CDLINFO

a. New Director of Digital Preservation Program

Patricia Cruse, CDL, has been appointed as the new director of the Digital Preservation Program.

The program, located at CDL, has been established to assist the UC libraries in persistently managing digital information, achieving the same level of stewardship for that information that they demonstrate with print - a level of stewardship essential to the libraries’ support of UC’s world-class research and teaching.

The Digital Preservation Program is housed by the CDL and supported not only by the CDL but through:
-co-investment of the UC libraries;
-leveraging technology, staff, and technical development efforts at partner institutions (including UC Berkeley library, Stanford University Computing Science Department, Stanford University Library, San Diego Super Computer Center); and
-external funding (the program is currently in receipt of two grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation).

The program already consists of three strands of activity that give the UC libraries practical experience of different preservation strategies as appropriate to the persistent management of different kinds of digital information. Strands include:

1. Establishment of a UC libraries digital preservation repository for persistent management of digital assets created by the UC libraries (catalog records, finding aids, digital surrogates for holdings in library, archive, and special collections).  Work on the program (recommended initially in a report of SOPAG’s Digital Preservation Advisory Committee) is conducted in collaboration between CDL and UC Berkeley library.

2. Participation in the LOCKSS beta test to explore this experimental caching software as a possible means for capturing and locally managing licensed electronic journal and other content that contributes to the shared digital collection.  Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (LOCKSS), is an initiative based at Stanford University Library.

3. Evaluating methods for the capture, curation, and persistent management of web-based materials.  With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the digital preservation program is evaluating methods for gathering and persistently managing web-based materials produced or disseminated by US state and federal governments.  Although dealing exclusively with government information, the project will provide the university libraries with some minimal understanding of preservation strategies appropriate to web-based materials generally.

As the program’s director, Trisha’s main tasks will include:
-integrating and developing these strands of activity into a coherent and effectively managed program;
-hiring technical and other program staff for which funding has been made available; and
-communicating about the program with the UC libraries and other stakeholders.

Trisha is no stranger to the CDL or the UC system.  She has served on systemwide committees and task forces and spent five years in the Social Sciences and Humanities Library at UCSD. Drawing upon that and other academic library experience, she first came to the CDL to manage its Government Information and Social Science Data program, successfully leading development of the Counting California service.  She also helped initiate and guide the Mellon-funded effort described in #3 above.  Consulting with Trisha and others, over the next several weeks the CDL will redistribute ongoing responsibilities for Counting California and the Government Information and Social Science data program.  The results of that transition will be shared widely.

Following the success of UC-eLinks for providing services among the CDL-Licensed resources, campus libraries expressed interest in using it for their locally licensed resources.  The extension of UC-eLinks to support campus-based resources that integrate with system wide resources originated with and was endorsed by SOPAG.  CDL negotiated the license for adding campus versions and worked with ExLibris, the product vendor, on the technical enhancements to present combined services to users.  The CDL will be hosting the SFX servers for most of the campuses.

The purpose of the UC-eLinks Liaison program is to share the responsibility for maintaining the holdings in the UC-eLinks knowledge base between the CDL and the campus libraries.  The CDL will be responsible for maintaining the CDL or system wide licensed electronic holdings.  Each liaison will be responsible for maintaining their locally licensed electronic holdings.

The following is a list of the UC-eLinks liaisons:
Jody Bussell, UCB
Don Lee, UCB
Rebecca Green, UCB
Bob Heyer-Gray, UCD
Juri Stratford, UCD
Tim Mcadam, UCI
Sylvia Goldberg, UCI
Stefanie Wittenbach, UCR
Mike Randall, UCLA
Mollie Bowling, UCLA
Elaine McCracken, UCSB
Fred Yuengling , UCSC
Lai-Ying Hsiung , UCSC
Gayle Hughes, UCSD
David Fisher, UCSD
Alan Daniel, UCSF
Bea Mallek, UCSF

NOTE: New resources listed below may not yet be in the CDL Directory of Collections and Services; they will be added within the next 2 weeks.  You can access them directly from the URL provided.

A list of recently added content is always available at: http://www.cdlib.org/news/whatsnew.html

a. BMJ Specialty Journals Now Available (Jo Anne Boorkman, UCD)

Negotiations have been finalized for access to the specialized medical journals available from BMJ Publishing Group as a Tier 2 license for UCB, UCD, UCI, UCLA, UCR, UCSD, and UCSF.  Full text access is currently available at <http://www.bmjjournals.com> for:

Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases
Archives of Disease in Childhood
British Journal of Ophthalmology
British Journal of Sports Medicine
Emergency Medicine Journal
Evidence-Based Medicine
Evidence-Based Mental Health
Evidence-Based Nursing
Gut
Heart
Journal of Clinical Pathology
Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health
Journal of Medical Ethics
Journal of Medical Genetics
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry
Medical Humanities
Molecular Pathology
Occupational & Environmental Medicine
Postgraduate Medical Journal
Quality and Safety in Healthcare
Sexually Transmitted Infections
Thorax
Tobacco Control
Pediatric Asthma, a virtual Journal

Jo Anne Boorkman and Karl Kocher at UC Davis negotiated this license on behalf of the UC Health Sciences Selectors Group, with the assistance of the CDL staff.

b. Three Alexander Street Press Databases

CDL reached agreement with Alexander Street Press (ASP), an independent publisher of scholarly works, to license three new historical databases: Early Encounters in North America - People, Cultures, and the Environment, Black Drama, and Asian American Drama.

