CDLINFO

In the latest issue of “Notice” (a newsletter published for all UC faculty by the Academic Senate’s Academic Council) is an article about the CDL. It is available online at http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/.  It is a fairly comprehensive article that describes the CDL’s collections and services and discusses some of the issues that the CDL is facing.  The article has been shared with ULs and we bring it to your attention for your information and in the event it comes up in your discussions with faculty.

a. The American Civil War Letters & Diaries

The first release of the American Civil War Letters & Diaries is now available [ http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/CWLDLive/ ].

In this first release, 460 authors and approximately 32,000 pages of letters, diaries and memoirs are available.   This resource includes the writings of politicians, generals, slaves, landowners, seamen, wives, and spies.  The letters and diaries give both the Northern and the Southern perspectives, as well as the views of foreign observers.  Detailed firsthand descriptions of historical characters and events, glimpses of daily life in the army, anecdotes about key events and personages, and accounts of sufferings at home, written for private consumption, provide an immediacy and a richness that are unmatched in public sources.

b. Oxford University Press

Full-text access for all campuses to the full collection of Oxford University Press online journals is now available.  The number of journals is expected to reach approximately 130 by the end of this year.  This package, in partnership with the previously announced access to the online journal collection from Blackwell Academic Publishers, represents another step in CDL’s efforts to add content of interest to faculty and students in the subject areas of Social Sciences and Humanities.  Under terms of the license, the print portion of campus subscriptions may be canceled, however the online portion will remain a 90% obligation.

c. Lippincott, Williams, and Wilkins

In the health sciences, full-text access to all journals available online from Lippincott, Williams, and Wilkins is now available. In addition to the 85 titles licensed by the CDL, the terms of the contract include trial access during 2001 to new titles that come online; the total is expected to increase to approximately 180.  Journals that come online after December 2001 will be separately negotiated.  This license provides for print at deep discount.

The list of journals is available at: http://www.lippincott.com/onlinestore/periodicals/electronic.htm

d. American Meteorological Society

Full-text access, including all back files, is now available for all ten journals published by the American Meteorological Society.  Pricing for this package is independent of campus print subscriptions.  The only requirement is that at least one print subscription must remain among the consortium members.  There is no print discount as part of this package.

The list of journals is available at: http://ams.allenpress.com/amsonline/?request=get-archive

a. Ovid Chosen as Replacement Vendor

The Transition Steering Committee, with analysis from the Resource Liaisons, has recommended Ovid Technologies as the vendor for the following databases:
-BIOSIS Previews, 1970-present
-Current Contents, 1993-present
-Ei Compendex Plus, 1970-present
-INSPEC, 1969-present
-MLA International Bibliography, 1963-present

Ovid Technologies is a major provider of electronic information to the academic community.  UC users will have unlimited access to all five databases.  The remaining two months of 2001 will be devoted to development customization, implementing links to full content, and testing.  Ovid has agreed to implement a number of enhancements to its interface that will be added over time.

Below is the transition schedule for these databases:

*CDL is committed to maintaining access through December 2002 unless there are unforeseen circumstances, such as vendors making significant changes to their data structure, or recommendations to remove parallel access earlier.

Please refer to the Database Status document for detailed information about which services (e.g., Request, Update, etc.) will be available and when in the new versions of all A&I transition databases. Available at: http://www.cdlib.org/news/databasestatus.html .

Directions for access to these resources will be announced closer to their implementation date, after the CDL has verified access.

b. All Transitioning CDL-Hosted Databases Now Have New Homes

What had seemed like an overwhelmingly difficult task last spring has successfully come to the end of its first phase.  With the selection of Ovid as the vendor for the remaining group of CDL-hosted databases (see article above), all of the transitioning A & I CDL-hosted databases now have new access providers. [For the full list of databases undergoing transitions, see the Detailed Status of the Journal Article Databases Transition (http://www.cdlib.org/news/databasestatus.html).]  The task at hand now is to ensure that the databases function well with their new vendors, and that CDL enhancements are in place by the time the CDL-hosted versions of databases retire.

Many people have been involved in making the transitions successful: SOPAG for its initial endorsement of the transition; the Transition Steering Committee (TSC), with representatives from the nine campuses who determined policies and principles to guide the transition, and who made recommendations on vendors to select; the campus Resource Liaisons who recommended which vendors to review, and who gave several different vendor versions of databases a thorough work out, as well as for their continued coordination with database vendors, campus staff, and the CDL as the new vendor versions unroll; the UC Health Sciences Librarians and CDL MEDLINE Transition Task Force Members, who prepared stellar guides for making the transition to PubMed considerably easier for us all.

