was based on the need to address a cataloging backlog due to a shortage of staff in this area. A decision to fund this position for a Spring, 2003 search is still pending by the university.

OTHER NEW LIBRARY WEBSITES

System/Reference Librarian Jim Nance has worked other library faculty members to either upgrade or create new library webpages for the campus, including a major indexed bibliography entitled Business Information Sources with Reference Head John Bell, a new Library Development Page with Curator Richard Saunders, a page for promoting student use of library subscription databases and a new page which simplifies our proxy server

(authentication) instructions for students using different browsers.

"WIRELESS" LAPTOP COMPUTERS IN MEDIA SERVICES

The Paul Meek Library and the Office of Computer Services created a pilot project late in 2001 to provide a number of "wireless" laptop computers for checkout to students. These new PC and Macintosh laptops are connected to the Internet by means of a transmitter/receiver system, and can checked out by students for in-house library use from the Media Services Department. Due to high levels of student demand, additional laptops were added during the Spring, 2002 semester. This strong student demand more than doubled

the equipment circulation stats for Library Media Services during 2001-2002.

YEAR-LONG SURVEY OF STUDENTS (2001-2002)

Last year the staff of the Paul Meek Library decided to try something different in order to encourage additional feedback from students concerning library services. We conducted an academic-year survey of the student population, with a new question placed on the library’s homepage each week. The student who answered the most questions received the prize of a paid

parking sticker. Student responses to library questions resulted in the

addition of new books and databases in selected areas in addition to a

change in the library’s final exam week hours.

OVERDUE NOTICES MOVED TO E-MAIL

Last year the Paul Meek Library began sending out overdue material notices via e-mail rather than through the post office. This new procedure was established so that the library could more effectively communicate with students, staff and faculty concerning overdue material. In moving to

an e-mail system, we consulted with other universities as well as UTM students. Overall, e-mail seems to be the best and most efficient solution

to the question of library overdues. E-addresses are being obtained from

the Banner and Mascot Systems.

SELF-RENEWAL OF BOOKS

One of the library's new services allows students to renew books themselves by using the online catalog (OPAC) to secure authentication.

NEW BOOK CIRCULATION SYSTEM FOR SELMER CENTER

Working with the staff of the Selmer LRC, the library purchased a scanning

wand and a magstripe-reading keyboard which allowed the LRC to begin circulating their non-reference book collection to students at the Center.

Nance placed the system online during one of his periodic trips to Selmer.

Since our last meeting, we have been fully staffed in the library. We all participated in the university’s Freshman Orientation, providing snacks on the lawn, and a brief overview of the library’s OPAC and database systems as well as a library tour to the 225 freshmen. Since that time, Sammy has given bibliographic instruction to an additional 200+ students through in-library classes. He has also begun developing "finding aids" for the students for each of the disciplines and continues to improve our library homepage.

Mitzi and I began a "faculty blitz" in the fall, going door-to-door to teach the faculty to use the library’s remote features. We have worked with 20 of the 50 faculty thus far, including our Academic Dean. Mitzi is also manually adding tables of contents to newly acquisitioned books, providing an extremely valuable search tool for the faculty and students. She has received much praise from the faculty for this extra effort. Over 700 books have been added to the collection in addition to 103 CDs, 62 videos, and several CD-ROMs.

Rex and Lyda spent the summer and fall semester entering our serials titles in the OPAC. The patron can now tell what titles we hold in paper, microform, and electronic formats. As part of our "faculty blitz" program, we asked each faculty member to review the titles held by his/her discipline to determine if the title was one that would be useful and if the format was appropriate. We had 100% participation by the departments in reallocating these funds for better use of the funds.

Lyda has just begun cataloging parts of the Government Documents collection to provide searchability for these records in the OPAC. In addition to handling all the acquisitions and spending responsibilities, Jackie has been actively working to organize the archives for better usability. We hope to begin offering remote access to indexes of that material sometime in the future.

