CDLINFO

a. Joan Starr Joins CDL as Project Planning Manager

Joan Starr will be joining CDL as the Manager for Project Planning and Resource Allocation on April 7.  Reporting to Deputy University Librarian Laine Farley, Joan will work with the CDL’s Resource Planning Group and project managers to more effectively document and manage projects and resources across the organization.

Joan comes to CDL from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco where she was a Senior Project Consultant in the Information Technology Services Department.  As a result of her success in managing project teams across locations, developing application systems, and providing operational support, she was asked to participate in the formation of the Project Management Office at the Bank. In that role, she participated in the evaluation of software for project management, and led the implementation process for the selected tool.  She has also worked with project managers to capture project documentation and enable measures of progress, effectiveness and resource utilization.

Joan was an information architecture intern at CDL when she was pursuing her MLIS at San Jose State.  She has also published several articles on metadata.

Her extensive project planning and management experience, technical and design skills, interest in digital libraries, and great sense of humor add up to a great fit for CDL as we delve more deeply into harnessing our projects and resources.

b. New Units in Digital Library Services

Two new units have been formed in Digital Library Services, reporting to Laine Farley.

Service Design: Led by Roy Tennant; includes Heather Christenson.

This unit develops user services architecture, prototypes, and functional specifications. Roy and Heather will work closely with project managers, web design and Information Services (below) as needed.  Heather will continue to manage the Resource Liaisons program although some activities are being assessed and redefined.

Information Services: Led by Ellen Meltzer; includes Sherry Willhite and Jayne Dickson.  We will be recruiting another analyst to staff the helpdesk, perform triage and answer feedbacks.

This unit encompasses user services, education and outreach, analysis and specifications, help, and guidance provided through the processes of feedback, triage, escalation, and testing for all products.  Members may also provide analysis and specifications for projects in conjunction with the Web Design and Service Design groups. One of their main tasks will be to develop these areas for new and emerging services, modeled on what is in place for bibliographic services and licensed content.

Other units in Digital Library Services include:

• Assessment (Felicia Poe, Jane Lee)
• Web Design (Steve Toub, Eric Satzman, Pamela Daniels, Robin Davis-White, Lena Zentall and a new web design manager to be hired).  Lena will also continue as service manager for the UC Image Service.
  Digital Library Services also includes product managers for:
• Bibliographic Services (Melvyl Catalog, UC-eLinks, Request, Verde): Patti Martin
• Public Content Services (Calisphere, Counting California): Rosalie Lack
• and a new area that doesn’t yet have a name but will focus at a minimum on access tools and services (”skin and slice” or user interface customization, common user interface, search and browse, metasearch, etc): Steve Toub.  Although our matrixed organization means that almost everyone still works across a range of projects, sometimes in different roles, this reorganization provide focus and identifies a manager for some of our common activities.

By Cheryl A. Bartel (UCLA), PubMed Resource Liaison

PubMed has made changes to the limits screen.  The majority of the limits are functionally the same. The presentation, however, is dramatically different.  Instead of the single short screen with drop-down menus, the screen is now in a table format with scrolling lists of checkboxes.  One of the advantages of the new system is that it is far easier to make multiple choices. For example, you can now easily check “English,” “French,” and “Spanish” as article languages.

The new screen also allows you to search for articles by a specific author or in a specific journal directly from the limits screen.  The method for this function is very similar to using Single Citation Matcher.

Because the current limits screen is so visually different from the previous one, if you have any educational materials featuring limits, you will need to update them.

The Users Council met for its annual meeting on April 28 at Preservation Park in Oakland.  Topics discussed during the morning session included a welcome by Daniel Greenstein, Associate Vice Provost, Scholarly Information and University Librarian, Systemwide Library Planning and California Digital Library, and presentations on the Open Content Alliance, Calisphere, and the Metasearch Infrastructure Project.

The afternoon was devoted to an update of Bibliographic Services, including the Melvyl Catalog, UC-eLinks, the Electronic Resources Management System (ERMS – Verde) and the Bibliographic Services Task Force.  Other topics covered were Licensed Content and Request, and the reorganization of the Digital Library Services unit of the CDL.

In addition to one member from every UC campus, the Users Council has representatives from the California Academy of Sciences, the California Historical Society, the California State Library, the California State University Libraries, the Getty Research Library, Graduate Theological Union, Hastings College of the Law, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore Lab, NRLF, SRLF, and Stanford University.

The meeting afforded an opportunity to inform members about current activities related to CDL projects, programs, and services, and to have an exchange of ideas and a time to answer questions.  For more information, contact your Users Council Representative.

The Metasearch Infrastructure Project seeks to develop a robust set of tools for crafting tailored search interfaces to diverse information resources for specific audiences and/or purposes.  For additional background information, see the project web site at <http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/>.

Significant progress has been made integrating MetaLib with the CDL Common Framework (see <http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/common_framework/> for more information).  Concurrent with this has been work to generalize the Common User Interface (CUI) component of the Common Framework so it serves the needs of the metasearch infrastructure as well as the Digital Preservation Repository and other services that will rely on the Common Framework.  CDL’s goal is to have a prototype search portal focused on earth sciences available in May for usability testing with undergraduates. This is in partial fulfillment of our National Science Digital Library (NSDL) grant, and will serve to provide us with important early feedback on what should be changed before getting campuses more closely involved.  During the spring we will also be improving the back-end infrastructure with the goal of making it easy for campuses to deploy portals.

Preliminary work was done to develop an interface component that allows librarians to automatically load an RSS feed into the entry page of a search portal.

Work has also been completed to expose harvested metadata records to searching via the SRU protocol (see <http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/>), which will enable integration of harvested metadata along with, or beside, licensed database results.  Additionally, a utility that was created in association with our harvesting work to normalize dates in harvested metadata was released to the library community (see <http://www.cdlib.org/inside/diglib/datenorm/>).

Campus Developments

Campus staff (from UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine) continue to advise us on the prototype Earth Sciences NSDL portal.  The UCLA European Studies portal team is on hold until we gain experience with our first portal and have improved our infrastructure.  Present plans are to make our nascent infrastructure available to the UCLA team this summer for setup and testing.

Campus staff will also be helping us with usability testing in May. CDL staff will be coordinating with campus staff to find appropriate facilities, find students to participate, etc.

The “SmartStart” portal team, which includes members from UCSC and UCLA, will likely also be reinvigorated to plan a portal aimed at undergraduates and/or those who want “a few good things.”

CDL staff continue to work with other MetaLib X-Server users and Ex Libris staff to identify, prioritize, and implement enhancements to the X-Server infrastructure.