At the CDL, an A & I Team skillfully chaired by Laine Farley met weekly to ensure that all aspects of the transition went smoothly.  Over the course of this phase, team members have included Jayne Dickson, Mary Engle, Linda Gallaher-Brown, Mary Heath, Rosalie Lack, Ellen Meltzer, John Ober, Margery Tibbetts, and Sherry Willhite.  Programmers who have helped with many of the behind-the-scenes programming tasks that helped us make users aware of upcoming changes and who have been working on Request include Ellen England, Michael Russell, Claudia Woo, David Loy, and Michael Thwaites.

Many thanks to all of these people and groups who have enabled us to reach this important milestone.  We have many equally important tasks ahead to ensure that these databases will continue function as valued research tools in the years ahead.

The CDL has created a new "Jobs at the CDL" page (linked from the "About the CDL" page) [http://www.cdlib.org/about/jobs.html].  It contains a list of jobs currently under recruitment at the CDL.

On October 4, the CDL and Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) announced a partnership to advance innovations in scholarly communication.  Through the partnership, the CDL will make a suite of electronic publishing tools from bepress available to University of California researchers working with the CDL’s eScholarship initiative.  The tools enable rapid and low-cost creation, management and online publication of electronic journals, discussion papers series, working papers, and other electronic forms of scholarship.

The partnership is an important development for eScholarship which supports scholar-led innovations in online dissemination of research from the University of California and beyond.

Working with UC scholars, the eScholarship program (escholarship.cdlib.org) is actively supporting new electronic publications and services for tobacco control research, environmental science, international and area studies, and dermatology research, among others.  The newly forged partnership will extend new capabilities to those and additional fields joining the eScholarship initiative.

A press release, containing more detailed information, is available at: <”http://www.cdlib.org/about/publications/BepressPressRelease10-4-01.pdf”>

The CDL-sponsored instruction workshop, originally scheduled for this September, and aimed at instruction and reference practitioners responsible for teaching new versions of Abstracting and Indexing databases and other digital information discovery resources, has been rescheduled.  Because of the enthusiastic response when the original workshop was first announced, two sessions each will be offered in the north and south of the state, making it possible for more staff to attend the workshops.  The sessions will be offered January 31 and February 1 in the north and February 4 and 5 in the south.  An additional segment on assessment will be added to the workshop.  Workshop leaders are Deb Gilchrist, Director of Library/Media Services, Pierce College, a current ALA Councilor and co-recipient in 1997 of the ACRL Instruction Section Innovation in Instruction Award, and Susan Barnes Whyte, library director at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon.  In 1995 she was presented the Edith P. Green Distinguished Professor award for her teaching at Linfield. Both are faculty of the ACRL Institute for Information Literacy.

The sessions will create opportunities for participants to explore ways to teach concepts within the context of the A&I database transitions [see documentation at http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/a-i-trans/], and to develop techniques to support self-directed learning.   The concept of learning transfer, the process by which students recognize elements from past experience and modify or apply these elements to new situations, and the role of public service staff as teacher in this process, will also be explored.  The role and use of the Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education to develop learning objectives and assessment will be investigated as well.

The workshops will emphasize the practical–practice, experience and application, so that participants will leave having begun to re-design their instructional approaches.  In order to engage all attendees fully in this process, the number of participants will be limited to 80 at each site, 40 in each session.

Dates:
January 31 and February 1, 2002, Northern California
February 4 and 5, 2002 Southern California

Time:
9:00 AM to 4:00 PM

Continental breakfast, breaks and lunch included

Selection process: Under SOPAG leadership campuses will send staff who are responsible for teaching users how to discover, manipulate, evaluate, and interpret the information provided by A&I databases, within the constraints of the attendance limits.

The CDL, with the endorsement and assistance of SOPAG, is sponsoring a workshop this November designed to increase UC library systemwide expertise in usability issues and methods.  The workshop is aimed at library staff who are involved with online system design and evaluation, including CDL Evaluation Liaisons, members of the Melvyl Education/Usability and Services Transition Teams, and Heads of Public Service.  The list of CDL Evaluation Liaisons, appointed originally by SOPAG in January 1999, has recently been refreshed.  The primary responsibilities of the Evaluation Liaisons include:

1. Share information about local user evaluation/feedback efforts, especially with regard to digital resources.
2. Help, when appropriate, with the creation and implementation of feedback and evaluation activities that often originate at (and are resourced by) CDL, but need to be conducted at the campuses.
3. Share and distribute the results of evaluation work with colleagues on their campus; occasionally collect information from colleagues.

