CDLINFO

A Melvyl Catalog Satisfaction Survey was made available via the web to UC library staff November 2-20, 2004.  Its aim was to determine the level of satisfaction of campus library staff for Melvyl, to surface issues of dissatisfaction of which CDL may not be aware, and to gain a feel for the general “pulse” of opinion about the catalog.  To support CDL’s ongoing effort to meet the bibliographic service needs of its library staff user community, the Melvyl Catalog Satisfaction Survey will be repeated on a regular basis.  The data will be used to measure changes in library staff satisfaction with the Melvyl Catalog suite of services, to assess evolving user needs and expectations, and to gather recommendations for change.

A total of 150 responses were submitted, and responses were received from staff at all ten UC campuses and represented a broad range of work responsibilities, including but not limited to Reference/Instruction (34%), Circulation (14%), Cataloging (9%), and Collection Development (8%).  A significant number of respondents (25%) identified their primary work responsibilities as falling into the category “Other”; of the 37 respondents indicating “Other”, 17 list interlibrary loan responsibilities as primary.

The full survey analysis can be found at http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/melvyl/melvylstaff_survey_nov2004.pdf.

Articles addressing some issues raised by user comments to open-ended questions will be reported in upcoming issues of “Melvyl Matters”.

In the Metasearch Infrastructure Project, the CDL is working to create metasearch tools and software that campus libraries can use to craft search portals tailored to specific audiences.  The “Core Collection” portal is targeted towards undergraduate students doing research for papers, as well as researchers doing research in subjects outside of their areas of expertise.  The primary goal of the metasearch service is to assist users in efficient discovery of information across a range of resources.  After a thorough review of leading commercial metasearch products, the CDL purchased the MetaLib application from Ex Libris and has been working with them to further develop the software.

In October 2004, CDL staff conducted usability tests and a focus group session with undergraduate students at UCSC, one of our campus partners on the project. The purpose of the testing was to predict the expected performance of actual users interacting with the current MetaLib interface, as well as detect any serious usability problems prior to the release of this service.  The purpose of the needs assessment portion was to determine whether students would perceive this service as useful.

A report of the testing is available at http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/core_ucsc_oct2004usability.pdf [PDF]

For more information on the Metasearch Infrastructure Project, see http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/.

Patricia Martin joined the CDL on January 5 as the new Bibliographic Services Manager, reporting to Laine Farley, Director of Digital Library Services.  Originally from New York, Patti received her MLIS from UCLA in 1989, and has spent the last 11 years working for Microsoft.  She has extensive experience with complex projects involving managing vendors in three countries, building special collections of speech data, entertainment metadata, and handwriting data, and serving as the main technical communication liaison both internally and externally.

She has worked on specifying search and browse functions, controlled vocabularies, and relevance metrics, and managed a team of seven catalogers.  She is also experienced in developing product strategies and evaluation metrics.  All of these experiences will come in handy in working with Melvyl, UC-eLinks and Request.

Please join us in welcoming Patti to the CDL.

b. Dayna Holz Named Office of Scholarly Communication Analyst

With the conclusion of an open recruitment, we are pleased to announce that Dayna Holz has accepted the position of Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) Analyst.  The OSC analyst will provide a wide array of program assistance to eScholarship, and data analysis and other analytic support to other OSC initiatives.

Dayna will draw from her recent experience providing part-time assistance to eScholarship for its new postprint service for UC faculty, and providing data acquisition and analysis for OSC’s Mellon-supported copyright and postprints study.

Dayna joins us from UC Berkeley where she worked at both the Environmental Design Archives and the Water Resources Center Archives managing image digitization projects, and various metadata, finding aid, and web related work.  Dayna, who recently completed her graduate studies in information science with a focus on archives and copyright law, brings fresh energy and valuable experience to CDL.  Please join us in welcoming her to the CDL.

The campus libraries are full participants in adding their campus-licensed resources to the UC-eLinks program. Along with the CDL, they have added many new targets (including journal aggregators, library catalogs, full text books, journal publishers and more) and titles in the past year.  This expansion enables users to easily discover and have immediate access to a growing array of materials.

The CDL currently has activated 121 targets reaching more than 19,000 titles.  The campuses have turned on from one to 60 targets, with the average being 28 targets representing an average of 2,696 additional titles.

