Information Commoner
April 2012
Volume 6, Issue 6
Keeping Library Staff on Common Ground
In This Issue
Announcements
2
Department News
2
Employee Spotlight
7
What’s Our Policy?
Mike’s Message
This is the story of Mike who liked to play tennis. He could serve like Pete Sampras, return like Andre Agassiz, run like Rafael Nadal, and hit forehands like Roger Federer. One day, young Mike was playing tennis and the next day his back began to hurt. Mike could not sit in the car without lying down and rolling on his side. An MRI revealed that Mike had a degenerative disc with pinching vertebrae that put sciatic pain down his left leg and foot. So Mike did physical therapy for two months, and then tried to schedule an appointment with a surgeon. Two months later surgery was scheduled in a month with Mike being off sick for the next three weeks. Since then, Mike came to work part-time working only part days.
Mike took off quite a bit of sick time in the nine months between August and April. Fortunately, Mike had saved many hours of sick time over the years, so he was able to collect his salary. Today, Mike has six days left from forty-one in August with more time to take. Don’t wake up in a roadside ditch. Don’t sell your hair to a wig dealer. Save your sick time and collect your check.
By Lesli Baker
The campus recently began using new donation forms for both small and large gifts. Patrons who wish to donate books valued under $5,000 will need to submit the new form. The Library will no longer have a separate form to complete. For donations over $5,000, please refer the donor to Mike.
Our gifts policy and donation forms are available from our web site at www.uvu.edu/library/policies/gifts.html. 2 INFORMATION COMMONER
Announcements
Semester Break Hours
The Library will be on limited hours during the semester break:
April 27—May 3 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Closed Saturday
May 4 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM
May 5 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Normal hours resume May 7.
EDITORIAL INFORMATION
The Information Commoner is an internal communication tool published once a month by and for the Utah Valley University Library staff. Input from all library staff is encouraged.
The deadline for information submittal is the third Friday of each month. Send information to Lesli via email.
News from Technical Services
By Keith Rowley
Busy is the ever present word for things in Technical Services. Christina is busy receiving a large bunch of videos which have recently arrived, including over 50 opera DVDs requested by the Music Department. (If you would like some advice on which to view first, I’d be glad to be of assistance.) Linda is busy processing music CDs and donated videos.
The librarians have supplied Shuyi with a large stack of orders to enter. Jennie is busy cataloging the last of the Theatre Department donation, and then she’ll be working on books for Constitutional Studies. Paul has a wide variety of books, music scores, videos and CDs to catalog. For the last three months Paul has also been busy instructing our cataloging intern whose last day with us was April 10. Erin Mumford was a quick learner and was at the end able to catalog everything Paul presented to her. She was able to transfer that instruction into a Cataloging Procedures manual for us. She is applying for jobs in the Las Vegas area. We wish her well.
INFORMATION COMMONER 3
By Sarah Suazo
Online Access Now Available for Science Titles
Several science titles are now available online including: Nature, Nature Genetics, and Nature Genetics Reviews. To access them:
1. Go to the library’s website: www.uvu.edu/library/.
2. Click on “Journals by Title.”
3. Type in “Nature online resource” (This will ensure you are taken directly to the electronic holdings.)
4. Choose “Nature (online resource)” and click on the link “www.nature.com.”
5. The most current issue will be featured on the web page. You can click on the picture of the cover or on the words “Table of Contents.”
6. You are able to have incoming information delivered to you via an RSS feed or electronic alert. Instructions are available by clicking “E-alert sign up” or “RSS feed.”
7. To access older issues available electronically, click the “Archive” link.
This same process is used to locate Nature Genetics and Nature Genetics Reviews, just type in the correct journal name. If you have any problems setting up alerts or accessing the online version of Nature, please contact Debbie Short at x6336 or shorted@uvu.edu and she will be happy to assist you.
Bindery Shipment Update
We currently have one shipment at the Bindery and will be sending another as soon as the previous one is received within the next couple of weeks. We will not be sending another shipment to the bindery until the end of the fiscal year, so if there are any items from the collections that need rebinding, please alert me so that I can add them to the latest outgoing shipment.
News from Serials
Standardized Sign-on Objective for All Library Applications
By Mark Stevens
We are currently investigating a standardization for all (or most) of our library applications to make them authenticate from the Central Cam-pus LDAP system. To illustrate, we would like to have the “MY ACCOUNT” feature in Symphony to sign-on using the patron standard UVid and password (just like logging into UVLink). Once we get this (hopefully) working in Symphony, we will try to accomplish the same thing for Interli-brary Loan (ILLIAD). That would relieve Ross Green of the trouble of dealing with patrons that forget their account names/passwords and saves the patrons from having to remember different ways to log into each system.
News from Systems News from Reference/Instruction
By Annie Smith
I say this every year, but our database statistics just continue to show phenomenal growth. Last year was our biggest year yet when it comes to database usage. Our databases saw more than 3,400,000 searches in 2011. That’s a lot, but it looks even more impressive when you see it like this:
The first few years are incomplete, but the data is reliable as far back as 2008. This upward trend seems to show no signs of slowing down. With that many searches, it means that our students,
faculty, and staff were running a search every six and a half minutes every day for the entire year.
I’m sure we saw many of those searches at the desk last year. In 2011, librarians answered 11,369 questions in person, by chat, by phone, by text, and by email. It also includes searches we answered while we were roving the stacks, helping students in the trenches.
With the potential arrival of a discovery layer—a tool that allows searching across databases and the catalog—next fiscal year, this searching landscape will change. An in-house committee made up of librarians has been evaluating two different versions of discovery layer over the course of the semester to see if we can find one that’s the right fit for us. The committee’s work is winding down, but they still have a few hoops to jump through. They hope to announce a decision before the end of the fiscal year.