Evaluation Liaisons, and in some cases, Melvyl Education/Usability and Services Transition Team members have or will be asked to help conduct usability testing on the Melvyl-T catalog, and features such as SFX.  Participants will also be ready to apply the skills they learn to other campus-specific projects.

The workshop leader is Jerilyn Veldof, User Education Coordinator, University of Minnesota Libraries in the Twin Cities.  Jerilyn has conducted many workshops and presentations on usability, is co-author of an article about usability published in 1999 in the Journal of Library Administration, and is also co-author of an article pending publication in the Internet Research Services Quarterly on the skills needed for successful web site design.

The workshop is based upon the premise that library web services are often built in the dark, and suggests that we methodically ask how we can really know how much of our interface design is helping or hindering our users’ abilities to conduct research. Evaluating the usability of your library online resources can ultimately make the difference between one that is easy to use and one that is full of roadblocks.

This full day, hands-on session is designed to give attendees the knowledge and skills to successfully conduct their own usability tests with no scheduling and minimal preparation. During the morning Jerilyn will focus on the difference between user-centered design and library-centered design and discuss almost a dozen ways to examine usability.  Then participants will learn the skills and techniques to administer one of these methods - the usability test.  Participants will create a usability test for a specific web site they are designing, prepare for the administration of the tests, conduct trial tests, and then analyze the success of these trials.

Dates:
November 5, 2001, UC Berkeley campus
November 7, 2001, UC Irvine campus

Time:
9:00 AM to 4:00 PM

Continental breakfast, breaks and lunch included

Selection process: Under SOPAG leadership, campuses have selected attendees from among interested staff including Evaluation Liaisons, Melvyl Education/Usability and Services Transition Team members, and Heads of Public Services.

The OCLC ArticleFirst database will be expanded to include tables of contents from the OCLC ContentsFirst database as well as citations from the OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online database.  These enhancements are scheduled for this Sunday, October 14, 2001.

We just learned today that when the ContentsFirst database is incorporated into ArticleFirst, all current ContentsFirst users will NOT BE automatically redirected to ArticleFirst.  CDL will be removing our webscript that provides direct access to the ContentsFirst database, and the ContentsFirst entry will be removed from the CDL Directory as part of this week’s CDL Directory update.  If your campus web site includes links to the CDL Directory entry for ContentsFirst, you should remove those links for ASAP.

These changes OCLC is making include the following:

• The ContentsFirst database will be incorporated into ArticleFirst in order to give users the ability to browse journal tables of contents, as they can now in Electronic Collections Online.  With the integration of these two databases, separate access to the ContentsFirst database will be discontinued in the FirstSearch Web and text-only interfaces.  This change is being made in response to requests from users for access to both the tables of contents and article-level information in a single database.
• Bibliographic information from the Electronic Collections Online database will be added to ArticleFirst.  If an Electronic Collections Online record duplicates a record present in the ArticleFirst database, the search automatically keeps only the Electronic Collections Online record, thus automatically removing duplicates from the results set.   Electronic Collections Online will remain as a separate database, as well, and will continue to offer the following options not available to ArticleFirst users: limit to subscription, limit to publisher collections, limit to subject collections, abstracts, and references.

a. WorldCat Retires from CDL-hosted Versions December 13, 2001

The CDL-hosted versions of WorldCat-telnet and web will retire December 13, 2001.  The CDL repeatedly asked OCLC to extend our versions through the end of UC Berkeley’s finals period, the last in the UC system (December 20, 2001); however, OCLC was unable to change their schedule, and needed to bring it down before that date.  As a result, beginning December 14, WorldCat will be available only in native mode. Currently, users can access WorldCat via FirstSearch in the following ways:

1. Select “WorldCat (FirstSearch)” from the More databases pull-down menu on the CDL-hosted databases welcome screen (http://www.dbs.cdlib.org); then press “go to it now”.
2. From the CDL Collections and Services web page (http://www.cdlib.org/collections/) select “WorldCat (FirstSearch)” from the Other Databases pull-down menu, then press “go to it now”.

b. Expanded Academic ASAP, National Newspaper Index, and Computer Database Changes (Frank Gravier, Resource Liaison)

Popular CDL resources, the Magazine and Journal Articles (MAGS) database, the National Articles (NEWS) database, and the Computer Articles (COMP) database, are now available with a new interface as part of the CDL Abstracting & Indexing Transition project.  The transition to the vendor interface includes a name change for some of the databases.  Expanded Academic ASAP is the new name for the Magazine and Journal Articles database; Computer Database replaces the Computer Articles database; and National Newspaper Index replaces the Newspaper Articles database.  All three databases are searched using the InfoTrac web interface.

