CDLINFO

a. Alison Ray Joined the CDL as an Information Services Analyst

The CDL very pleased to announce that Alison Ray joined our staff as an Information Services Analyst on Tuesday, September 5.  Alison is a recent graduate of the University of Oklahoma, where she received her Master’s Degree in Library and Information Studies.  She also has a Master of Arts in Cello Performance from the University of Iowa.

In library school, Alison was a graduate assistant at the University of Oklahoma’s Schusterman Library where she was responsible for faculty current awareness; taught seminars for students and faculty in electronic resources; served at the reference desk; handled interlibrary loan requests (including helping to set up the ILLiad customer interface pages); and provided IT support.  She has also done website design. In addition, Alison performed reference, teaching, Excel training, and on-the-fly cataloging at the Hardesty Regional Library in Tulsa, where she received an award for outstanding customer service.

In another part of her life, Alison has taught cello technique, sight reading and basic music theory at the Cedar Rapids Symphony School.

Alison will be serving on the CDL Helpline, and working on customer support and other CDL projects and services.

Becky Culbertson, Manager, Shared Cataloging Program, reported that on July 1, SCP catalogers began to use SFX OpenURLs on new and existing serial records.  These URLs will be used in lieu of PIDs to the greatest extent possible.  The same URL, depending on IP address range, points to the UC-eLinks screen that reflects the local campus instance of what is licensed or available as open access.  There will continue to be multiple points of access in a record, but, over time, each of the different PIDs will be replaced by one SFX OpenURL which will then take the patron to a screen of choices.  The syntax looks like this:

http://openurl.cdlib.org/?sid=SCP&genre=article&char_set=utf88&issn=xxxx-xxxx

One benefit of this type of URL is that, even though the SFX OpenURL is longer than a PID, the URL itself is predictable — all that is needed is the ISSN of a journal, and for those journal titles that are turned on in the UC-eLinks Knowledge Base, the ISSN can be substituted for the xxxx-xxxx (above) and users will be taken to the SFX screen that represents the holdings for their campus, as in this example:

http://openurl.cdlib.org/?sid=SCP&genre=article&char_set=utf88&issn=0123-4567

Why is this being done?  The reason for this change is to bring into closer alignment the representation of the many licensed and open access serials available with the SFX instances that are unique to each campus.

It will not always be possible to use the SFX OpenURLs; for example, SFX OpenURLs cannot generally be created for titles that lack ISSNs.  In such cases, PIDs will continue to be used.

In order to remove proprietary-specific formatting (the sfx_local portion below) of the OpenURL, we have recently changed the format of our catalog 856 fields.  It will be a little while before the old format is gone, so you may see some records with 856 fields which look like this:

http://ucelinks.cdlib.org:8888/sfx_local?sid=SCP:SCP&genre=article&__char_set=utf8&issn=xxxx-xxxx

For more background information on this topic, please refer to: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/linkres/linkresolverstatement.pdf

a. North American Women’s Drama

By Jane Faulkner (UC Santa Barbara), Resource Liaison

North American Women’s Drama is a full-text database of 1500 plays written by women from the United States and Canada from the Colonial period to the present.  Many of the works are rare or out of print, and nearly a quarter of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays.  Each is extensively indexed and can be searched by a keyword in the play itself, or by such topics as production company, sexual orientation of an author or character, setting (“London –house—interior”), costume designer, and any number of equally creative and useful fields.  As is true with all Alexander Street Press databases, the semantic indexing combined with the thesaurus allows users to hunt up answers to questions such as “Which plays written before 1890 treat the subject of divorce?” and “are there any monologues by female characters who are dancers?”

Plays are accompanied by reference materials.  Fun side note: the “showcase” link from the NAWD home page features color images of playbills, brochures, flyers, and postcards.

CDL has purchased perpetual rights to North American Women’s Drama on behalf of future UC scholars.

b. Latino Literature.

By Jane Faulkner (UC Santa Barbara), CDL Resource Liaison

Latino Literature claims to be the most comprehensive collection of Latino literature yet created, and it may well be. When complete (in spring 2007) it will contain 450 plays and more than 100,000 pages of fiction and poetry, from 1848 to the present.  The themes addressed in these writings cover the entire spectrum of Latino issues, from the struggle for independence to political and economic advancement, social protest, migration, exile, and life in the barrios, making Latino Literature a significant resource for a wide range of academic disciplines.

The term “Latino” in this database includes all citizens of the United States whose heritage is Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central American, and South American.  About 80 percent of the texts are still in copyright and nearly a quarter of the collection consists of items that have never been published before.  Most of the texts are in English, with selected works of particular importance Spanish.

Those familiar with other Alexander Street Press databases will recognize the standard interface which allows for multi-field searching in areas such as ethnicity, occupation, character names, composers, production companies, and the like.  A quick browse through the subjects listing on the Latino Literature homepage shows the range of the collection and the depth of the indexing.  See the resources section for an interesting gallery of images of playbills, flyers, programs brochures, and postcards.

CDL has purchased perpetual rights to NA Women’s Drama on behalf of future UC scholars.

The use of web accelerators can be a great convenience. As accelerator use is becoming more and more prevalent it is necessary for campus library staff to be aware of the potential problems caused by their use and to communicate this information to their faculty and students.

Web accelerators are applications that use various techniques to make web pages load faster or to download links, images, or files more quickly.  Google Web Accelerator and the Firefox plugin “DownThemAll” are some commonly used products.

The two main problems caused by the use of web accelerators:

• Users cannot access licensed content from a valid UC IP address.
• Triggering of vendor “excessive downloading” thresholds which can result in the user’s IP address being blocked by the vendor.

This second situation can be especially problematic if the user is accessing the vendor’s content via a campus proxy server or VPN.  In cases like this, the actions of one person can shut down access to a vendor’s resources for all users of a campus proxy server or VPN until the problem is resolved and the vendor removes the IP block!

Examples from the CDL Helpline files:

1.  Google Web Accelerator & JSTOR

A user accessing licensed content from on-campus was blocked from viewing JSTOR’s online content because JSTOR did not recognize the user’s IP address as a valid UC campus IP address.  JSTOR displayed the following message, “We’re sorry.  You do not have access to JSTOR from your current location.

The user was blocked because Google Web Accelerator sends the user’s page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic, thus, the request comes from a Google IP address, not the UC user’s IP address.  JSTOR Technical Services advised the user to add JSTOR’s domain (jstor.org) to the “Don’t Accelerate These Sites” text area in Google’s Web Accelerator Preferences section; see http://webaccelerator.google.com/support.html#preferences2 for more information.

2.  Access to Ejournal Site Blocked by the Vendor

With web accelerators it becomes very easy to trigger “breach of contract” issues.  Recently, CDL was notified by a vendor that a user’s IP had been blocked because of “excessive downloading”, in this case, the downloading of an entire issue of a specific online journal.  IP blocks can be triggered when an excessive number of files are downloaded from a single IP address within the vendor’s pre-determined period of time (whether or not the files appear in the same online journal issue).

What you should know and do:

• Most of UC’s access to licensed electronic resources is controlled by IP addresses.
• If a patron is using the campus proxy server or VPN service and initiates a breech, this can result in a lockout to that vendor’s site for all proxy or VPN users.
• Please communicate this information to the students and faculty at your campus, and troubleshoot user problems if they arise.