4 INFORMATION COMMONER
News from Media
By Kim Rollins
Christy will be back before the next newsletter, on May 14! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time in her stead, and have appreciated the opportunity to do collection development, instruction, reference and everything else that Christy does so very well here in the Library.
Heather is almost through with her big DVD cleaning project, and we have also been wrestling with some media-related issues in the strategic planning process, which I'm sure Christy can shed some more light on when she returns. Faculty media requests keep coming, and we are in the process of making more room for music scores. INFORMATION COMMONER 5
News from Access Services
By Jacques d’Emal
We have added the very capable Chelsie Young to our team. Chelsie will cover our weeknight closing shift working 7:00 PM – midnight. If you need to speak with Chelsie in person, and don’t want to stay late, she comes in on Wednesday afternoons to attend our regular department meetings. Accompanying Chelsie at our meetings is her daughter Daphne, who does more to keep the meeting well behaved than I ever could.
After working for us full-time for nearly four years, Holley Larsen left us to take a position at the Weber County Library. Congratulations to Holley. As I write this, we are close to hiring a person to fill the vacated position. By the time you read this, the person may have already started.
Over Spring Break, the Circulation staff held a planning retreat to begin redesigning our process for training our student aides. Every fall we hire 15 to 20 new students, some who have never had a job before. And every fall we struggle to get these enthusiastic young people prepared, usually in less than two weeks, to face the tsunami that is the first few weeks of fall semester. Every year we feel like we did not do enough to prepare our now shell-shocked students. So this year we have decided to throw out everything we have done in the past and start over with an entirely new training program.
This summer we will roll out an added service to our textbooks reserves. Currently, all textbooks are circulated on a first come, first served basis. This leads to some frustration. Quite often a student will ask to check out a textbook only to find it is already out. The student is faced with waiting near the desk watching for the text to return or returning later and hoping it is back. It is not at all unusual for a student to check back at the desk every ten to 15 minutes to see if the book is back for over an hour only to have the book returned and immediately checked out to another student.
To alleviate some of this, we have given the Circ staff the ability to place a hold on a checked out reserve item for a student willing to stay nearby. When the item is returned we will notify the student by use of a restaurant pager. Tony tested the pager and discovered that they have a phenomenal range; he was able to get a signal as far away as the Woodbury building.
We’ll be piloting the system over the summer and should have all the bugs worked out by fall.
The pager lights up, vibrates, and buzzes when the textbook is back. 6 INFORMATION COMMONER
News from the Sutherland Archives
By Catherine McIntyre
The Sutherland Archives and Dr. Kathryn French hosted a successful reception and exhibit for the opening of the Oral History of Utah Peace Activists. A large number of participants in the project attended the luncheon and participated in the panel discussions held afterwards in the Library Lecure Hall. Further, there was a full house in the Sutherland Archives to see the exhibit of activism photographs by Alexis Kelner. We put in lots of hours and extra work to make it a success. I especially want to thank Brent for all his hard work in printing, framing, and hanging the photographs, and for completing the Peace Activist web site before the event. I also want to thank Mike Freeman for all the support he’s given to the project and to the opening events.
On April 11, the Sutherland Archives opened an exhibit from UVU Deaf Studies. The exhibit consists of many types of assistive devices for the deaf, including a number of older models of teletype machines. One of the machines, invented in the 1920s, was originally used on a Navy boat to transmit messages, but was discovered that it could be used to communicate for the deaf as well.
The Deaf Studies exhibit will run through April 20, and is being held in conjunction with the Fifth Biennial Deaf Studies Today! Conference, “Beyond Talk,” being held here at UVU April 12, 13 and 14, 2012.
On June 8 at 7:00 PM in the Library Lecture Hall, the Sutherland Archives will host a program derived from another oral history project we’ve been working on, called "Tabernacle Experiences and Meanings in South Central Utah: An Oral History." Dr. Simon Fass and Ronald Smith of the University of Texas-Dallas will present the program. They were funded by grants from the Utah Humanities Council and Utah State History to conduct oral histories with residents of central Utah towns with Mormon tabernacles. These towns include Manti, American Fork, Spring City, Vernal, and Provo. The people interviewed are mostly long-time residents of these towns, and they talk about how important the tabernacle has been to their town—architecturally, culturally, historically, and spiritually. We did the transcribing for the project, as well as local photography, and will eventually get copies of each interview for our own archives.
Opening night at the Peace Activists’ Exhibit
A TTY (teletypewriter) machine Chelsie Young recently joined the UVU Library as its newest circulation supervisor.
Background information
I am originally from the sprawling metropolis of Orangeville, Utah. Population 1,398. I moved here from Logan with my husband, Trevor, and our adorable daughter Daphne (almost five). I apologize in advance that you all aren’t her parents. We have no pets as I do not like animals. This saddens the rest of my family. Too bad for them.
Favorite things about job/UVU
I love libraries! I came here from the Orem Public Library and before that I worked in various department at the Utah State University Libraries (circulation, acquisitions, ILL). So my favorite part is that I’m at a library. Also, the people here are fabulous.
Education/where did you go to school?
I earned a bachelor of science degree from USU doubling in History and Law and Constitutional Studies.
Favorite things to do in your spare time or hobbies
I love crafting (especially crochet), cooking, spending time with family, and consuming all sorts of media.
Any other fun stuff or interesting things about you that you’re willing to share?
I love bacon and cheese. Sometimes I even eat them together.
New Employee Spotlight: Chelsie Young
INFORMATION COMMONER 7
Utah Valley University Library Collection