The ASP databases were recommended by a wide variety of UC selector groups in Ethnic Studies, Literature, Africana, Performing Arts and British/US History.  The databases were endorsed by the Joint Steering Committee (JSC) on Shared Collections, and approved by the CDC as important contributions to our digital collection of scholarly historical resources.  The license negotiated by CDL contains perpetual and archival access to guarantee ongoing UC research for future generations.

As part of its collaborative mission, CDL fully funded this one-time pre-publication purchase, supported by co-investment from participating campuses to cover an annual Web access fee for each database.

Alexander Street Press has acknowledged the critical contribution of Cindy Shelton, Assoc.  UL at UCLA, whose insightful conversations with the publisher helped guide their editorial direction for Early Encounters.  CDL wishes to thank Rob Melton, Literature/Humanities Bibliographer at UCSD, for his thoughtful critique of the performing arts databases.

The new databases complement previously licensed databases from Alexander Street Press: North American Women’s Letters and Diaries, Colonial - 1950 (Vol. 1-5) and American Civil War Letters and Diaries, Vol. 1-5.

Early Encounters in North America: People, Cultures, and the Environment

Assembled from hundreds of primary sources, <http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/EENALive/> this database documents the relationships among peoples and with the environment in North America from 1534 to 1850.  The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women.

It includes works by American Indians as well as a wide range of Europeans.  It captures first impressions, records hundreds of years of observations of flora and fauna, describes encounters with native peoples, presents a new literature with words and metaphors created in response to new places, and much more.  The database includes prints, drawings, paintings, maps, bibliographies, letters, photographs, and original facsimile pages all searchable by standardized vocabulary.

Black Drama

Black Drama <http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/BLDRLive/> integrates approximately 1,200 rare and hard-to-find plays written from the 1850s to the present by playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African Diaspora countries.  Nearly a quarter of the collection will consist of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, Femi Euba, Randolph Edmonds, and others.  James Vernon Hatch, a leading historian and scholar in this area and curator of one of the world’s largest collections of black drama, is serving as the project’s editorial advisor.

The result is an exceptionally deep and unified collection that illustrates the many purposes that black theater served: to give testimony to the ancient foundations of black culture; to protest injustices; to project emerging images of the new Black; and to give voice to the many and varied expressions of black creativity.

Part 1: North America, 1800-1950.  The collection includes musical comedies, domestic dramas, folk dramas, history plays, anti-slavery plays, one-act plays and other works, published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies.  It covers key writings of the Harlem Renaissance, works performed for the Federal Theatre Project, and plays by critically acclaimed dramatists of the 1940s, such as Langston Hughes.

Part 2: North America, 1960-1990. The second volume of the collection covers the “Black Arts” movement of the sixties and seventies, with playwrights such as Amiri Baraka and works performed by the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), The Negro Ensemble Company, and others.

Part 3: African and Caribbean Drama, 1900-1990.  This collection brings together a wide range of playwrights from Ghana, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, The United Kingdom, The West Indies, and other parts of the world.

Asian American Drama

Asian American Drama <http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/AADRLive/> brings together more than 250 plays, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information.  The collection begins with the works of Sadakichi Hartmann in the late nineteenth century and it is planned to include contemporary playwrights, such as Philip Kan Gotanda, Elizabeth Wong, and Jeannie Barroga.

The plays have relevance well beyond the study of literature, drama, and Asian American studies.  They present views of important historical events, such as the construction of the railroads in the nineteenth century, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the Vietnam conflict.  The plays also address sociological issues, such as assimilation, integration, and cultural identity in a Western context.  The effect of Western religion is also examined.

Asian American Drama represents the various ethnicities within the Asian American community.  Along with many works by writers of Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese descent, the collection includes plays by writers of Hawaiian, Indian, Thai, Korean, Persian, and Malaysian ancestry.

a. Melvyl-T Public Release

On April 23, 2003 CDL rolled out the new Melvyl-T catalog to the public.  Compared to the legacy Melvyl catalog - which will continue operating until August 2003 in parallel to the new catalog - Melvyl-T has a new format and design.  It offers users a variety of enhanced features, and contains completely updated data for the holdings of the UC system.  Once the legacy Melvyl catalog has been retired, Melvyl-T (for Transition) will become Melvyl.

