CDLINFO

a. Alvin Pollock Joins the CDL

The Online Archive of California (OAC) is pleased to announce that Alvin Pollock is officially devoting 50% of his programming time to OAC projects.  Alvin worked closely with Daniel Pitti on the development of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard at UC Berkeley when it was known as the Berkeley Finding Aid Project (BFAP).

Alvin’s knowledge, skills and abilities were instrumental in the success of the UC EAD Project, precursor to the CDL OAC program.  The UC EAD Project applied the EAD standard to UC Special Collections and University Archives finding aids.  During the UC EAD project, Alvin led us through the difficult terrain of ingesting and publishing over 4,000 finding aids using the Dynaweb software.

Most recently, Alvin’s skills have been applied to the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA) and the Museum Online Archive of California (MOAC). Currently, Alvin has completed work on the first phase of the OAC Ingest Tool release that has automated the process of uploading finding aids into the OAC.  The Ingest Tool is available from the CDL Libstaff site: http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/oac/ .  Periodically, OAC participants ftp finding aids to the CDL servers where they are automatically parsed and checked for compliance with EAD encoding standards and with the OAC Best Practice Guidelines for Encoding New Finding Aids (OAC BPG).  A log is generated indicating errors and needed corrections.  In phase two of the OAC Ingest Tool release, the generated error messages will link directly to relevant sections of the OAC BPG.

Alvin has also recently completed some revisions to the OAC Dynaweb User Interface. During the Fall 2001, Rosalie Lack completed a series of OAC user evaluation studies with archivists and graduate students.  These studies resulted in the OAC Usability Report that is available at http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/oac/.  Based on these results, Alvin enhanced the interface of the OAC in the hope of improving navigation and retrieval on the website.

We are very thrilled to have Berkeley’s support of this co-library project and to have Alvin’s continued expertise in support of the OAC

a. Literature Resource Center (LRC)

Literature Resource Center (LRC) [http://www.cdlib.org/hlp/directory/litrc.html] from Gale Group has been licensed by the CDL for all 9 campuses.

Recommended by History and Reference bibliographer groups and endorsed by the CDL Joint Steering Committee on Shared Collections, the Literature Resource Center (LRC) is available and being licensed by the CDL.  A relatively new Gale product, the LRC was funded as a combined “one-time” purchase by the CDL with annual maintenance fees to be supported by the campuses, beginning in 2005.  The JSC recommended that the CDL license the LRC after negotiations with Gale changed the offering from an annual subscription to a “one-time purchase” (of the Contemporary Authors and Dictionary of Literary Biography files) with dramatically improved pricing, especially on the annual fees. UC campuses will have unlimited access to the LRC.

LRC provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline; combining core literary databases (Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism Select, Dictionary of Literary Biography, etc.) into a single online service.  The Literature Resource Center covers more than 120,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,500 of the most-studied authors.

This unique resource allows users to search in a number of different ways, including keyword, title, advanced, authors by type, by document, as well as the ability to see a literary-historical timeline of the authors life in context.  By looking for Authors by type, users can select an author ethnicity, Hispanic American, for example, and combine it with a genre such as social novels.  Other ways to search are by literary movement or time period, author nationality or theme.  There is also a feature called Authors on the Highway from Publishers Weekly, which gives dates and locations for author readings and book signings.

a. Cecily Johns Joins the CDL

Cecily Johns, who most recently has served as AUL for Collections and Technical Services at Santa Barbara and Project Director for the Collection Management Initiative (50%) joined the CDL on January 2, 2002, as Senior Associate for Collection Management projects for the duration of 2002.  The UC Santa Barbara Library has rearranged a number of local responsibilities in order to make this contribution to the co-library.

Cecily’s 50% appointment will be in addition to her continued duties (50%) as Project Director for the Mellon-funded Collection Management Initiative, which carries through the end of 2002.  As Senior Associate at the CDL, Cecily will assist with the eScholarship Program, focusing especially on communication and collaboration with the UC libraries, and with other collection management planning projects. Cecily will support the Collection Management Planning Group, a committee of SLASIAC.  She will continue to be located primarily at UCSB where the Library will provide office and computer support.

b. Fathilah Kamaluddin Leaves the CDL

December 28 was Fathilah Kamaluddin’s last day at the CDL. Fathilah joined the CDL over a decade ago as our main ADABAS database administrator and has been an absolutely vital member of our staff for both mainframe and, more recently, UNIX database applications.  We’ll greatly miss her database skills as well as her cheerful willingness and wonderfully sardonic humor.

The latest statistical profile of the CDL is now available from the “About the CDL” publications web site: <http://www.cdlib.org/about/publications/>, entitled The California Digital Library: Key Indicators of Collections and Use (July 1, 2000 - June 20, 2001).

