a. PCIFT Collection 4
By Myrtis Cochran (Resource Liaison), UC Berkeley
Pursuant to advice from the Collection Development Committee and UC bibliographers, the CDL licensed perpetual rights to a new collection of Periodicals Contents Index Full Text (PCIFT), the leading index for periodicals in the humanities and social sciences. It is scheduled to go live in November with the new Collection 4.
One million articles are drawn from the 14.5 million article citation records in the Periodicals Contents Index with access to more than 300 scholarly journals. Indexed titles date back as far as 1770, complete with links to current full text JSTOR holdings.
Currently, there are three complete collections in PCIFT. PCI Collection 1 and 2 each contains 100 journals with full-page images and index records. Collection 3 also includes 100 journals with full-page images and index records; 50 of these journals have searchable full text. When complete, Collection 4 will feature 75 journals, all with searchable full text.
Several UC librarians contributed to the list of journal titles that will be included in Collection 4. See the spreadsheet showing the titles that are currently confirmed for inclusion: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/news/cdlinfo/pcift.xls
There are 69 titles confirmed. Of these, 36 titles (53 percent) were ranked as either 1 or 2 in preference for the CDL (identified in the next to last column in the spreadsheet). Titles that appeared in the first release are noted in the final column. Some of these titles were not ranked because many of them were not on the list at the time of the evaluation, including nine titles from the University of California Press.
Also keep in mind that the publisher of PCIFT is making every effort to include as many of the titles suggested by CDL member libraries as possible, including English and foreign language titles. The goal is to create a resource that will be used by international consortia as well as consortia in the U.S.
Thank you to those who suggested titles to be considered for Collection 4. If the titles you suggested are not on the confirmed list or if titles you think are important are not on the list and should be considered for a future release, please email them to mcochran@library.berkeley.edu and they will be forwarded to Chadwyck-Healey.
The CDL has recently become a member of RLG, a not-for-profit organization of universities, libraries, archives, and museums who are working to improve access to the information that supports research and learning: http://www.rlg.org/
Membership in RLG will provide the CDL with access to strategic and technical information related to information discovery and will allow the CDL to contribute to the development of new standards.
Thursday, October 28th, 2004 | Category: Staff News
a. Bill Landis Joins the CDL
On November 1, Bill Landis will join the CDL staff as Metadata Coordinator for the Documenting the American West Project, a three-year project funded by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/amwest/
Bill is well known to many CDL staff as a member of several working groups, including the CDL Tools and Services Working Group. Bill has also served on the OAC Working Group and contributed his metadata expertise to developing OAC’s best practices documents.
Bill comes to CDL from the UC Irvine Library Special Collections and Archives where he has served as the Manuscripts Librarian since 1998. Bill has also been instrumental in the work of several Society of American Archivist groups, including the Canadian-U.S. Task Force on Archival Description which produced the publication “Describing Archives: A Content Standard” (2004) http://www.archivists.org/catalog/pubDetail.asp?objectID=1279
Work on the Metasearch Infrastructure project (http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/) is progressing. The Ex Libris MetaLib software has been installed at the CDL, and CDL staff completed software training in mid-September. Staff are currently experimenting with the software and customizing MetaLib to UC’s desired specifications.
User interface testing on a prototype version aimed at undergraduates beginning their research will take place in late October at UC Santa Cruz. A focus group session will also be conducted there; the testing will help inform decisions such as labeling, navigation, and value-added services. Christy Hightower (UC Santa Cruz), one of the campus members of the Metasearch team, has helped with the planning and arrangements for these tests.
Another team of library staff at UCLA, working with the UCLA Center for European & Eurasian Studies, is developing a Metasearch version oriented to research within the broad subject area of political, cultural, and economic integration in Europe.
Thursday, October 14th, 2004 | Category: Staff News
a. Hovey Lee Joins the CDL Staff
On Monday October 11, Hovey Lee joined the CDL staff as the Project Manager for Documenting the American West, a three-year project funded by a grant from the Hewlett Foundation: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/amwest/
Hovey has a broad range of professional project management experience in both corporate and public service environments, including the Brooklyn Public Library, About.com, Ziff Davis Media, City of Berkley, and most recently at Innovative Interfaces in Emeryville.
More than 100,000 ERIC documents published in 2003 or earlier and indexed from January 1993 through July 2004 are now available from ERIC via CSA. Through UC-eLinks, users can click on the option full text or abstract available from ERIC. Downloading time has improved considerably.
