The big event for the month of April was the 25th Anniversary Celebration of the Walker Management Library. All library staff and the entire Owen Graduate School of Management community were invited. Special guests included a number of former Management Library employees including Carol Dickerson who served as director from 1985 to 1999, and Germain Boer and Dewey Daane who spoke of their recollections of the library ‘back then’ as part of the program. Special arrangements included invitations and logos, champagne glasses with the logo as a keepsake, and a wonderful slide show with photos from the last 25 years. Rachel Vacek and Brent Tenpenny deserve special recognition for the creative work that went into this celebration, and all the staff were responsible for making this a successful event. Special Collections provided a great deal of assistance by finding and preparing photographs to be included and by having Henry Shipman take photos at the party. The slideshow is available on the WML homepage, and a CD with the slideshow, photos from the event, the remarks and the invitation was created and distributed to all former and current staff. More pictures are available online.

Owen has introduced a new school calendar system which will allow the various departments in the school to plan and coordinate activities, and provide better information to faculty, staff, students, potential students, recruiters, alumni, and website visitors. Calendar users can subscribe to RSS feeds produced by the various calendars and add specific events on those calendars to their own Outlook calendars. WML has a calendar that is linked off the WML homepage under Quick Links. Rachel was designated as the “Calendar Champion” for the Library.

A new, 42” flat-screen monitor has been mounted on the wall in the Library’s conference room. A laptop can easily be hooked up to a power and connectivity grid in the middle of the conference table. Use of monitors in the group study rooms is also under consideration, and Owen is looking for donors to help support the costs of adding these. So far, there appears to be the possibility for funding equipment for 4 of the rooms. Fund-raising will continue.

In November, the national Net Impact Symposium will be held at Vanderbilt; planning and support for this will be provided by the students as well as by the School. The Library is looking forward to participating in this event and has been discussing the options for providing program space during the conference.

Library staff said farewell to Bec Hinton as she completed her term position as a circulation assistant. We held a special luncheon for all of our student assistants and provided small tokens of appreciation for our eight graduating seniors.

Deborah Brooks, at the request of David Carpenter and Hilary Rudsenske, conducted a tour of the library for Steven Nordstrom and Ramona Romero.

Service Model Project

The reconstituted Service Model Project Team, with Brent as lead, got underway in April. Joining Brent on the committee are Cynthia Kutka, Laura Norris and Rachel. Committee members have agreed upon new timetable goals for testing and implementing the unified service desk model, and have identified key areas for the group’s consideration as we move forward. The new group is enthusiastically working toward the goal of having a unified service desk operation in place by fall 2007.

Data Gathering & Tracking

According to Google Analytics, there were over 7,400 visits to the library website during April, and over 18,200 specific pageviews.

For the month of April, 44% of our users came to the WML website directly, 22% came from Google, 16% came from the Owen Intranet (Blackboard), 7% came from the Heard Library website, 6% came from the Owen homepage, and 5% came to the WML website by other means.

Our current blog platform also conveniently captures statistics for the WML Spotlight, although it has many limitations. There have been 1,393 total views other than from the Library’s home page since it began in January.

During the second week of April, Access Services staff collected data for the library-wide Seating Sweep.

The number of circulations in April was the highest for the year so far at 430 items (an additional 239 circulations for reserve items). However, circulation for the spring semester as a whole was down by 8% from last spring. For the year to date, circulation is down 18% with reserve circulation down 25%.

The Information Services team received a total of 186 requests in April; this is 32% decrease from the 273 questions that we had during the same period last year. This decrease continues the trend we have seen over the past academic year. Interestingly, we had a substantial increase of 56% (28) in Owen faculty requests, compared to April of last year.

We now have 30 research guides in total; these were viewed by 1,246 individuals during April.

To help us better understand information service use, we enhanced LibStats to help us accurately capture the amount of time librarians spend on each reference transaction; we look forward to reporting on those statistics in the future. Also, at the end of the month we posted a 5 question information services survey for our students; results from the survey will be included in the May report.

The Business Information Service currently has 74 clients; during April, a light month, there were 8 meetings with clients, 2 research requests, and 5 document delivery requests.

User Services

Planning for the Accelerator program in May/June got underway in April. Cynthia will be providing most of the information services support to this intensive four week program, and she and Brent are working on library schedules that will help support the students’ needs. Joe Collins will help provide extended evening support as needed.