Susan’s team of student workers went to bat on recon cataloging. Pam has taken on this project "in her spare time," and has added 15,000 records to the OPAC this year that were previously not searchable. The students scanned the barcodes attached to every book in the library to make sure all books were cataloged in the collection properly.

Two committees have joined with the library in developing community awareness. The Library Committee, made up of faculty members from each School, will be sponsoring lectures, book reviews, and film-viewings in the upcoming months. The Lambuth-Jewish partnership will be setting up a Jewish Resource Room in the library. Through library and religious grants, we hope to provide resources on Judaism, and particularly on the Holocaust, for the community.

Due to lower than expected enrollment this fall, the money that had been budgeted for our migration from DRA is not available. Our grants’ director continues to look for other funding opportunities after our first two grant applications were denied. Needless to say the staff is very disappointed. We have been told that the money will be set aside in next year’s budget.

Bridgette Decent and Laura Simpson presented a workshop on plagiarism to the members of the faculty at our fall President’s workshop. It was very well received and much of that information is available on our website.

As others have mentioned we also have an ongoing project to correct and enhance the brief bibliographic records for serials in our catalog.

Margaret Cardwell, Bridgette Decent, and Benjamin Head were able to attend ALA in Atlanta this past summer.

Benjamin Head designed a short survey for our incoming group of evening students. The results, which revealed lack of knowledge of how to search the catalog, were shared with the Academic Vice President.

We are happy to have Wade Osburn on our staff and he has added a great

deal to our reference area as well as being our resident expert in

Biblical Studies.  We completed a major re-lettering project over the

summer, merging our oversized books back into our collection.

We are beginning the process of long range planning in the library.  We

need more space and the administration know, with the help of SACs, that

something has to be done.  We are looking at renovation vs a new

building and hope to have future plans decided in the next year.

Our enrollment is up and we have had a very busy fall semester. Hope

Shull was gone for 3 months, Aug. 11-Nov. 11, helping with our FHU

International Studies program.  The group consisted of 4 faculty/staff

and 27 students. 

It was a wonderful experience and I am so grateful to our staff who

agreed to let me go.

DSCC has been hunting for an Instructional Librarian since last May.  I advertised nationally three times.  Two times with no applicants.  There were only three applicants with MLS's but the only qualified applicants had M.Ed with Library Specialty.  The Monday after your meeting the former Director of the Martin Public Library applied.  She brought lots of experience and is working on her M.Ed. Teresa Johnson is now our Instructional Librarian.  She started Tuesday.  Thursday we are interviewing for our Technical Services/Computer Library Assistant.  Things look promising.  We should be back to our small staff of five with all positions filled.

Only one comment about the search for the instructional librarian:  The MLS’s did not have the training in information skills, learning theory, information theory and information technology to meet the information literacy training spelled out in the ACRL Information Literacy Standards.  The M.Ed's did have the education background, learning theory, information theory and information technology training.

With the arrival of Teresa, DSCC will begin to develop an Across the Curriculum Information Skills program to begin beta testing in Fall 03.

Early Sunday morning, Nov. 10 an F1 tornado formed above the campus, creating 110-mile-an-hour winds which blew dumpsters and picnic tables through the air, knocked down trees and power lines, and broke and shattered glass windows in cars and buildings. Damage estimates of 1.7M dollars were concentrated in the student housing area where several dozen students were displaced from dorms and suffered loss to personal property. Fortunately, no one was injured and the spirit of community on campus during the cleanup effort has been most noticeable.

A major emphasis in the library this past year has been on strengthening and enlarging our collaborative efforts with other departments. The library faculty continued its close working relationship with the School of Education & Human Studies to provide graduate courses for those seeking School Library Media Specialist certification. Five of our students successfully passed the certification exam during the year. There are a total of twenty students in the program at the present time compared with eleven a year ago. The library has also entered into a joint effort with Art Department to facilitate the development of a more functional slide library in support of their disciplinary accreditation effort. Space has been provided to accommodate the cataloging, processing, and filing of slides previously housed in the department. In addition, the library has made arrangements to facilitate the cataloging of the collection being developed for the Ryan Center for Biblical Studies. In addition to making the collection more accessible through the library’s online catalog this effort will also make inventory and control of the collection much more efficient as it grows larger.

