It Takes a Library Staff to Send me to Sea

The MV Explorer has a nice library of almost 9,000 volumes, carefully selected to support many of the courses that are taught.  However, each voyage is unique with different faculty, different courses, and different syllabi. A course taught on travel literature last fall might use some of the same materials that our courses will use,  like Paul Theroux's "The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from lives on the Road".  That book lives on the ship.  But new books are added for each voyage when requested by a professor on the voyage.

Those new books don't magically appear on the ship.  So, here is the journey.  Once the Academic Dean selects a faculty member, that person must submit a syllabus for the courses that he/she is teaching.  The syllabus (that includes readings for the students) is vetted by academic departments at UVa and approved for UVa credit or sent back for revision.  That is part of the academic rigor that UVa brings to Semester at Sea.  When the syllabus is approved, a copy is disseminated to the library coordinator for Semester at Sea.

 Mary Johnston has been the coordinator until she recently retired, and she has literally read every syllabus for many years.  She pulls out the list of readings, including books and articles to make sure they are going to be available.  After she checks the shipboard library catalog, she places an order for any book that is not on the ship.  If the book is in the ship library, she communicates with the librarian on the current voyage to determine if the book is actually physically there.  If not, she orders it.  By "she orders it", that means she places a request, and our crack acquisitions staff in Alderman Library process the order with our vendors for the book (or sometime video).  They also monitor the status, so it is important that the books get ordered with plenty of lead time.

When the book is delivered by UPS, our receiving room staff deliver the boxes to acquisition where they are "received", ie. boxes opened, checked against the invoices and sent to cataloging (unless they arrive cataloged).  The invoices are paid by the folks in our Business Office. The books go to cataloging and a record is created that goes in our catalog. Before each voyage, a file is created in cataloging and sent with the librarian so that the information is added to the ship catalog. The books themselves are moved along to the Preservation Dept. to get a call number.

Then they are kept on a shelf until packing day.  The acquisitions folks have saved us boxes, so we have a little packing party of past and next librarians.  Our receiving room guy gets the boxes labeled and ready for UPS to pick up.  Then we don't see them again until a couple of months later on the ship when they appear after in the library of the MV Explorer to be unpacked.

So, there are at least a couple of dozen great staff members involved in this process, and that doesn't even count the many who work on the articles that get scanned for reserve.  The faculty on the ship just know that they have their materials.  While they don't magically appear, the whole process is magic.  Thanks everyone for the help sending me to sea.