Announcements
Food For Fines
Between November 4 and December 19, the Library will accept donations of non-perishable food as pay-ment
for fines.
Thanksgiving Break Hours
We will offer the following limited hours during the Thanksgiving Break:
Wednesday, November 27 8:00AM to 5:00PM
Thursday, November 28 CLOSED
Friday, November 29 CLOSED
Saturday, November 30 8:00AM to 5:00PM
Information Commoner
Volume 8, Issue 2 October 2013
In this Issue
Mike’s Message 2
At Your Service 2
In Memoriam 3
What’s Our Policy? 3
Department News 4
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 Baker via email.
Mike’s Message
Everyone needs to complete the sexual harassment training as soon as possible. The
email looks like an outside advertisement at first glance, so pay attention until you do
receive it.
If you have mistakenly deleted the email for the training, no need to worry. The training
will be emailed to you every two weeks until you complete it. The entire training takes
about an hour, and takes you through multiple scenarios so that you can better deter-mine
the legal parameters of harassment. Remember that harassment is a persistent
form of behavior that makes you uncomfortable as an employee.
If you are comfortable speaking with the offender, you can do that. You can also inform
your supervisor and have that person address the situation. However, you have no legal
requirement to inform anyone at any time before a complaint is filed. That is why every
person should just be aware of their own behaviors, especially any behavior that may
lead to making a fellow employee consistently uncomfortable in the work place (or out-side
the work place, for that matter).
For more information about UVU’s sexual harassment policy, visit https://www.uvu.edu/
policies/officalpolicy/policies/show/policyid/36.
2
At Your Service
By Lesli Baker
We all know “practice makes perfect.” Since none of us are perfect at personal communica-tion,
we must all continually practice improving our skills. The book Advanced Communica-tion
identifies the following keys to personal communication:
• Be enthusiastic
• Be attentive
• Stay focused on the customer
3
What’s Our Policy?
By Lesli Baker
Full time employees accrue personal, sick, and vacation leave throughout the calendar
year, in addition to several paid holidays. Even though the leave we receive is quite gen-erous,
we may come across situations where we don’t have enough time accrued for ab-sences.
This is the current process that often takes place within the system, sometimes
without the employee knowing:
• If an employee enters sick leave in excess of the time accrued, Banner will automati-cally
deduct the excess hours from personal leave.
• If an employee does not have enough personal leave available, Banner will automati-cally
deduct the excess hours from vacation leave.
• If an employee does not have enough vacation leave, Banner will automatically enter
the leave as docked pay.
In January, the leave entry system will change and employees will not be able to enter
leave in excess of the time allocated. The new leave system also allows supervisors to ap-prove
requested time off in advance. The new system
also provides a calendar view of all employees request-ing
days off. An entire year’s worth of leave will be avail-able
to view for both employees and supervisors, with
the ability to make changes during the current year.
The new system will make entering and approving
leave easier for everyone involved. We’ll be hearing a
lot more about this as it gets closer, so we will keep you
posted!
By Kim Rollins
Our friend and colleague, Lasca Wood, passed away Tuesday, October
15. In her memory, the Library has created a Lasca Wood Memorial
Fund with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) for anyone
who would like to contribute. You may submit online donations if you
are interested at http://www.fundraiseforBCRF.org/lascawood or Lesli
can print a donation form if you would prefer to mail it directly to BCRF.
Lasca’s obituary can be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/m7p5of2.
In Memoriam: Lasca Wood
4
News from Access Services
By Kim Rollins and Judy Robertson
We are all mourning the loss of our colleague, Lasca Wood. We will miss you and your en-dearing
personality in the Circ suite!
Dolly Sanjinez and Monte Hansen no longer work at the Library; we wish them well in their
educational pursuits. We have hired a new Library aide, James Watson, who is pursuing a
degree in exercise science. We are happy to have Jasmine, Chelsea, and Jessica back work-ing
for us in Access Services. We are also happy that Asha is back with the Circ team after
traveling to India and send our sincere regards in the loss of her mother.
Did you know that approximately one third of our circulation is from Library Reserve? Any-one
who has tried to help a student find a textbook has probably noticed that the default
“Reserve Desk” option in Symphony doesn’t always help you find an item if you don’t know
the exact title or course number. Chelsie and Tony have taken on the task of making reserve
searching more accurate and efficient. Azucena has been amazing at helping Circulation
set up new cataloging procedures for reserve items and for creating a new reserve search
in the catalog that will allow keyword searching in all fields, including course number,
faculty member, and all other information recorded for that item. Supervisors are weeding
old and unused reserve textbooks and standardizing reserve item records.
When the new system is ready to launch, it will take the place of the “Reserve Desk” search
at the menu on top of the catalog page. Take a look at the new search option by clicking
on Books and Media (from the Library’s homepage) > Advanced Search > Reserve Search:
Cole is leading circulation’s new push for improving customer service and awareness at
the Circulation Desk. The first phase included a makeover of the service counter, allowing
better views between the patrons and staff. Secondly, we are all training ourselves to look
up and acknowledge patrons every time anyone walks by or approaches the desk. We ask
the rest of the staff to help us meet our goal of creating a friendlier, more approachable
countenance by giving the supervisors feedback on positive and not-so-positive experi-ences
as they walk by the desk.
5
ContentDM 6.4 Find/Search Process Shell Script Patch
By Mark Stevens
The ContentDM find/search process on the new 6.4 server has been dropping every few
weeks (and not restarting). We’ve asked OCLC to check our server for problems in this re-gard.