To obtain ERIC documents when starting with an ED number, perform an Accession Number search in CSA in Advanced mode. To do this, select AN from the pulldown menu and enter the ED number, e.g., AN=ED481645. From the results display, click on UC-eLinks to obtain the ERIC document.
Users can also find ERIC documents via author and title searching in CSA. Note: If the document requested via UC-eLinks is not online at ERIC, users will get the message, “The Document you requested is not available in the ERIC Online system” and are offered the options to ask for assistance via email or phone.
As the Resource Liaison for ERIC, I am not recommending use of the ERIC search interface at http://www.eric.edu.govs. It does not have all of the search features needed to search ERIC effectively and it does not have the power we get from using ERIC via Cambridge Scientific Abstracts with UC-eLinks.
The UC system selected EBSCO after UC selector groups conducted an in-depth comparative analysis of several business-specific electronic databases. The database was endorsed by the Joint Steering Committee on Shared Collections and approved by the Collection Development Committee to license as an important business resource for UC, with unique titles such as the Harvard Business Review (exclusive on BSP until 2010), California Management Review, and Sloan Management Review.
The Counting California team continues to add new versions of currently available statistics and new titles (see below for a list of recently added content). Census 1980 STF3 files are coming soon.
In addition, Counting California (http://countingcalifornia.cdlib.org/) has an improved advanced search page. The topics pick list is an exciting new feature that provides users with a list of topics from which they can choose. Users can also search by keyword, table title, subject, agency, and publication title.
New Content
California Vital Statistics: Newer versions of the California Department of Health Services vital statistics are now available:
County and City Data Book (1944-1977): This new resource provides diverse information ranging from local government activities to population estimates. Some of the areas covered include: business and industry; crime, law enforcement, and criminal justice; education; elections; income, poverty, and the cost of living; transportation; and work, labor, and employment. Available at: http://countingcalifornia.cdlib.org/title/ccdbca4777.htmlA special thank you to the UC Berkeley DATA team of Fred Gey and Ilona Einowski for their hard work in making this resource available.
California Statistical Abstract (2003): This annual compilation of detailed social, economic, and government statistics for California covers topics such as land and water, acreage of national and state parks, the California state economy, crime, education, and more. With the inclusion of the 2003 edition, there are now five consecutive years of the California Statistical Abstract, which users can search or browse simultaneously. Available at: http://countingcalifornia.cdlib.org/title/castat.html
These updated guidelines are based on the EAD Version 2002 DTD, the current version of the encoding standard maintained by the Society of American Archivists: http://www.loc.gov/ead
As explained in the OAC “News and Features” pages (http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/oac/news/), the revised guidelines will go into effect in January 2005 and will supercede the existing Version 1.1 guidelines. At that time, the OAC will ingest EAD Version 2002 DTD finding aids only.
Until then, OAC contributors may continue to use the existing Version 1.1 guidelines; however, the Version 1.1 guidelines will not be supported after December 2004. Alternatively, contributors may begin encoding new finding aids now using the updated Version 2.0 guidelines and delay submitting the finding aids to the OAC until after January 2005.
The CDL is pleased to announce the continuation of the Online Archive of California (OAC) Local History Digital Resources Project. This multi-year project is supported by the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), administered in California by the State Librarian.
Since the beginning of this project in 2000, more than 30 public and academic libraries, museums, and archives have provided public access to their content via the OAC. The process of creating digital facsimiles of their collections and creating the associated metadata requires a significant amount of effort, education, experience, and funds. Many LSTA projects have served local needs, but it is important that the resources created through these efforts are publicly available for the long-term to the citizens of California.
With the renewal of the LSTA grant in year five, the CDL will meet the following new objectives:
Collaborate with the California State Library LSTA program to coordinate the work of LSTA grant-funded institutions participating in the Local History Digital Resources Project, including the implementation of standards and use of digitization project-related tools and services.
Assess digital content created with LSTA funding from 1997/1998 through 2000/2001 for retrospective ingest and aggregation, including storage the UC Libraries Digital Preservation Repository.
The CDL has been awarded a three-year, $2.4 million grant from the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The award is for a project to develop web archiving tools that will be used by libraries to capture, curate, and preserve collections of web-based government and political information.
In addition, the UC Santa Barbara libraries received a three-year, $2.6 million grant from NDIIPP to form a multi-partner repository for digital geographic information such as maps, aerial and space photographs, population figures and other data.
