CDLINFO

Welcome to the new and improved CDLINFO. Written primarily for University of California librarians and staff, this electronic newsletter provides updates about California Digital Library projects, initiatives, and newly available electronic resources.

Beginning in 2007, CDLINFO was reformatted in order to help CDL’s latest news reach users speedily via RSS feeds for either all items that appear in any month or for items in specific areas only. See Subscribe to CDLINFO RSS for more information. CDLINFO will still be sent to subscribers via email, as usual; however, it will arrive monthly instead of biweekly.

If you would like to contribute to CDLINFO, please send email to Robin Davis-White at CDLINFO-SUBMISSIONS-L-Request@UCOP.EDU. If you would like to contact the CDL Web Production Team, email Eric Satzman at esatzman@ucop.edu.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

Manager, Shared Print
SALARY: $64,300 - $90,000 (Midpoint of Range)
Location: Oakland, CA
CLOSE DATE: May 17, 2007
Job# 20070067

The California Digital Library (CDL) seeks an innovative and proactive Manager of Shared Print to plan and oversee projects that allow the University of California libraries to share and coordinate printed collections.

Shared Print is a major collaborative effort of the 10 campuses of the University of California (UC) designed to enable the UC libraries to meet the complex information needs of an outstanding faculty and student body in the 21st century through creative and effective sharing of printed materials.  The Shared Print program assumes a leadership role in planning sustainable systems for millions of printed library materials, develops mechanisms for effective and creative resource sharing, and provides a focus for the development of strategies and initiatives that guide the University’s libraries through the transition to a more collaborative approach to building and sustaining library collections.

Responsibilities:  The Manager will have primary leadership responsibility for planning shared print projects, including the analysis of UC print collections for potential shared print opportunities, consultation with the UC campus libraries and systemwide librarian groups, development of workflow models and cost models, negotiation with publishers and vendors, identification and assessment of available technologies and tools to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of collection collaborations, and assessment of shared print projects.  The Manager will also be responsible for identifying and developing opportunities for collaboration on shared print initiatives with libraries and organizations outside of UC.

Qualifications:  Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education and experience and at least five year’s relevant experience in collection assessment and planning (Required). Masters degree in library and/or information science or related subject or equivalent experience and education (Preferred). Other requirements that must be demonstrated:  ability to plan, evaluate, budget for and manage complex projects;  knowledge of library bibliographic standards and use of library collections in a research library setting; knowledge of and experience in applying collection methodologies; ability to plan and implement new services and collections; ability to work as a leader in collaborative environments, build consensus and promote the exchange of information among diverse constituencies such as faculty, librarians, and vendors; excellent written and verbal communication skills; experience designing and using data-centered reports and assessments; attention to detail and proven ability to perform competently under pressure; strong logic and quantitative reasoning skills.  Other preferred demonstrated skills include:  success in collection development and management in a large ARL library; library technical services management; working knowledge of UC library collections and current and historical practices in collaborative collection development and management at UC.  Additional qualifications can be found in the full position posting.

Environment: The California Digital Library supports the assembly and creative use of the world’s scholarship and knowledge for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve. Shared Print is part of the CDL’s Collection Development and Management Program, which facilitates collaborative collection development in all formats across the University of California libraries, seeking synergies among licensed content, print collections, and digitization initiatives. In addition, the CDL provides tools that support the construction of online information services for research, teaching, and learning, including services that enable the UC libraries to effectively share their materials and provide greater access to both print and digital content.  For more information, visit the CDL website <http://www.cdlib.org/>.

The University of California, one of the largest and most acclaimed institutions of higher learning in the world, is dedicated to excellence in teaching, research and public service and enrolls premier students from California, the nation and the world. The University of California Office of the President, home of the California Digital Library, is the corporate headquarters to the ten campuses, five medical centers and three Department of Energy National Labs.

To apply for this position, please be prepared to attach your resume as part of the application process.

HOW TO APPLY: For a complete job description or to apply for this position, please visit the University of California Office of the President employment website at http://jobs.ucop.edu/ or you may use the following quicklink for this position <– http://jobs.ucop.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=51471>.

