CDLINFO

a. Michael Mckenna Joins the CDL

Michael McKenna joins the CDL as a Programmer Analyst in the Advanced Technology Group.  His role will be to spearhead the investigation and integration of next generation metasearch capabilities and other tasks as appropriate, into CDL’s newly emerging infrastructure.

Michael, a veteran of many years at Sybase and then Commerce One, will start work at the CDL on November 13. Michael has extensive experience in technical project management, currently consults for a variety of Silicon Valley firms, and brings considerable expertise in internationalization to the CDL.  He currently works with W3C and the Unicode communities.  Many years ago, Michael worked at Carlyle Systems, and at UC Berkeley.

b. New Manager of Public Content
Rosalie Lack will be the new Manager of Public Content.  In this new position, Rosalie will be responsible for overseeing the public web site (http://californiadigitallibrary.org/) as well as Counting California (http://countingcalifornia.cdlib.org/), and working with various partners and communities with interests in these content areas to develop services.  She will also serve on CDL’s Content group representing content development for social sciences data and government information.

Rosalie brings deep knowledge of most CDL projects to her new role, a result of her experience as Evaluation and Instruction Analyst.  In this role, she also worked closely with campus libraries and other partners, learning about their use of collections and services.  Rosalie was a member of the project team that developed the public web site, and she has participated in other activities with K-12 partners such as the California Learning Resource Network.  She has served as CDL’s representative on the eBook Task Force, and the CIG on Information Literacy.

A transition plan compensating for Rosalie’s departure from communication and evaluation activities, including possibilities for recruiting new staff, will be finalized in the coming weeks.

c. Jennifer Lee Begins Part-Time CDL Appointment

On November 1, 2003, Jennifer Lee began a half-time, six-month appointment to assist campus ILL units with their implementation of VDX.  Jennifer will participate in the implementation through training of ILL staff, development and/or distribution of documentation, and advise on workflow considerations and location configuration.

Jennifer is currently Head of ILL Services at UCLA’s Young Research Library, where she has worked for the past 14 years.  Prior to that, she worked in the UCLA Biomedical Library’s ILL and Circulation units.  Jennifer, along with Gary Johnson of UCSB and Alicia Amador of UCLA, has been the guiding force in the implementation of VDX thus far.  CDL is very grateful to UCSB and UCLA for their donation of Jenny’s, Gary’s, and Alicia’s time to this important project, and is now delighted that Jennifer is able to apply the expertise she has developed to the project’s next phase.

Jennifer is currently scheduling two-day visits to campuses over the next few months, so please contact her (jcl@library.ucla.edu) if you are interested in getting on her calendar.

A new project is getting underway at the CDL.  The Metasearch Infrastructure Project will create an infrastructure that can be used by campus libraries and the CDL to tailor search portals to particular user needs.   This infrastructure will replace the existing SearchLight service with a “family” of portals aimed at specific audiences and needs.

The decision to embark on this project was based on feedback from students, faculty and library staff, and from research conducted by Christy Hightower (UC Santa Cruz) and Catherine Soehner (UC Santa Cruz).

We learned from the SearchLight project that a multi-resource discovery tool was needed, but SearchLight’s architecture did not allow for easy customization, and it was expensive to maintain.  Now that the market has matured somewhat, we’re able to consider a vendor product for this purpose.

CDL’s goal for the Metadata Infrastructure tool is that it will be flexible enough to allow campuses and libraries to adapt it for their user’s needs.  For example, an engineering library could take the Metasearch Infrastructure and create its own gateway into engineering resources.  Likewise, UC Santa Cruz could use it to create a portal into its core humanities resources.

Some initial CDL and grant-funded projects that will use this infrastructure to experiment with creating portals include:

• Core collection: this tool for undergraduates and those outside of their area of expertise will include a few core databases (yet to be determined) that will allow users to get a broad overview of a topic.  The CDL will be working closely with Christy Hightower (UC Santa Cruz) and Catherine Soehner (UC Santa Cruz) and other campus staff to create this tool.
• Melvyl Search of Other Library Catalogs: cross database searching of selected non-UC partners’ catalogs
• National Science Digital Library (NSDL) science portal (grant-funded): the CDL will design and develop a prototype service that integrates the NSDL (and other like products) with the larger, foundational scientific collections (e.g., of monographs, journals, and reference works in print and electronic formats) available via the CDL. http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/nsdl/
• Digital Collections Research Project (grant-funded): this prototype portal will provide access to online information, such as journal article citation databases, monographs, digital images and digitized primary source materials, to assist faculty in preparing materials for undergraduate teaching. http://ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/cshe/collections/

The CDL is in the process of reviewing vendors’ products and hopes to make a selection in early 2004.

Please visit the project web site to learn more: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/

b. Two Changes to Melvyl
1. Library pull down menu
A critical mass of the California State Library’s records has now been loaded into the Melvyl Catalog.  As a result, the CDL has added the California State Library to the Optional Limits - Library pull down menu on the Basic and Advanced Melvyl screens.  Users have retrieved CSL records when conducting their searches all along as long as these records have been in the catalog–they were unable until now to limit their searches to the CSL.  There are many unique CSL records in Melvyl.

The CDL will continue to add the records from the CSL’s original “snapshot” followed by its updates until loading is complete.  We anticipate this will be by early 2004.

2. Default record display
The CDL has changed the default for the number of items displayed on a screen after a search is conducted in Melvyl. The number of items displayed was increased to twenty from ten.  This change does not have an impact on records displayed in Browse, over which we have no control.