I. Collections, Services, and Systems

A. Collections

Full Text
During 2001 University of Tennessee placed subscriptions for ScienceDirect and Wiley InterScience to provide access to Elsevier and Wiley online journal collections, respectively. Both projects were collaborations with other Tennessee libraries, including Vanderbilt University, so that publishers consider holdings in the aggregate when assessing charges for titles not held in print. UT and Vanderbilt also subscribed to Early English Books Online, and Tennessee joined EEBO's Text Creation Partnership, thanks to funding from the English Department. Other Tennessee commercial subscriptions focused on increasing access to full text, including ABI Global Full Text, LION, Patrologia Latina, E-Subscribe (ERIC documents), and the JSTOR General Science and Ecology/Botany collections.

Update: Year One of "Southeastern Native American Documents, 1730-1842" Available
The University of Georgia and the University of Tennessee have been the recipients of two one-year IMLS grants, as reported in Vol. 1. No. 2. The 1,000 documents from the first year of the project, which were supplied by the University of Georgia Special Collections, the University of Tennessee Special Collections, the McClung Museum of the University of Tennessee, and the Tennessee State Library and Archives, are now available as a public database on GALILEO at www.galileo.peachnet.edu. Select the Arts and humanities databases, then "Southeastern Native American Documents."

B. Services

Reference Services
The Reference Department has provided asynchronous digital reference service through e-mail since September 1996. With the recent flurry of software development to support call centers and virtual reference service, our goal to implement synchronous or "real time" virtual reference is closer to reality. The University of Tennessee Libraries has formed a working group led by the Digital Initiatives Librarian and the Head, Reference and Instructional Services to plan service policies, develop criteria and evaluate software, and study the funding, resources, and administration needed to support such a service. The Hodges Reference Department will pilot test selected software between June and December 2001 and make recommendations for future long-term service initiatives. We will also be studying possible collaboration with ASERL partners in support of digital reference service.

Digital Media Service
UT Office of Research and Information Technology and UT Libraries have formed a partnership to create a Digital Media Service (DMS) for the University community. Initially the partnership will focus on digitizing and storing media in all formats -- audio, video, text and images -- for instructional use by faculty, at no cost to individual faculty members or their departments. Other projects requiring some aspects of digital production and supported by the steering committee may also be pursued. A competitive pricing model has been developed for non-instructional support. The service will open its doors on July 2, 2001.

Digital Media Services will receive general guidance and oversight from an Advisory Group representing the major stakeholders, including Customer Technology Support, the Libraries, the Innovative Technology Collaborative, Information Technology Engineering, the Faculty Senate, and faculty who have been early adopters of digital media in teaching.

During the pilot phase, operational and management issues will be handled by a Steering Committee composed of representatives from the Libraries and from IT Client Services, which is managing the function. The Steering Committee and the Advisory Group will report jointly to Brice Bible (Office of Research & Information Technology) and Barbara Dewey (University Library). Funding for the service comes from ORIT while the location of the service is in the main library (Hodges).

The Media Center and Studio
The Audiovisual Services department in the John C. Hodges Library is being transformed as it adds new service areas to its traditional delivery of audiovisual collections in group viewing rooms and to carrels for individual study. The new digital initiatives include expansion of electronic-text services (to be defined in 2001), acquisition and creation of digital image collections to support diverse disciplines, and creation of a digital media production laboratory.

Called The Studio and opening at the start of fall term in 2001, the new laboratory area will provide eight individual computer stations, two group room stations, and a consultant's station for creation of media-enhanced assignments. Each of these stations will have a range of audio, visual, and scanning input devices plus a full range of software to create, enhance, and manipulate media including Adobe and Macromedia suites, 3-d and animation software, and web-creation tools. Also in The Studio will be 10 computers for editing media files and accessing electronic text and digital image collections.

C. Systems

In order to better support its digital library program, the University of Tennessee library has joined the University of Michigan's Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS). Two staff from Library Systems are currently enrolled in DLXS's summer workshops.

II. Projects and Programs

Digital Library Funded
In March of 2000 the President of UT issued a call for proposals, the President's Initiatives to Improve Teaching, Research, and Service. The library's Digital Library proposal was one of fifteen chosen for partial funding out of a total of sixty-seven. It received $431,500 for equipment, space renovation, training and operations, graduate research assistance, and content, the funds to be available July 1 of 2001, and to be expended over a total of five years. The award is to facilitate the integration of digital resources into core teaching and learning, to provide a framework for all collections of digital information, and to allow the campus to conceive of new ways of creating, accessing and applying information resources. The library staff are currently beginning a planning process, with the expectation that setup will begin in the fall, along with a campus-wide call for expressions of interest.
http://www.lib.utk.edu/~outreach/DigLibCtr.pdf

Electronic Journals Web Page
Access to journals available in electronic format has been improved by the creation of a dynamically generated e-journals web page. Records for electronic journals are extracted from the library catalog on a weekly basis, and loaded into a MySQL database. The web page, written in PHP, allows users to search for e-journals using title keywords, or to browse alphabetical listings. As more and more journals are available to our users online, this new web page allows efficient access; as titles are added to the catalog, they become quickly available on the page through an automated process.

The e-journals web page also allows users to browse by subject category. This is currently being accomplished by mapping the LC classification from the catalog record to a list of subject headings, and storing that information in the database. Work is in progress to improve this scheme, to give librarians more control over the assignment of journals to subject groups.
http://cortez.lib.utk.edu/ej/

Open Archives Initiative Alpha and Beta Tests
Beginning in the fall of 2000, The Library, in partnership with the University's SunSITE, participated in the Open Archives Initiative alpha and beta tests. The University's OAI compliant site began functioning in January, just a few days before the end of the alpha test. Dean Barbara Dewey then committed funds to continue adding records at least through the first half of the beta test. To date, besides Tennessee's TEI Lite Native American documents, staff have added four "sets" (in OAI terms). Two are from photograph collections. There are also files of the last several issues of the Library's yearly publication, the Development Review, a complete run (seven issues) of The Emancipator, an important early Tennessee newspaper, and a "set" of EADs. Staff from the SunSITE have written perl scripts which generate OAI headers for the TEI Lite and EAD records.
http://helios.dii.utk.edu/oai/

Web Tutorials
Over the past year reference librarians have re-designed the Building Library Skills tutorials to be entirely web-accessible. Using Dreamweaver software we have also created a new module that explains the online catalog. These web-tutorials are used in teaching basic catalog and database searching skills to all freshman composition classes and with other groups who need introductory instruction. Three groups of reference librarians were also successful in obtaining "Teaching with Technology" grants offered through the University of Tennessee's Innovative Technology Center. One group designed a "UT Libraries' Web of Science Tutorial"; a second designed "MLA and APA Basics"; and a third, "Facts, Figures, and Statistics." We have continued to explore the use of video streamed instructional modules through the web, and in 1999/00 produced a video tour introducing general sources for the undergraduate business student. Currently nearing completion is a virtual tour of the University Libraries to link off of the University of Tennessee's main homepage and a departmental virtual tour of the Hodges Library. Reference and Systems Librarians have been working together to create a new University Libraries homepage, which should also debut over the summer.
http://www.lib.utk.edu/instruction/tutorials.html - Access to the Building Library Skills and the Business video tour
http://www.it.utk.edu/itc/grants/twt2000/utlibraries.html - The Teaching with Technology tutorials are on the ITC server

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