As explained in the report’s introduction, the CDL has changed from calendar year statistical reporting to fiscal year reporting.  Unless otherwise noted, the report presents selected statistics for the fiscal year July 1, 2000 to June 30, 2001, and contrasts them, where possible, with similar metrics from January to December 2000, the coverage from the previous report.  It is important to note that, since this report reflects the transition to fiscal year reporting, in most cases, there is an overlap of 6 months of data (Jul-Dec 2000) between these two most recent reports.

If you have any questions, please contact Rosalie Lack at Rosalie.lack@ucop.edu.

This is a reminder that you can find up-to-date information about the status of resources being licensed by the CDL.  Details about ongoing negotiations and the status of recently licensed resources are available (”CDL Collections Update” available at http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/docs/ ).  Contact your collection development officer or the CDL for the password.  Important: Please do not share this document with vendors.

a. Music Index (Paul Machlis, UCSC)

The UC Music Librarians represented by Paul Machlis at UC Santa Cruz have completed a Tier 2 negotiation with Harmonie Park Press for access, beginning 1 January 2002, to the Music Index (for all campuses except UCSF).  The Music Index [ http://uclibs.org/PID/1386 ] provides citations to articles in 655 international music periodicals, 1979 to the present, performance and recording reviews, obituaries, and articles in musicological journals.

b. RIPM: International Index to Nineteenth-Century Music Periodicals

RIPM: International Index to Nineteenth-Century Music Periodicals [http://biblioline.nisc.com/scripts/login.dll?BiblioLine&dbname=QRIPM ] has been licensed for all 9 campuses.

Licensing RIPM was a high priority for music bibliographers; it was recommended as a complement to RILM as part of the shared digital collection.  It is entirely supported by Shared Collections and Acquisitions Program (SCAP) funds.

RIPM concentrates on documenting nineteenth-century music and musical life.  It contains indexes and abstracts of over 65 primarily nineteenth-century journals published in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden and the United States.

a. PAIS Available Via CSA

PAIS (Pubic Affairs Information Service) via Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) is now available, and will be turned off via SilverPlatter on January 17, 2002. UC-eLinks (CDL’s SFX server) will not be turned on, however, until issues are resolved concerning its use with other CSA databases, in consultation with the Transition Steering Committee.

b. Medline Retires

MEDLINE/HealthSTAR, the first of CDL’s hosted databases, which debuted on October 8, 1987, retired on December 21, 2001.  During its fourteen-year life span, it was always the most heavily used article database, as well as one of the most complex and fully featured.  PubMed from the National Library of Medicine now replaces Medline, bringing access to health sciences literature into a new era.

UC health sciences librarians initiated the original grant project to develop the database.  They worked closely with staff at the Division of Library Automation and later CDL to refine the database and provide extensive education programs and materials.  Maintenance of the Medline database over these years required countless staff hours, loading files and performing other kinds of maintenance on this major database.  In order to retire the database, staff also spent many hours reprogramming, writing and mounting messages about the upcoming changes.

UC health sciences staff, led by Alison Bunting, UCLA, and the CDL MEDLINE Transition Task Force (Janice Contini, UCLA; Amy Butros, UCSD; Steve Clancy, UCI) and the MEDLINE liaisons at each campus were instrumental in making the transition a smooth one.  Their contributions included evaluating the move to PubMed initially, working with NLM/NCBI on many of the UC-specific features for PubMed, and in preparing instructional materials for the UC community.  This has been an enormous undertaking on the part of many people within UC.  Congratulations, and farewell, MEDLINE/HealthSTAR.

c. UC SFX Service Named

The Transition Steering Committee, with input from the campuses and endorsement by SOPAG, has selected a name for the new SFX linking service.  The new name is UC-eLinks. SFX (which stands for Special Effects) is a new product, based on the OpenURL standard, and created by Ex Libris, that provides users with links from a particular citation to various library services.  It will replace the current CDL linking technology.

The choice of name was guided by the following principles.  The term should

• Include UC as part of the name
• Be short and not too cute or trendy
• Be generic enough to cover future services
• Be easy to say and teach at the reference desk
• Include “links”, a term which is recognizable to our users
• Not include SFX since other linking services are likely to develop

Initially, the CDL’s SFX server will offer three services: links to full text, links to campus holdings, and links to Request (ILL).  From a journal database, a user will see an icon for UC-eLinks, and click on it to link to one of the three services.  SFX will initially be activated in the CDL-hosted databases that are transitioning to new vendors, and will eventually function with nearly all the CDL and campus database vendors.

From October through December, selected campus staff conducted testing on a CDL-SFX Prototype with the vendors CSA, Gale, ProQuest and Ovid to test the functionality of the system (e.g., did users encounter error messages, did they get incorrect results).  The test also solicited feedback on how intuitive the SFX options are.

For more information about SFX, click here: http://www.sfxit.com/