**ALCTS Technical Services Directors of Large Research Libraries
Discussion Group**

**University of Pennsylvania Round Robin Update -- June 2006**

**New entry page**

The new entry page for the Library\'s website
(<http://www.library.upenn.edu/>) went live in May. The new page adopts
a streamlined design, which simplifies navigation; improves access to
resources, collections, and services; and provides a single search box,
which enhances known-item searching.

**Information Commons**

The David B. Weigle Information Commons, which opened in April, is
located in the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center. The Commons supports
collaborative and group work by providing: group study rooms, study
booths, and consulting services on research skills, time/project
management, writing and communication skills. The Vitale Digital Media
Lab, also housed in the Commons, offers training and equipment for
working with digital media - including video, audio, imaging, and web
publishing. <http://thecommons.library.upenn.edu/>

**New Vet Library**

Penn is preparing to open a new Veterinary Medicine Library in the fall.
The library will be part of the Vernon and Shirley Hill Pavilion\--the
new teaching and research building of the School of Veterinary Medicine.
The building will contain five floors, including teaching and library
space and research laboratories. The library will feature an electronic
classroom, digital laboratory, and group study rooms. Penn\'s School of
Veterinary Medicine, New Bolton Center recently received national
attention for its treatment of Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro.
<http://www.vet.upenn.edu/newsandevents/news/Barbaro.htm>

**VCAT**

A new version of the Penn Library Video Catalog, VCAT, is about to be
released. This new release adds new browsing features, including actors,
directors, genres, countries, languages, and production companies.
<http://www.library.upenn.edu/catalogs/vcat/>

**PennTags**

Penn Library is preparing to move our PennTags product from beta to a
full public release in the fall. This social-bookmarking system allows
tagging bibliographic records from Franklin and VCaT records, in
addition to web sites, and also allows for annotations. PennTags is a
locally-developed product, using Perl, Oracle, Ajax, JavaScript and
*wetware.* <http://tags.library.upenn.edu/>

**Library Summer Internship Program**

The Penn Library is embarking on the second year of our Summer
Internship Program. This diversity initiative was designed to bring
minority high school students from the local community into an academic
library environment to kindle an interest in the library and information
science profession as a career choice. The program pairs student interns
with library professionals who served as mentors and guide students
through the Library system in a series of hands-on experiences.

**Judaica Collection, Unicode conversion and Voyager upgrade**

Penn's online catalog contains almost 14,000 Hebrew catalog records that
originated at Dropsie College (now Penn's Center for Advanced Judaic
Studies). This rich collection of Judaica, though listed in our catalog,
was not as accessible as we would have liked because the catalog records
contained un-displayable and un-searchable Hebrew characters. With the
help of a consultant, we have converted the ISO character codes in these
records to Unicode, to load into our upgraded Voyager system. The
Unicode upgrade will take place in early August, to be followed
immediately by upgrading to Voyager 5, and possibly even Voyager 6.1.

**Center for Research Libraries**

After a membership lapse of 18 years, the Penn Library rejoined CRL as
of January 1, 2006, under the terms of a three-year \"transitional\"
membership. We are making energetic, system-wide efforts to promote CRL
collections and services to our students and faculty and are hopeful
that the benefits of membership will more than outweigh its costs.

**Blackboard and Sakai**

Since 2003 the Penn Library has hosted Blackboard for the University.
Usage has grown from less than 700 courses to over 4200 courses in four
years. In addition to Blackboard\'s standard set of features, blogging
and wiki tools designed by Learning Objects, Inc. have been licensed
over the past year. Penn Library plans to evaluate the Sakai
Collaborative Learning Environment and will soon have a development
installation configured. A number of features included with Sakai would
complement those of Blackboard. Of especial interest are the Open Source
Portfolio, WebDAV, RWiki, News/RSS, TwinPeaks (for searching external
repositories) and a scheduling tool.

**ERM TF**

Electronic Resources Management (ERM) Task Force was charged in April to
review of commercial products currently available; assess these products
against the goals Penn had established for an ERM, and make a
recommendation. Penn currently uses a locally-developed product for
electronic resources management.

**Binding workflows**

We are in the process of reviewing our workflows related to binding. In
Feb. we implemented the first phase of a new periodical binding
workflow. Item record creation and holdings updates are now part of the
binding preparation. Volumes at bindery are now trackable, for patron
requests, and the workflow is more efficient.

We are also in the process of updating our monograph paperback binding
profile to specify picture covers in lieu of standard book cloth covers.
This results in covers which are both more appealing and informative to
the reader. Additionally, we will realize savings in time, since
cataloging staff will do less marking of title pages.

**Casalini**

For the past 3 months, Penn has purchased LC core and enhanced level
records for our approval plan books from Casalini Libri. A record
loading routine that is similar to the one used for loading PromptCat
records was adjusted for Casalini data. As we near the end of the fiscal
year, we are assessing our decision to purchase these records.

**Staffing**

-   Valerie Peña has agreed to leave her post as the Director of the
    Health Sciences Libraries to become the Penn Library\'s Director of
    Staff Development and Human Resources, effective July 1, 2006.

-   Michael Ryan has resigned as the Director of the Rare Book and
    Manuscript Library. A search for a replacement is underway.

-   A search is also underway for the Director of Collection Development
    and Management