User Services Weekly Report
Date: 9-21-2011
Name: Dan Frostman
Circulation Services – Circ, Reserves, and Stacks
Statistics:
• Number of emails processed for reserve Fall 2011: 940
• Number of available carrels as of 8:30 am Wednesday: 6
• Number of DVDs checked out in September: 514
Highlights: (Progress towards Goals, accomplishments)
Armstrong:
• Lots of activity
• Only one student schedule gap left
• ILL and NExpress busy
• Reserves slowing down
• 8 of 9 carrels given out Tuesday
• Armstrong check-in meeting on Wednesday
Davis Family:
• Carrel day – see below – bottom line: we survived and learned some things
• Farewell to Morgan!
• Interviewing circ sub candidates this week
• Desk very busy
• Training new students
• Will be hiring at least one more student to fill a few gaps and some shelving
• Lots of schedule swapping
• Updated the Screening request form with Stew
• More work on the What Students should know Helpdesk page
Stacks:
• Carrel cleaning, maintenance, key repair, etc.
• Created new carrel agreement form, deployed to every carrel
• Created carrel bookmarks for checked-out materials
Reserves:
• 1560 items on reserve
• 688 Eres links
Web team: Marketing of LIS services – posters, Campus advertising, etc.
Space Team: n/a
Challenges:
• Carrel Day, Fall 2011
o Booking was delayed 15 minutes Tuesday morning due to a loan rule error – led to many phone calls at the circ desk
o In some cases, patrons booked multiple (*cough*67*) carrels. Next time, we will disallow multiple bookings on Carrel day.
o A number of patrons only booked their key for Tuesday, which allowed someone else to book it for the rest of the semester. This created the stickiest problems. I am not sure the cause of this – my best guess is user error – they changed the default dates for some reason. I have updated the instructions to explicitly state DO NOT CHANGE THE DATES.
o I have responded to a couple of very disgruntled students, but for the most part, people seem ok, despite the glitches.
• Broken link issues with Science Direct (Eres)
• Faculty expectations for reserves are unrealistic
• Error with the “put on reserve” button in MIDCAT – form not submitting if faculty elected not to get a copy of the form. Resolved now.
• A few recalled NExpress books not getting returned