The University of California is an

Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer

The Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA) was recently re-designed and updated to be an integral part of the Calisphere Web site. JARDA’s more than 10,000 government and personal photographs, official documents, transcribed oral histories, paintings, diaries, and other primary sources bring you inside the story of Japanese American incarceration during World War II.

Representative images and documents were hand selected and organized into the following four areas:

• People: The faces of the men, women, and children who were incarcerated
• Places: Prewar neighborhoods and wartime camps
• Daily Life: People eating, sleeping, working, playing, and going to school
• Personal Experiences: Letters, diaries, novels, poems, and art that express the emotional experiences of internees

For each of these areas, there are essays that put the items in historical context along with selected browse terms. There are also lessons plans for grades 4-12 that suggest ways teachers can further help students understand this controversial time in American history.

You can visit JARDA at http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/jarda/.

Bob Heyer-Gray (UCD) — Interim Resource Liaison Coordinator

By Ivy Anderson

As many of you know, Heather Christenson, who has served as Resource Liaison Coordinator at the CDL since 2002, has recently assumed the role of CDL Project Manager for the UC implementation of Verde, the electronic resource management system from Ex Libris. With this new challenge, the Resource Liaison program must reluctantly bid Heather a fond farewell. CDL would like to take this opportunity to convey its thanks to Heather for her outstanding years of service to this program. Under Heather’s leadership, the RL program has become an important systemwide tool for e-resource management, a potent force for keeping our vendors honest, and a model of good electronic resource stewardship within the profession.

Happily for the CDL, we have been able to arrange a terrific interim replacement for Heather while we recruit for a permanent staff member. Robert Heyer-Gray, Collection Development/Reference Librarian at the UC Davis Science and Engineering Library, has graciously accepted a part-time appointment as Interim Resource Liaison Coordinator at the CDL through August 2007. Bob’s extensive systemwide experience, his deep understanding of the RL program, the quality of his contributions as resource liaison for a number of CDL-licensed products, and the respect he commands among his colleagues make him an ideal candidate to take on this coordinating role. Bob’s assignments will include organizing and facilitating the Annual Resource Liaison Meeting in April, compiling the annual Vendor Report Card survey, working with Wendy Parfrey and other CDL staff on the recruitment of new Resource Liaisons, and serving as a general point person for resource liaison issues. Resource liaisons throughout UC can look forward to communications from Bob very soon on all of these topics.

The CDL greatly appreciates UC Davis’s generosity in making Bob’s expertise available while the permanent RL Coordinator position remains vacant.   Bob will remain based at the UC Davis campus while he fulfills this interim assignment.  Feel free to contact him at rheyer@ucdavis.edu.

The Melvyl Catalog version 16.2 of the software is now projected to be released in late summer 2007. Work has been ongoing at the CDL to install copies of the software in multiple environments (development, staging, production); convert the user interface; reindex the catalog; and run quality assurance (QA) tests. These operations combined have taken months to accomplish.

In addition to ongoing in-house QA testing at the CDL, campus librarians helped considerably by testing in specialized areas such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages; music; and government documents formats.

The catalog is also being moved from IBM to Sun servers.

The look and feel of the catalog will remain the same; there will be some enhancements in areas such as

• The order and spacing of the holdings displays,
• The indexing of Integrating Resources; examples of integrating resources include updating loose-leafs and updating Web sites,
• View and navigation of “Previous” and “Next” buttons,
• Enhancements brought on by reindexing of the entire database,
• Display of UC-eLinks button from the Full Record (Details/Location) page.

By Roy Tennant (roy.tennant@ucop.edu), CDL Service Design Manager

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, including previous updates, see the project web site at http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/.

CDL Developments

Metasearch Software
Since the last update on March 1, 2006, we have successfully completed the National Science Digital Foundation grant, during which we demonstrated the integration of NSDL content along with licensed journal content.

Usability assessment work was performed on the prototype at UCLA by CDL (Felicia Poe and Jane Lee) and UCLA (Elaine Adams) staff. The report is available at
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/nsdl/CDL_0333710_A5.pdf .

Screenshots of this prototype can be found at
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/metasearchscreens.ppt .

