Mudd Man­u­script Library Annual Report, FY2012

Sum­mary

The staff at Mudd Library had a very suc­cess­ful year in 2012 with notable high­lights that include:

• Pre­pared for the launch of Aeon on July 1, 2012.  This required sig­nif­i­cant work from both pub­lic and tech­ni­cal ser­vices staff.
• Sig­nif­i­cant work done to upgrade access tools, in par­tic­u­lar a new find­ing aids site launched in beta, and other work done to pre­pare for inte­gra­tion of EAD data into Primo.
• ACLU project com­pleted, with almost 2,500 lin­ear feet of records described as part of NHPRC-funded pro­cess­ing project.
• In addi­tion to ACLU, 1,800 lin­ear feet of other pol­icy and archives mate­ri­als described, includ­ing the Harold Med­ina Papers.
• The Daily Prince­ton­ian dig­i­ti­za­tion com­pleted, with the years 1876–2002 now online.
• Dis­ser­ta­tion sub­mis­sion pro­ce­dure altered to pro­vide full-text, online access via OIT’s DataSpace.
• Hosted IMLS intern Brenda Tindal
• Con­tin­ued high level of use of col­lec­tions, both in-house and remote, with great degree of patron sat­is­fac­tion, with PDF requests sur­pass­ing paper copies.

Major Activ­i­ties

Pub­lic Services

In the past year, the staff of the Mudd Man­u­script Library served 1,686 patrons, 211 of whom had vis­ited Mudd prior to FY12 and 678 who were new researchers. We cir­cu­lated 8,531 items (2,761 Uni­ver­sity Archives boxes/items, 5,812 Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers boxes/items, 34 Gest rare books and 14 other items). For more on par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tions used, see Appen­dix A: Most used Archives and Pol­icy col­lec­tions in FY2012.

Staff also filled 354 pho­to­copy orders total­ing 39,431 pages, of which 265 orders were deliv­ered as PDF files total­ing 27,338 pages and 89 orders were ful­filled on paper, total­ing 12,093 pages, so a PDF con­tin­ues to be the pre­ferred method for the major­ity of our users.  Scan­ning con­tin­ues to be the default method by which we pro­vide images for patrons and last year we filled 90 orders for 266 scans.

We responded to over 1,900 pieces of cor­re­spon­dence (includ­ing 882 per­tain­ing to the Uni­ver­sity Archives and 403 to the Pub­lic Pol­icy Papers; 16 requests for per­mis­sion to quote) which arrived as follows: 1,317 e-mail; 111 tele­phone; 23 sur­face mail and 1 via fax.  Indi­vid­ual cor­re­spon­dence totals:  Mau­reen Calla­han, 64; Christa Clee­ton, 7; John DeLooper, 15; Kate Dun­don, 20; Lynn Dur­gin, 108; Dave Gille­spie, 9; Adri­ane Han­son, 81; Dan Linke, 207; Christie Lutz, 184; Christie  Peter­son, 88; Amanda Pike, 340; Dan San­ta­maria, 27; Brenda Tin­dal, 18; Kris­ten Turner, 35; Helene van Rossum, 5; Ros­alba Rec­chia, 82.   The staff also responded to more than 500 brief tele­phone calls.

Col­lec­tively, the staff worked with 9 dif­fer­ent classes relat­ing to junior papers and other research/writing projects with a total of approx­i­mately 115 attendees.

In addi­tion, a large num­ber of vis­i­tors took advan­tage of Mudd’s dig­i­tal cam­era pro­gram as 279 patrons pho­tographed 6,419 items from our col­lec­tions, total­ing 73,338 images.

John DeLooper left Mudd in Sep­tem­ber to accept a ref­er­ence librar­ian posi­tion, and in early Decem­ber, Christa Clee­ton joined the Mudd staff as the new SCAIV for pub­lic ser­vices (front desk posi­tion). Christa, who had pre­vi­ously worked at Fire­stone, quickly and effi­ciently assumed the duties of the posi­tion, from greet­ing and reg­is­ter­ing patrons to over­see­ing stu­dent work­ers to car­ry­ing out spe­cial projects for Dan Linke. Sig­nif­i­cantly, Christa became the coor­di­na­tor for Mudd’s social media efforts, respon­si­ble for our blogs, Face­book page and Twit­ter feed, all of which she has ener­get­i­cally attended to. She has been attend­ing the University’s Social Media SPIN meet­ings, and work­ing directly with the University’s direc­tor of social media to imple­ment best prac­tices and draw more atten­tion to our social media out­put. Christa also assisted Lis­beth Den­nis in cre­at­ing a Face­book page for RBSC.

The biggest change in Mudd’s pub­lic ser­vices oper­a­tions this year was the imple­men­ta­tion of the Aeon cir­cu­la­tion man­age­ment sys­tem, done in con­junc­tion with the rest of RBSC. All Mudd staff attended train­ing ses­sions in Jan­u­ary, with Lutz, Pike and Clee­ton par­tic­i­pat­ing in extra train­ing and numer­ous meet­ings regard­ing imple­men­ta­tion, use, and work­flow issues. Full imple­men­ta­tion took sev­eral months, but in June we con­ducted pre­lim­i­nary tests of the sys­tem, and start­ing in July, began using the sys­tem.  Lutz, Pike and Clee­ton worked to alert cur­rent and future Mudd researchers to the changes through our web­site, social media out­lets, and in exchanges with patrons. Both expe­ri­enced and new Mudd users have been quite recep­tive to the new sys­tem and par­tic­u­larly appre­ci­ate that they can sub­mit requests for mate­ri­als prior to their arrival at Mudd. While there was some con­cern among staff that we must first send researchers to the Access Office in Fire­stone to obtain Spe­cial Col­lec­tions iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards, we have not heard many patron com­plaints over the need to make this extra stop. How­ever, this stop is a tem­po­rary mea­sure until Mudd obtains the hard­ware and soft­ware nec­es­sary to cre­ate the ID cards here at Mudd.

Through­out the year, we received acco­lades from patrons for the qual­ity and effi­ciency of the ref­er­ence ser­vices we provided.

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