Archives > IRIS News and Notes June 2004
IRIS
News & Notes December 2003
Contents:
Physical and Electronic Document Delivery Campus-wide
Extended Hours in Olin and Uris
Annex Construction Project Update
Staff Comings, Goings, Kudos, and On the Move
My Immersion
IRIS Cabinet Hosts All Staff Coffee Break and Open Session
In case you’ve been asleep for the past several weeks
and hadn’t realized it, winter is almost upon us. Monday,
December 22, marks the winter solstice. For those of you lacking tickets
to a Caribbean island, I thought you might want to celebrate this event
with a quiz instead. We know the winter solstice signals the shortest
day of the year, but there are other astronomical—and astrological—issues
to consider. Test your knowledge by taking the solstice quiz. We’ll
automatically send you your personal score card and rating!
Physical and Electronic Document Delivery
Campus-wide
Long requested by library users, expanded document delivery services will
be rolled out campus-wide in 2004. Beginning with the spring semester,
the library will offer library-to-library book delivery (“expanded
borrowing”). Using the Voyager Callslip system, patrons who have
identified a needed monograph in the OPAC will be able immediately to
request that the item be delivered to the circulation desk of their choice.
The service will be offered to all Cornell faculty, staff, and students.
Requests for delivery will be for monographs only, no journals or non-book
materials will be included—at least at first. Set up and testing
of the system is currently underway with plans for full implementation
in January. A small group, Susan Currie, Howard Raskin, Deb Lamb-Deans,
Carmen Blankinship with the help of Lydia Pettis and Fred
Muratori, has been working on the system and the connection with
the OPAC. Shipping and Receiving has also been working to get the delivery
procedures in place. Complete implementation in January will include training
for all Access Services staff across CUL. By spring ’05, physical
book delivery to academic departments will become available as well.
A pilot implementation of electronic document delivery,
called MyDocument Delivery, will begin in January 2004. This electronic
document delivery service allows faculty, staff, and graduate students
to receive articles and book chapters electronically at a fee of $10 per
request up to 50 pages. During the pilot, patrons can request items only
from the Mann, Veterinary, and Entomology libraries. This project, led
by Jesse Koennecke and Terry Kristensen, is currently going through final
testing. It will continue through summer 2004 at which time it will be
extended to the full library system. For more information visit the Web
page.
The library will support the cost of
expanded borrowing, but users of the electronic document delivery and
the departmental book delivery services will be charged a nominal fee
to help defray costs.
Extended hours in Olin and Uris
IRIS News & Notes for last December
announced the launch of the convenient business hours survey. We’re
happy to report that based on the findings of that study and others, hours
will be extended in both Olin and Uris beginning with the spring semester.
The biggest change is that Uris Library will be open 24 hours Sundays
through Thursdays. From 2:00am – 8:00 am on those days, study space
will be provided to members of the Cornell community in the Cocktail Lounge,
the Austin Room, the Gallery, and the Fiske Room. The stacks and library
services will not be available during this time, although computers throughout
the building, including the CIT computer lab, will be self-service. Olin
will be open fourteen more hours per week, closing at 2:00am Sunday-Thursday
and opening at 10:00am on the weekends.
Library Annex Construction Project
Update
Plans for the Library Annex Construction project are proceeding apace.
We are nearing completion on the Schematic Design phase and approvals
for the next two design phases, Design Development (DD) and Construction
Documents (CD) will be sought from both the Capital Fundings and Priorities
Committee (CF&PC) and the Trustees' Buildings and Properties Committee
(B&P) in January. A schedule for construction has been adopted, based
on the assumption that both the reviews and the necessary funding will
be secured. If there are any delays in this process, obviously the schedule
will slip. With that caveat in mind, the timeline indicates that the DD
phase will begin in late January, CD phase in March, and bidding to contractors
in June. If all goes well, the construction could begin in June with completion
expected in early December 2004. Racks will be installed after that, and
we’ll start moving books at the end of March 2005. We'll know more
in late January whether this schedule will go forward. If it looks like
the plan is on track, the library will turn next to planning for annex
moves. The collections measuring project is one step in that direction.
A team of Facilities and Preservation and Collection Maintenance library
staff—Dave Davies, Susann Argetsinger, and Kelly Smallidge—are
in the process of measuring the entire collection including in uncataloged
material and items in non-book formats. Stack space has already been measured
in Uris, Olin, Kroch Asia, Kroch RMC and Fine Arts, with Engineering and
Management scheduled next.
Staff News: Comings, Goings, Kudos, and On the Move
Comings
Kevin Lash, who has been an Evening Circulation Supervisor in
the Music Library for the past 3 1/2 years, will join the Access Services
staff in Olin in January. Kevin will be the supervisor in charge during
the newly expanded late shift in Olin Sunday through Thursday nights during
the academic year.