In working with the Common User Interface (CUI) based on Java Server Pages (JSPs) and Struts to develop this prototype, we determined that it was too complicated and time consuming to deploy for the potentially large number of search portals we expect. Therefore, we embarked on a refactoring of the user interface code in Ruby on Rails at the beginning of this year. This work is ongoing, and we hope to have it completed by the end of April.

We suffered a setback in this work due to a hard disk failure in late January. The timing of this could not have been better, as we were able to join the MetaLib v. 4 early adopter program at the last minute. By the end of March we will have installed this version, which will include the ability to provide faceted browsing of search results. This ability may not immediately be available through our user interface code, but it will be added as we can get to it.

Campus Developments
Elaine Adams from UCLA assisted us with NSDL prototype usability testing. UCLA is also
partnering with us to do a test deployment of the metasearch infrastructure, and through this
process inform our decision-making regarding deployment of this service.

Co-chaired by Marta Brunner and Caroline Kelley, the UCLA project will work with a campus academic department to select appropriate sources and build a search portal to their requirements using the metasearch infrastructure. UCLA has decided to change subject focus from the previous project on European Studies. UCLA and CDL staff will record the time and level of staff required to perform various deployment tasks. Once the prototype is complete, tests such as load testing will be performed. The main deliverable from this project is a report that summarizes experiences of CDL and campus staff, and makes recommendations regarding production deployment. The project runs from now until late Fall of this year. If the end result is a decision to deploy this infrastructure in production, one of the first projects will be an undergraduate search portal.

As time allows, CDL may also configure a test instance of the metasearch infrastructure for UC Merced to compare against their existing (Innovative Interfaces, Inc.) metasearch service.

By Teri Vogel (UC San Diego), Resource Liaison for Nature journals

The UC campuses now have access to the newest titles in the growing collection of Nature Publishing Group (NPG) journals.

The multidisciplinary Nature Nanotechnology (launched in Fall 2006) will publish significant and quality papers covering all aspects of nanoscience and nanotechnology, including "the design, characterization and production of structures, devices and systems that involve the manipulation and control of materials and phenomena at atomic, molecular and macromolecular scales." Refer to http://www.nature.com/nnano/about/index.html for more details about the journal’s scope. Along with research articles, readers will also get news and views, review articles, letters, commentary, book reviews and research highlights.

Launched this year, Nature Photonics (http://www.nature.com/nphoton/about/index.html) seeks to publish the same high-level quality research as other NPG physical sciences journals, covering everything from "the fundamental properties of light and how it interacts with matter through to the latest designs of optoelectronic device and emerging applications that exploit photons."

Readers can expect to find articles on topics like lasers, sensors, biophotonics, and quantum optics. Along with research and review articles, research highlights, letters and news and views, Nature Photonics will also take a look at the technology/business side with sections like "Out of the Lab" and "Product Focus." 

Selective Tier One and Tier Two journal and database usage statistics for calendar year 2005 are now available on the Inside CDL website at http://www.cdlib.org/inside/assess/usage_statistics.html#2005. There are two reports included: Ejournal articles viewed by campus and Database searches by campus. CDL staff are still collecting missing usage data for some resources. The reports are expected to be complete by early April 2007. The EJournal articles viewed spreadsheet shows the number of successful full-text article requests by resource name on both UC systemwide and campus levels for calendar year 2005, and 2004-2005 comparison data on UC total number of article request statistics by resource name. The Database searches spreadsheet shows total searches by database on both UC systemwide and campus levels for calendar year 2005, and 2004-2005 comparison data on UC total number of search statistics by database. Anomalies in the data are described in notes that accompany the reports. Staff continue to work with publishers and database providers to make the usage statistics reports more accurate and standardized. For example, at present, not all publishers break down their usage statistics by campus nor do they provide COUNTER-compliant reports.

CDL staff are also working with a commercial vendor, ScholarlyStats, to create usage statistics reports for calendar years 2006 and 2007. ScholarlyStats is a new service licensed by CDL that offers a single point of access to standardized usage statistics reports from many of the largest and most important publishers and database providers. CDL expects to release 2006 annual usage statistics reports and 2007 monthly reports in early April 2007.

For questions and more information please contact Chan Li, CDL Data Analyst at Chan.Li@ucop.edu or 510-987-9796.