Melvyl-T is available at: <http://melvyl.cdlib.org>

See CDLINFO Special Issue from April 3, 2003 for more details about Melvyl-T <http://www.cdlib.org/news/cdlinfo/cdlinfo040303_special.html >

Press release available at: <http://www.cdlib.org/about/publications/melvyltrelease.pdf >

b. Help Us Load Test Melvyl-T

The CDL has completed multiple successful in-house peak load tests using specialized software to simulate well over a thousand simultaneous sessions searching Melvyl-T.  Now that we have released the catalog publicly, we have the opportunity to have actual users test in combination with simulated users to create at least 1,200 simultaneous sessions during the test period.  We know from our usage data going back many years that Melvyl’s peak usage time comes in the fall.  We want to see if the system needs any further tuning now, rather than waiting until November.

The CDL is encouraging as many staff and other users as possible from the campuses to search and display records during a 15 minute period on May 1.  The test will take place from 9:30-9:45 a.m. Please search in Basic, Advanced or Command modes in Melvyl-T (http://melvyl.cdlib.org) and display results in different formats.  Please do real searching—-the kind you do in your everyday work.  If you encounter problems during the test period, you should report them via the Comments and Feedback link at the bottom of all Melvyl-T pages.

If you haven’t had the time yet to try out Melvyl-T, here’s a great opportunity to do it.

“Help us to Load Test Melvyl-T” flyer available at:
<http://www.cdlib.org/news/cdlinfo/loadtestmelvylt.pdf>.  Feel free to post and share this information with all patrons.

The CDL is very pleased to announce the release of the new Melvyl-T production catalog to UC library staff.  The URL for the new web-based version of the catalog is http://melvyl.cdlib.org The telnet address is telnet://melvyl.cdlib.org.  During this limited release there will be a few brief planned and announced system outages to complete testing of backup and recovery strategies.  The CDL will announce a final public release very shortly.

Because of the delay in releasing Melvyl-T, we will extend the parallel running of legacy Melvyl and Melvyl-T an additional month, until August 1, 2003.

In July 2002, CDL released a prototype of the Melvyl-T catalog containing 630,000 records, or 3% of the full database.  The new 23 million record-plus production catalog, the largest implementation of Ex Libris’ Aleph software on which the Melvyl-T catalog is based, is now being released to library staff.  The purpose of this initial release to UC staff is two fold: first, it allows library staff to become familiar with the catalog before it is released to the public at large, and second, by initially giving the catalog a low profile, the project team will be able to identify any undetected issues and take corrective action before the systemwide announcement, expected later in the spring 2003.  The campus Melvyl Transition Team members are conducting additional systematic testing of Melvyl-T during this period.

The new version of the catalog contains recent campus library snapshots of each catalog’s records and all of the updates received since the snapshots were taken.  Request (interlibrary borrowing) may be used in this version of the catalog, as well as in legacy Melvyl.  The new catalog reflects user interface changes based on two rounds of campus usability testing.

There are some changes in the content of the new catalog and legacy Melvyl.  Melvyl-T contains records from the following collections:

· All University of California library records, including all records equivalent to the UC component of legacy Melvyl’s CAT and PE databases
· Hastings School of Law Library
· Center for Research Libraries (CRL)
· Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL)
· California Academy of Sciences Library
· California Historical Society Library
· Graduate Theological Union (GTU) Library

Records from the California State Library (CSL) are scheduled to be loaded by the end of June, 2003.

Melvyl-T includes all formats of materials including periodicals that were previously in the CAT and PE databases, but does not include records from some non-UC sources that contributed to PE but not to CAT.  These include:

· CULP (Public Library Periodicals)
· SERHOLD (Medical Library Serials Holdings)
· California State University (CSU) Library Holdings
· Stanford University Library
· Getty Research Library
· Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL)

The Library of California will no longer produce CULP.  As part of the review process, UC Medical librarians indicated that they no longer accessed SERHOLD through Melvyl, so this file will no longer be loaded.

Following advice from SOPAG, which has been acting as the policy advisory group for the Melvyl-T project, the CDL is investigating other strategies for directing patrons to the remaining materials (CSU, Stanford, The Getty, and LLNL).  As an interim strategy, Melvyl-T now contains a link to the source catalogs not loaded in the database.  A longer term strategy is also being developed.

A calendar will soon be in place for education and outreach activities aimed at campus library staff.

Guides aimed at beginning and intermediate users and library practitioners are available from the CDL Adaptable Outreach and Instructional Materials Web page (http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/comm/outreach/) and also available from the CDL Guides page (http://www.cdlib.org/guides/).

The CDL will develop a schedule of bug fixes and anticipated future releases, receiving input from the appropriate advisory committees.  Releases representing significant changes to database content or functionality will most likely be done on a regular schedule, bearing in mind the academic calendars and teaching and training needs.

Please test Melvyl-T and use the feedback link to send us your comments.

Thanks once again to the many, many campus library staff members who contributed to the building of Melvyl-T.  This enormous and complex project would not have been possible without their many contributions.