Expanded Academic ASAP indexes over 2600 periodical titles and includes full-text articles from over 1400 periodicals. Content includes citations and articles from popular magazines, general interest journals, and scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences and general sciences. Legal, business, and health journals are also included.  Citations for most articles include abstracts and in-depth subject indexing.

National Newspaper Index indexes articles from 5 of the top U.S. newspapers: New York Times (including the New York Times Book Review), Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal.  The database provides citations only, but includes enhanced title content and in-depth subject indexing.

The Computer Database indexes over 150 journals in the field of computing, telecommunications, and electronics.  Over 100 of the titles indexed include full-text. Citations for most articles include abstracts and in-depth subject indexing.

[Note: Below is detailed information on specific features and functionality of Expanded Academic ASAP, National Newspaper Index, and Computer Database]

More Content via InfoTrac

Extended dates of coverage for all three indexes are available through the InfoTrac interface.  Expanded Academic ASAP and the Computer Database are now indexed back to 1980 (in the CDL load these databases begin in 1988), while indexing in the National Newspaper Index has been extended to 1977 for some titles (in the CDL interface all coverage begins in 1982).

Four Search Methods

The InfoTrac web interface provides four methods for searching.  The Keyword search is the default search for CDL users.  Subject Guide, Relevancy, and Advanced searches are available as well.  Context sensitive help screens for each search method are available.  Select the search method you want from the menu bar on the left, and then select Help for tips on searching.  New search features in InfoTrac include proximity searching; searchable full text; and the ability to limit a search to peer-reviewed publications.  Increased truncation options allow internal truncation and the ability to specify the amount of truncation.  More display options and full content with graphics are available as well.

Display options include a brief citation, and an extended citation that includes linked subject headings.  When full-text is available for an article it is provided in html.  Many full-text articles are also available as pdf documents and may include graphics (in 1999 Gale began including full color graphics for scanned articles).  Retrieval options are displayed at the bottom of every full record display.

Viewing and Saving Records

A marking feature is available to save specific records.  The marked list view includes retrieval options at the bottom of the list.  Retrieval options include browser printing, email, and, if available, pdf documents.  Downloading is available using your preferred browser’s Save feature.  InfoTrac allows “click viewing” of all articles from a specific journal issue from a citation in a results set.

CDL users will be pleased with a number of familiar features available using the InfoTrac interface, as well several others planned for future implementation.

Saving Searches and Updating Search via Infomark

The Infomark feature can be used in several ways to customize your InfoTrac searching.  For example, if you frequently do Relevancy searches in the National Newspaper Index you can bookmark or save the URL for that kind of search in NNI.  You can also set up “predefined searches” in InfoTrac by saving or bookmarking the URL from the citation list of a search.  Each time you use this predefined search updated search results will be included in the citation list.  Users can use this function to run their own Updates.  Gale does not have an automated current awareness feature similar to the CDL Update feature, so users will need to remember to run the search on a regular basis.

Linking to Content

The Gale Group and CDL are both working to implement OpenURL (SFX) linking technology in the InfoTrac databases which will allow cross database links to CDL content and holdings.  CDL is testing this function with Gale now, and users should see this after the first of the year.  Future enhancements include the ability to download records to citation management software like EndNote, Gale expects the tagged display format to become available in the summer of 2002.

In addition, to the help screens available in the InfoTrac interface, extensive help information is available from the Gale Group Customer Service Center as well.  Resources include search assistance by email, user documentation, and customer education tools like database fact sheets, searching tip, and practice searches.  Users can also subscribe to an InfoTrac Discussion listserv as well.  For more information visit the Customer Service Center at http://www.galegroup.com/cust_serv/

As the UC Resource Liaison for Expanded Academic ASAP, National Newspaper Index and the Computer Database, I would appreciate receiving feedback on issues related to these databases at gravier@cats.ucsc.edu.