Since they have not identified a problem, we’ve written a shell script to check every
five minutes to see if the service is running, and restart it when required. A log is kept of all
occurrences and an email is sent to report when the service has to be restarted. Our script
should automatically resolve the problem (usually) before staff, users, or administrators
are affected by it.
Browser Recommendation for Canvas
By Carlos Alarco
Due to recent changes made to our campus LMS, Canvas, there have been
issues related to usability on some Internet browsers. The Innovation Center
recommends that all users of Canvas use Google’s Chrome browser as it is
currently the most reliable. Firefox and Internet Explorer do not provide a
consistent experience for the user.
News from Systems
News from Technical Services
By Keith Rowley
Christina and Linda have spent every minute of the last couple of weeks preparing for the
annual credit card audit. They are almost ready, just a few more items to organize, for the
audit which will occur around October 28. They will sure be glad when that is done.
Shuyi has been doing a great job of keeping up with the regular books requests from the
librarians. At this time of the year we should have about 38% of our funds encumbered or
spent. We are at 40% right now, so ordering is right on track.
Paul informed me that in the last year he has cataloged over 1,100 DVD and Blu-ray videos.
During that time we discarded about that same number of VHS tapes. Paul has also been
busy lately updating the URL data for our online reference sources. Both Paul and Jennie
have been spending a lot of time re-cataloging books that are mysteriously missing from
the catalog. It is possible that by doing inventory we are discovering titles that didn’t make
the transition from Horizon to Symphony.
6
News from Reference/Instruction
By Annie Smith
Revisions! Revisions! Revisions! The Library’s Instruction Committee is all about improving
our current workshop and tutorial offerings. Hence, revisions! Every summer, the commit-tee
reviews the feedback from faculty and other librarians about how our latest versions of
the ENGL 1010 and ENGL 2010/2020 presentations went, then incorporates that feedback
into new editions. The idea behind the presentations is to
ensure that students leave their workshops with the same
basic research competencies: creating keywords, search
strategies, finding articles, evaluating information, and
finding help from a librarian.
Usually, we have a new version ready to go by the start of
the fall semester. But because we introduced a few twists
to the presentation, we had to make a few more changes
recently to improve the flow, i.e. the structure of the presentations so that transitions be-tween
slides and topics is smooth and logical.
The Instruction Committee recently began another project to find or create tutorials for
non-EBSCO databases, which often have complex advanced search options or special fea-tures
that require explanation to use. You will see new icons next to the database names
on the Complete List of Tutorials as we vet found tutorials for these resources.
By Trevor Young
Lots and lots of worn out buttons. That’s what you get when you sit down to watch a video
at many of the viewing stations in the media viewing area on the second floor. It’s hard to
believe it, but that equipment is now as old as the Library itself. Recently, I’ve assembled a
committee to investigate the best way to go about replacing that equipment. We consist
of Heather Gurule’, Tim Rowley, and (on loan from Media Services) Travis Tasker.
As we are living in a time of constant technological upheaval,
there are more issues to discuss than ever before. We now have a
long line of video formats that we continue to support. VHS, DVD,
Blu-ray, and (most recently) streaming. Fortunately, all of these
formats can be supported at very reasonable prices. We’re work-ing
very hard to insure we get the most bang for our buck.
Heather and I are planning a trip to the National Media Market in
Charleston, South Carolina from November 4 to 7. Media will be
pretty dark during that time. We hope to come back with more
new and valuable films than we can carry.
News from Media
7
News from the Sutherland Archives
By Catherine McIntyre
We just wrapped up our eighth and final
Pioneers in Your Attic scanning event this
past Saturday in Springville! Brent and I held
events in Provo, Orem, Heber City, Pleasant
Grove, Springville, Spanish Fork, Delta, and
Fillmore between August 3 and October 19.
It has been a very busy time, but we have
made great contacts with the directors of the
public libraries where we held the events.
We got to meet and interact with so many
interesting people and see and scan their
treasured items. We actually have to return
to Delta because there were too many items
to scan in the time we had. (Brent scanned
until 3:00 AM!) We will soon be adding the digitized images and metadata to the Pioneers
in Your Attic website (http://mwdl.org/portals/pioneers.php) for all to see!
Aimee hosted a booth at the Alumni Family Fun Fair last month and made many new con-tacts
for the UVU Sutherland Archives! We had a display of historic items from the Archives,
and many people stopped by to take a look. She created some very clever and humorous
buttons to give away to those who stopped to talk to contacts who may have alumni items
to donate, or to others who joined the Archives’ Facebook or Twitter. Stop by and pick up
a free button so that you can “Love UVU Archives” too!
October is American Archives Month, and we cel-ebrated
with a few special events. We hosted fac-similes
of two volumes of the Saint John’s Bible,
on loan for a day from BYU. It was a wonderful
opportunity to see and touch an exquisitely illu-minated
work of that size and to see the beauti-ful
artwork and clever devices used by the artist
up close.
We have an exhibit of a variety of items from our
own collections on display, to demonstrate the
types of collections we have and wish to collect.
On October 25, we are hosting the 2013 Conference of Intermountain Archivists (CIMA)
Fall Caucus! This is the first time UVU has hosted a CIMA conference (they are held ev-ery
fall and spring) and we are excited to be able to invite our colleagues in the archives
and special collections fields to join us here. We appreciative Mike’s generosity, which will
make this day-long meeting comfortable and enjoyable for all seventy attendees.
Pioneers in Your Attic Scanning Event in Spanish Fork.
Photo Credit: Rebekah Cummings, MWDL
Saint John’s Bible Exhibit.
Photo Credit: Roger Layton
Utah Valley University Library Collection
