Weekly Report
Date: 31 March 2010
Workgroups(s); Circulation Services – Circulation, Reserves and Stacks
Highlights:
• General activity levels – break week very quiet; midterm business in full swing Monday after spring break
• Spring break projects: Main – All Feb/Mar search lists done, Reserves shelves read, equipment inventory, sweeps of library and carrels; equipment weeding project; hold-shelf maintenance; forms/supplies; Arms – pulled withdrawn titles for CM, shelf-read and cleaned up all the current periodical section; pulled any title shelf magnet labels for journals no longer received in a hard copy; Mus – periodicals project
• Mill Circ/Innovative ILS enhancement voting – schedule meeting ?
• Student staffing and schedules – -3 unfilled shifts Sunday – consider special schedule next year? Very quiet break – 1 student employee per shift on weekdays may be adequate; Summer interviews for Mus and Main set for Wed and Thursday this week; posted for Armstrong summer jobs after losing initial students who were interested
• Circ staffing – schedule flexing and stretching to cover vacations and time off
• Reserves – Prep for BLSE Reserves: refining workflow with Lib Acq for BLSE and BLNM; met with BL contact re: reserves procedures; beginning to receive lists from BL faculty; new acquisitions for LS starting to arrive; quiet spring break week; worked with Coll Mgmt to allow personal copies of reserve items to remain in Mill after semester ends; will save lots of processing time for Reserves dept. each term
• Armstrong – Slowest and lowest usage observed at Armstrong for spring break in 8 years
• Music – Sent 5 bins of periodicals to be bound; reduced staff at Mus Mon and Tuesday;
• Main – Quiet Sunday at Main; many large tours passing through
• Staff transitions – Ref training
• Stacks – the library has again been the beneficiary of “light duty” assignment, over the last three weeks most of the bookstacks in the lower level, including the mobile stack housing the journals, but excluding the very top shelves and tops of books, were dusted
• Loaner equipment – meeting on media/data storage equipment; withdrawing dead/dying loaner firewire drives; equipment to support student symposium
• Digital Archives Team – continued discussion of best practices, report from day-long conference on scanning standards
• Curricular Technology Team – no new activity
• Web Team- Usability testing development; surveys
• Reviewing Library hours for recommendations – summer and AY
• Planning Circ workshop on RSS feeds at April monthly circ meeting
• Working on Circ phone tree
• Documentation – overdue, blocks procedures/policy
Challenges
• Dust accumulation on tops of books and on shelves; when best to dust books and minimize impact on services (vacuuming is loud, disruptive activity)
• Unanticipated ILL workflow problem at Arms – slow at the end of the week – staff away at an ILL conference (after talking with ILL staff we agreed it would make sense to train Arms in how to help put ILL requests into the Armstrong queue so that we can be working on them even when ILL staff are gone); a lot of last week’s pending ILL’s not pushed out on Monday, so we’ve had a busy few days catching up
• Missing Reserve items
• Issue with “Ask a Librarian” online submissions
• Compact shelving out of order
• 80G iPod went missing before break
• Staff uncertain about positions; staffing changes
• Schedule gaps at Circ desks; planning for time off with fewer staff to cover
• Summer student hiring; problems with new job posting system
• Lost and stolen library books
• No Ref coverage Sun before classes started
• LS and BL activity/prep picking up – still many questions to resolve about support/staffing