CDLINFO

a. Shifra Raffel Joins the Digital Ingest Group

On January 12, Shifra Raffel joined the CDL’s Digital Ingest group as a Programmer Analyst II on a two-year staff contract. Mostly recently, Shifra worked for UC Berkeley as a Web Applications Programmer with the Institute of Transportation Studies’ Technology Transfer Program.  Her broad range of programming skills (including Perl, Java, XML, and XSLT) will make her an invaluable addition to the Digital Ingest group and to the organization as a whole. Shifra is interested in metadata and databases, and will most likely work on Text Ingest systems and on the Preservation Repository.

The Earthquake Engineering Abstracts (EEA) database is now available to the UC community as part of the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) databases in civil, environmental, and mechanical engineering.

Charles James, UC Berkeley’s Earthquake Engineering Research Center’s (EERC) Librarian and Information Services Manager, secured special arrangements for UC access to continue upon EEA’s transition to a commercial database via CSA.  The database, which was previously made publicly available by the EERC, is produced by the National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering at UC Berkeley.  Bob Heyer-Gray (UC Davis) will continue to be our Resource Liaison.

Information about earthquake engineering and earthquake studies from journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, maps, videos, slides, and computer files is included in the database.  Topics include structural dynamics, seismology, geology, architecture, political science, economics, planning, public policy, and hazards mitigation as they relate to earthquake studies.

Records in the Directory of CDL-Licensed Content and the Melvyl Catalog are currently being updated and will be available shortly.  In the meantime, you can access this resource via the following URL: http://www.cdlib.org/hlp/directory/eea.html.

Note: Access to this database via UC Berkeley will end on January 31, 2004.  After this time, the database will no longer be available to the general public.

a. Digitale Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker (Digital Library of German Classics)

By Jim Spohrer, UC Berkeley

The Digitale Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker (Digital Library of German Classics) contains all of the works in the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag printed editions except works by Schiller, Goethe, and Wieland.  The web edition is currently being issued in eight complete full-text releases.  Published in cooperation with the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag Frankfurt am Main, the database provides electronic access to 133 volumes of the print edition, SGML-coded and manually keyed.

The database is highly regarded in Germany and throughout the world as the premier collection of literary and non-literary German writing.  All of the texts in the Digitale Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker have been newly edited by leading international scholars and are accompanied by extensive commentaries that reflect the most recent research.  The database holds 31 single-author editions (Werkausgaben), including writers such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, Kleist, and Kant, and all 16 collections (Sammelwerke) of historical, philosophical, theological, political, and art history texts.

The Digitale Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker gives users the ability to cross-search an outstanding corpus of classic texts and opens up significant new possibilities for research in German literature, language, and thought.

Endorsed by the Joint Steering Committee on Shared Collections (JSC), and approved by the Collection Development Committee (CDC), the database is an important contribution to our digital collection of international scholarly resources.

As part of its collaborative mission, the CDL partially funded this one-time purchase, supported by co-investment over five years with zero percent financing from six participating campuses (UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UCLA, and UC Merced) to allow access throughout the UC system.  The license contains perpetual access to guarantee ongoing UC research for future generations.

The database is available at http://klassiker.chadwyck.com.

Note: The CDL would like to thank Jim Spohrer for leading the negotiations for this license.

(Courtesy Announcement for Systemwide Library Planning)

The Office of Systemwide Library Planning sponsored two regional seminars in late fall 2003 to discuss scholarly communication issues and strategies for change.  More than 60 participants hailing from all UC campuses and a wide-ranging set of disciplines (including the sciences and health sciences, humanities, and social sciences) attended.  More than 20 key thematic issues were identified, and are posed as questions for UC action in the attendant report (available at http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/scholarly/fall_03_facultyforums.html).

In related news, a letter outlining efforts initiated in the Academic Senate and among the UC’s libraries to address scholarly communication was recently sent to all UC faculty from Academic Senate Chair Lawrence Pitts and the University Librarians.  The letter, while announcing the successful completion of negotiations with publisher Reed Elsevier, cautions that, “However great our success in securing an acceptable contract with a single publisher, we have only just begun to address the deeper structural problems in scholarly communication that fundamentally threaten the academy.” Full text of the letter is available at http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/facmemoscholcomm_010704.pdf.

In September 2003, the CDL launched two new web sites: the CDL “brochure” site, intended to provide general information about the CDL to a broad public audience, and “Inside CDL,” intended to provide UC library staff and other CDL partners with the supporting documentation required to accomplish their collaborative work with the CDL.