The more targets and titles activated by the libraries, the better the situation is for users.  If a campus has not turned on a target, but has a subscription to full text, the user can only discover the full text by clicking through to the campus catalog or the Melvyl Catalog.  The more campuses participate in adding their resources, the less often this extra step will have to be taken for titles the libraries have actually licensed.

NOTE: New resources listed below are not yet in the Directory of CDL-Licensed Content; they will be added within the next two weeks.  You can access them directly from the URL provided.

a. INSPEC Backfile

By Karen Andrews (Resource Liaison), UC Davis

INSPEC, a comprehensive index to literature in physics/astronomy, computer science, electronic engineering, and information technology, has added records covering 1898-1968.  The INSPEC backfile was a one-time purchase by CDL, endorsed by the Joint Steering Committee on Shared Collections (JSC).  The license provides perpetual access to INSPEC articles for future generations of UC researchers.

All campuses now have access. The current INSPEC file is mounted on Ovid, but the backfile is only available at the Institution of Electrical Engineers site
( http://www.iee.org/inspec/archive/).  An Ovid representative indicated they plan to finish mounting the INSPEC backfile by April 2005.

The INSPEC Backfile corresponds to three print resources: Science Abstracts (1898-1902) and its successors Physics (Section A), Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Section B), and Computer Science (Section C).  The backfile covers original and translated articles, dissertations, conferences, papers and proceedings, books, book chapters, reports and patents published in Europe and America.  Figures and tables are included. Articles contain cross-references to other related articles, but are not linked to full text via UC e-links yet.

The basic search is easily navigated, and allows standard searching of basic index, author, title, abstract, indexing, journal title, publication title, and corporate source.  Limits for date range and document type are clearly visible.  The advanced search features additional search choices such as conference title.  More complex numeric and chemical searches can only be done in command mode, which few researchers or librarians will take time to learn.  When the backfile is mounted at Ovid, we will have full search and update capabilities matching the current file, as well as article links.

Important searching notes:

• Be sure to search using both British and American spellings for complete retrieval!
• Old and new indexing terms: Each unique term found in the original Science Abstracts indexes has been mapped to the nearest existing Inspec thesaurus term.  Even if terms have gone out of use or technologies have been replaced, a modern alternative description is provided.  You can choose to search only new terms, or across the original terms.  New and old terms are displayed alongside each other in the full record display.
• Language: Care should be taken when searching the language field prior to 1946, because language of original article was not consistently recorded until then.  Many English language articles prior to 1955 are excluded if searches are restricted to English language because of lack of indexing.
• Author searching: Marie Curie was referred to in the literature as M Curie but also as Mme Curie or Mme Sklodowska-Curie.  Try various combinations when you search, and replace initials with any known prefixes or suffixes, or add these after the initial. Other examples of names appearing in a different format are: Lord Kelvin, Lord Rutherford, E Witschi, Jr.

Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) had informed the CDL and the UC campuses that they will be moving to a new interface in January 2005.  The new interface incorporates many improved features requested by CSA Resource Liaisons and CDL staff, including a cleaner interface, searchable help, and more visible features such as alerts and combining searches.

CSA has notified us that the move to the new interface must be completed by January 31 at the latest.  Although the CDL strongly requested that the overlap period between the old and new interfaces be extended, we were advised that this was not possible because of the systems requirements of the new interface.

On their web site, CSA provides the following tools to ease in the transition to its new interface:

• Tutorials suitable for library staff and end-users on quick, advanced and command searching (http://md2.csa.com/help/tutorials.html).
• An online quick reference card is available at http://md2.csa.com/support/QRC.pdf [PDF] that covers the following areas:
  • Getting started
  • Quick, advanced and command searching
  • Search tools (thesaurus, indexes, combine searches, history, alerts)
  • Search results
  • Search tips

There are now links to these tools from the CDL Instructional Materials web page (http://www.cdlib.org/inside/instruct).

CDL licenses the following Tier 1 CSA databases:

• Earthquake Engineering Abstracts
• ERIC
• GeoRef
• PAIS International
• PsycARTICLES
• PsycINFO
• Social Services Abstracts
• Sociological Abstracts

Tier 2 CSA databases (licensed by more than one campus) include:

• ARTbibliographies Modern
• Worldwide Political Science Abstrac

Individual campuses also license additional CSA databases separately.

We regret that it was not possible to have a longer overlap period for the new interface.