The library has received a major collection of about 3500 volumes from alum and former President of the Southern Baptist Convention, Dr. Franklin Paschall. Dr. Paschall was the pastor of First Baptist Church of Nashville for many years and the collection includes the books of his immediate predecessor, W. F. Powell. Together the collection represents the preaching mind of one of Baptists most influential churches during six decades of the twentieth century. The collection is presently housed in the new Ryan Center for Biblical Studies.

The library received about $3500 in book donations in honor of the 50th birthday of school President Dr. David Dockery. The major focus of the collection is on the classics of spirituality and evangelicalism.

Burroughs Learning Center is now actively involved in our long awaited

"bar-coding Project".  This process will be slow and we expect to clear up

many classification discrepancies, inventory lapses, weeding issues, and

etc...We have also been involved with preparation of the library for SAC's

visit to have our PA Program evaluated.  It was a success. Evaluating

databases has also been a big concern for the BLC.

At UT we are preparing to advertise for 3 professional positions in

Access Services, Electronic Services, and Reference. We have just about

concluded the fall teaching blitz, teaching nearly 1000 2-hour sessions

since July. During the summer we received a donation from the Student

Government Association to replace study tables and chairs on the main

floor and in the third floor study rooms.  On October 15 the library

co-sponsored a PDA fair which was well attended by nearly 150 people.

We continue to develop our web resources. We now have links to our

journal holdings in PubMed on our web site. These links may be helpful

to your library patrons, as well. To see them on our library's web site

PubMed. A journal available in our library will have an orange UT logo

in the Abstract display of a selected citation. Brenda Green, our

Instructional Services Coordinator, has been successful with several

funding requests to help the community, including a project to develop

a consumer health library for the Hope House staff and patient families

and another project to train staff at Christ Community Health Center in the use of PubMed and MedlinePlus. Our new issue of the library's

newsletter has been published. If you are not currently receiving

issues, please contact Priscilla Stephenson (pstephenson@utmem.edu)

with your mailing information.

LeMoyne-Owen College

Hollis F. Price Library

Mrs. Rita Mabry, Administrative Assistant was a participant in the 2002 Historically Black Colleges and Universities Archives Assistant Training Program in Atlanta, Georgia in April 2002.

Mrs. Linda Rousseau and Annette Hunt attended the American Library Association Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia in June 15-18, 2003.

In August 2002 Annette Berhe Hunt attended Society of American Archivists Annual Conference in Birmingham, Alabama. The conference provided an array of informative sessions, programs, and tours to promote networking and sharing with Archivists in the United States and beyond.

Annette B. Hunt attended the Memphis Area Library Council Fall workshop at Harding University Graduate School of Religion on "Elvis Did It His Way", presented by Dr. Dan Champion, September 10, 2002.

On October 27-29 Annette Berhe Hunt attended the Historically Black Colleges and University Library Directors initiative meeting in Atlanta, Georgia with 100 librarians and deans. This was an organizational meeting for library directors and deans to network and explore ways to share resources, personnel and services.

The Hollis F. Price Library staff has been actively involved in completing the reclassification project begun two years ago. Barcodes were shipped to the Library in July and the entire staff has been actively involved in bar-coding the collections. The online catalog was introduced to the campus community in September 2002. The Library staff offers Bibliographic Instruction to Honor Students in the fall of each academic year to assist with research for special projects. The Fall 2002 Honor’s seminar students were introduced to the online catalog with a demonstration of ways to explore a more effective tool to locate information. The Library staff continues to discover ways to enhance library services and also ways to make known the resources that are available in the library.

Online cataloging and circulation training for the staff has been on-going both in-house and at the University of Memphis.