Four months have passed since the launch of the two sites, and the CDL now invites and encourages you, our partners, to spend a few minutes exploring the sites and provide us with additional feedback on how well the new sites are meeting your information needs.  The URLs for the sites are:

CDL brochure site: http://www.cdlib.org
Inside CDL: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/

The brief survey is available at:
http://websurveyor.net/wsb.dll/2734/cdlib_survey.htm

The last day to take the survey is Friday, January 16.  Thank you in advance for taking a few moments to provide us with feedback.

a. Cecily Johns Retires

After may years at the University of California, and nearly four years of contributions to Systemwide Library Planning and CDL projects, Cecily Johns officially retired on December 31, 2003.

In July 2000, Cecily accepted a part-time appointment with the CDL and Systemwide Library Planning to develop a proposal to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for what became the Collection Management Initiative (CMI).  The breadth of Cecily’s experience — at one time or another, she has had administrative responsibility for virtually every facet of research library operations - and her deep knowledge of the UC’s libraries were invaluable in developing this successful project proposal.

These same qualities made Cecily the logical choice to serve as Project Manager for the CMI project in January 2001.  Cecily made major contributions across the whole range of CMI projects and activities, and was indispensable in her special role of communicating and coordinating with the campus libraries.  Most of the informational materials on the CMI web site (http://www.ucop.edu/cmi/), including progress reports and publicity materials, were authored by Cecily, usually in close consultation with a host of CMI advisory groups.

She also provided leadership for the campuses in implementing the Journal Use study, including the painstaking process of selecting 300 titles for the study, planning for the relocation of nearly 9,000 volumes to storage, and overseeing the collection of use data for a one-year period.

Cecily joined the CDL nearly two years ago as a Senior Associate at half-time, complementing her role as CMI Project Director. She assisted the eScholarship program with outreach to the UC libraries, which included coordinating the BioMed Central Liaisons, supporting SLASIAC’s Collection Management Planning Group, staffing the CDC’s Use Data Analysis Task Force, and overseeing the UC editors’ project.

The CDL and the UC libraries were extraordinarily fortunate to have someone with Cecily’s experience in the UC system in technical services, collection development, and public services roles, and to have the UC Santa Barbara library provide her with a home base for these activities. We will miss her cheerful readiness to pitch in wherever needed and her sage advice, and wish her the best in her real retirement.

(Courtesy Announcement for Systemwide Library Planning)

Daniel Greenstein, Associate Vice Provost for Systemwide Library Planning, has appointed a search committee to assist in filling the unique and challenging position of Director of Shared Print Collections for the University of California libraries.

Reporting to AVP Greenstein and consulting regularly with the University Librarians, the Director of Shared Print Collections will be responsible for the planning, development, implementation, and management of the UC libraries collection in an environment of shared governance.

The Search Committee is as follows:

• Claire Bellanti, Director of Library Resource Sharing and SRLF, UCLA
• Beverlee French, Director of Shared Content, CDL (Chair)
• Patricia Iannuzzi, Associate University Librarian, Director of Doe/Moffitt Libraries, and Interim Director of Collections, UC Berkeley
• Carole Kiehl, Associate University Librarian, Technical Services, UC Irvine
• Lucia Snowhill, Collection Development Coordinator, UC Santa Barbara
• Victoria Williamson, Bibliographer/Reference for sociology, ethnic and gender studies, UC San Diego

Please contact any of the search committee members with nominations.

The California State Library (CSL) “snapshot” and update files have now been completely loaded into the Melvyl Catalog.

A separate link to the CSL library catalog (http://www.lib.state.ca.us/) is also available on the list of “Other Catalogs” in Melvyl.

Please share this information with library staff and other users, particularly users of government documents and information.

As of January 1, 2004, two RLG anthropology databases “Anthropological Literature” and “Anthropological Index, Royal Anthropological Institute” became available as a single database, RLG’s new “Anthropology Plus” database.

Anthropology Plus provides extensive worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies.  The index offers excellent coverage of all core periodicals in the field in addition to local and lesser-known journals.  Coverage is from the late 19th century to the present.

Suzanne Calpestri (UC Berkeley), who has been the Resource Liaison for the Anthropological Literature and Anthropological Index databases, will continue as the Resource Liaison for the new combined database.  Records in the Directory of CDL-Licensed Content and the Melvyl Catalog are currently being updated and will be available shortly.  In the meantime, you can access this new resource via the following PID http://uclibs.org/PID/34670 or URL http://autoweb.rlg.org/cgi-bin/webscr/cucx/ewebyeq1a.scr.