By Barbara I. Dewey, dean, University Libraries and Scholarly Communications

Fall is in full swing and I can’t wait for the Open House this week. We have about 200 more students on campus this fall and we’ll probably feel this increase this week and into the semester.

We bid Jack Sulzer a fond farewell last week and he is already missed! Let us know if you have any questions or need assistance in the interim. Lisa, Kimlyn, Rob, and I stand ready to help. The associate dean searches are in full swing and most are in the process of conducting phone interviews. Many thanks to the committees and Chairs, Ann Snowman, Tim Pyatt, and Dace Freivalds for their fine work thus far.

I received a report from the Office of Annual Giving and I wanted to share some good news. University Libraries is up in both dollars and donors in FY14 compared to FY13. The increase in our overall giving dollars and number of donors was across all channels of Annual Giving including mail appeal, email appeal and telefund appeal. The University Libraries also hit both dollar (109.26%) and donor (100.86%) goals for FY14. This translates into $322,336 and 2,100 donors for this portion of our development effort. Congratulations to the development team and all of you who assisted and/or contributed in any way to this effort which is so important to meeting our library goals.

I hope you can attend (in some form) the Dean’s Forum on September 16, at 9 a.m., in Foster Auditorium featuring our Provost, Dr. Nick Jones. I know you will enjoy meeting him and hearing about his priorities. He’s also happy to answer questions.

Have a great fall semester!