Kornelia Tancheva of Mann Library has been named
Project Coordinator for the Race and Religion Web site project for the
coming year. She will be spending half her time on this project and we’re
happy to provide her with an office in Olin 504. While her hours will
not be on a set schedule, please welcome Kornelia to Olin when you see
her.
NSF funding for the IRIS portion of Project Prism, a Web
archiving initiative called Virtual Remote Control, ends in April 2004.
Last week, Chris Bucko began working halftime on a Web tool inventory
for the project that is evaluating the potential of a range of tools for
enabling Web resource longevity. She will contribute to the acquisition,
installation, and testing of selected tools. As a result, Joe Richardson
will be working full-time on technical support through April.
Goings
On December 4, 2003, the Library recognized Ved P. Kayastha's
thirty-seven years of service with a reception
in his honor. Ved began his career as South Asian Cataloger in 1966 and
retired this year as South Asian Curator and Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator
for Asia Collections. The reception included brief descriptions of Ved's
career as bibliographer, scholar and colleague and featured tributes by
Herbert Finch, Kenneth A.R. Kennedy, Adnan Malik, and Sarah
Thomas. Moved by the spirit of the occasion, Caroline Spicer,
Katie Williams and Jim Gair shared impromptu observations
of Ved as librarian and gentleman. Ved acknowledged his warm feelings
for Cornell and the Library and his gratitude to the many friends who
are fixed in four decades of his memories. As a parting gift, Ved's colleagues
presented him with a donation to the Rajiv Kayastha South Asia Endowment.
Michael Esposito is leaving his position in Gifts
& Exchanges, on January 2 to become Assistant Director of the Academic
Personnel Policy Office in the Office of Human Resources in Day Hall.
Michael has worked in the library nearly 12 years—4 years in Searching/Fastcat
and the last 8 years in Gifts and Exchanges. He obtained a Master's degree
in Organizational Behavior and Human Resources from ILR through the Employee
Degree Program. In recent years he has been on the Board of Trustees of
Cornell University and served on the Presidential Search Committee. He
is past chair of the University Assembly and the Employee Assembly. We
will miss Michael, and wish him well in his new position. With his departure,
G&E will be transferred from IRIS to CTS, and plans, which are well
underway for this move, will be announced shortly.
Kudos
As many of you know, Julie Copenhagen, the head of Olin Interlibrary
Services, was the recipient of the 2003 Outstanding Performance Award,
which has been made possible for the past five years by the generosity
of former colleague, Christian Boissonnas, and his family. In
her nomination, Pat Schafer highlighted Julie's long-term outstanding
service and her leadership in 2002/03 in two transformative interlibrary
loan initiatives, Borrow Direct and ISO ILLiad. As Dennis Massie, RLG's
Program Officer for Resource Sharing, wrote, "She's had a huge impact
on the way ILL will be done in the future..." Congratulations again
to Julie!
John Dean has been granted
a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Jamaica for four months, beginning sometime
this winter/early spring. With the support of Dr Stephney Ferguson, Librarian
of the University of the West Indies, and Dr John Aarens, Archivist of
the National Archives of Jamaica, John will help 
establish
comprehensive preservation and conservation programs that will encompass
the upgrading of the overall environment; the preservation of endangered
materials through microfilm and digital imaging; and the treatment of
books, periodicals, and manuscripts through a modern conservation operation.
Good work will be done, we’re sure, but John receives the innovative
award for dealing with Ithaca winters!
On the Move
Sarah How has transferred from 504 Olin to the Reference Services
Division and will now be located in 106C. She will continue to divide
her time between collection development and reference services. Sarah’s
phone number will remain the same.
My Immersion
For the past month I’ve been enjoying an immersion into various
IRIS operations and units. I’ve spent time attending meetings; taking
classes (including the Intro to HTML, where I made my first ever Web page);
touring the stacks; visiting the Annex; observing chat ref and Interlibrary
Loan Services; shadowing folks at reference and circulation desks; following
the flow of incoming Kroch Asia materials; and meeting with staff both
individually and collectively. This has been an extremely rewarding experience
for me. My appreciation for the excellent work being done by IRIS staffers
just keeps growing. Still to come: immersion in Access Services, IT, Research,
Instruction, Collection Development, and the Africana, Fine Arts, and
Music libraries. By the time my immersion ends, I expect to be thoroughly
saturated!
IRIS Cabinet Hosts All-Staff Coffee Break
and Open Session
On Monday, January 19, the IRIS Cabinet is hosting an open session/coffee
break for all staff in IRIS. Bring your ideas, questions, and concerns
to the members of the IRIS Cabinet. Because we are such a large group,
this open session will run from 9:30-11:00am in 703 Olin. Stop by for
some coffee and goodies anytime during that period.
Well, that’s it for this time. Enjoy the much-deserved winter break.
John Dean and I will be in Vietnam the first 2 weeks of January, doing
a series of workshops in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. I’ll see you
after the 13th, but in the interim, please drop a line with questions
and comments.
Anne