Six new library research guides were added to the website - Accounting and Auditing, Salary Surveys and Relocation, Surveys and Polls, Industry Ratios, Hedge Funds, and Finanical Ratios.

Cynthia taught a class for MGT 599, Online Explorations for Business Information.

Collections

Joe and Bec completed pulling periodical volumes for the annex transfer project. Sylvia Grant completed most of the maintenance work required for finishing this project.

In preparing for the conversion of our order records to the new electronic funds, Deborah has identified all of our electronic resources which are not journal related and is in the process of soliciting assistance from the team in evaluating the type of content of each resource. She will then assign the order to the corresponding e-fund.

The Collection Development team of Hilary, Rahn Huber and Deborah met several times to organize, plan and refine the focus of our commitment to creating a responsive and accessible collection. While this team is looking towards the future by assigning several “action roadmaps” to accomplish our vision, we are also dealing with the day to day issues of the present. These include ordering materials; responding to requests from other library departments regarding acquisitions and cataloging issues; investigating standing orders, invoices and claims; and communicating with vendors. This team also was involved in some liaison work with the Accounting faculty to acquire materials to support new programs. As a result, a couple of ongoing requests were finally resolved and an investigation into the feasibility of obtaining additional resources from the American Accounting Association was initiated. Rachel met with the WML Collections Team to discuss how electronic resource management should be handled.

Outreach & the Business Information Service (BIS)

Tracy Primich and Rahn met with the Vanderbilt Office of Technology Transfer and are currently working on three of their licensing research projects. The immediate goal is to teach them and understand their challenges better. Ultimately we will have enough information and understanding about the nature of their work to recommend future steps for support.

Technology

Rachel installed Datastream Advance and the Excel Add-on for them for two Owen faculty.

Jim Toplon and Laura initiated a conversation with Rachel and Dale Poulter about getting ILLiad set up in the library in preparation for the faculty delivery service.

Jason Reusch of Owen ITS met with Rachel to talk about upcoming technological plans and changes as well as some of their projects that may affect the library over the summer.

Rachel and Brent continued to post news items to The WML Spotlight. On WML Tech Updates, Rachel continued to post notes from various technological meetings and webcasts she attended, as well as a few other items she found relevant and interesting.

Administrative Support

Elaine Hill took a survey of staff/student coffee usage for evaluation and to ascertain other options of providing coffee and hot water service for the future.

Following a telephone audit, two telephone lines were deleted which are no longer in use.

Staff Activities & Professional Development

Library-wide Committee and Project Team activities:

CAC representative for WML (Brent)
Collections Committee (Deborah)
Electronic Resource Management System Project Team (Rachel)
Faculty Document Delivery Service Project Team (Laura)
Library Staff Picnic Planning Committee (Laura)
Primo GetIt! Implementation Project Team (Brent)
Primo Usability Testing Team (Cynthia)
Primo GetIt! Implementation Project Team (Rachel)
Primo Usability Testing Team (Laura)
Project Management Project Team (Rahn)
Research Services Committee (Cynthia)
Seating Sweep Project Team (Brent)
SFX Project Team (Rachel)
Staff Development Committee (Rahn)
Technology & Training Support Coordinators (Rachel)

Other Library activities:

Cynthia and Hilary attended a demonstration of the ORBIS – International Company database.

Rachel attended the coffee & donuts session, the Emerging Technologies in a Divinity Library Presentation by Chris Benda, Theological Librarian Candidate, a SirsiDynix Webcast: The Info Island Project on Second Life, Ex Libris’ Verde demo, and she blogged the Scholarly Stats and SwetsWise demo.

Rachel met with Amy Stewart-Mailhoit to discuss suggestions and exchange ideas for the Central Library website facelift over the summer.

Rachel attended the monthly Spiders Meeting in Sarratt where she watched a presentation on “The Science & Art of Effective Web & Application Design.” They also talked about the campus-wide web server migration, the new Peabody College redesign and the upcoming Vanderbilt homepage redesign.

Rachel had 2 conference calls with her Emerging Leaders Project Team in preparation for their poster session at ALA Annual.

Rahn participated in the planning for the SLA/SARC Regional Conference.