CDLINFO

By Felicia Poe (felicia.poe@ucop.edu), CDL Assessment, Design & Production Manager

A full report of the findings and recommendations from the CDL Spring 2006 assessment project, entitled “Communication and Collaboration: Priorities and Perspectives on the UC Libraries-CDL Partnership” has been released and is available at:

http://www.cdlib.org/inside/assess/evaluation_activities/docs/2007/cdl_spring2006.pdf

Background:

In early 2006, the CDL embarked upon a series of interviews across the ten UC campuses. The purpose of the interviews was to gather information that would provide CDL with insight into issues vital to the campus libraries, including:
 
1) Campus priorities in regard to current and future digital information tools and services.

2) Campus perspectives on existing digital information tools and services (their strengths, weaknesses and areas ripe for improvement or innovation).

3) Campus capacity for digital information tool and service development, whether independently or in collaboration with CDL or others.

Interviews were launched by the CDL assessment team in April 2006 and typically included a campus AUL, a collection development or special collections librarian, and persons involved with building digital services and tools. In total, 51 individuals across all ten UC campuses were interviewed, via in-person visits to seven campuses and teleconferences with three campuses.

Questions about the project and report should be directed to Felicia Poe (felicia.poe@ucop.edu).

Findings and recommendations from a round of usability testing conducted on a prototype UC-eLinks window in February 2007

By Jane Lee (Jane.Lee@ucop.edu), CDL Assessment Analyst

On behalf of Head of Public Services (HOPS) and the UC-eLinks project team, CDL’s assessment unit traveled to UCSD to assess a prototype version of the UC-eLinks window.  The main purpose of this assessment was to determine if the changes made to the UC-eLinks user interface improved the usability of the interface.  Eight usability testing sessions were conducted on February 22-23, 2007 at UC San Diego in a Library Administration office in Geisel Library.  Each session lasted approximately one hour.

The following are two major findings from this round of assessment:

1.  Placing links into logical groupings improves usability, but current labels for groupings and links are confusing to users.

2.  Students face many potential pitfalls in trying to reach online full text.  The UC-eLinks window itself poses challenges.  Furthermore, even if students successfully navigate through UC-eLinks to a publisher’s site, for a variety of reasons presented in this report there is no guarantee that they will obtain the full text article they were seeking.

To learn more, please read the full report, which is available at the following URL:
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/assess/evaluation_activities/docs/2007/elinks_ucsd_feb2007.pdf

American West (AmWest) is a three-year William and Flora Hewlett Foundation grant to assemble a virtual collection drawing from the resources of major research institutions. Learn more at http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/amwest/. Note: under “Project Findings,” there are many interesting reports regarding assessment and metadata activities.

Prototype
A prototype site was created as a proof of concept of the harvesting, metadata enrichment and classification work that brought together collections from partner institutions. In addition, the project provided the opportunity for the participants to learn more about user needs related to hierarchical, faceted browse. In summer 2006, the decision was made to not go live with AmWest; therefore, it will remain a prototype.

Assessment
As planned, Year 3 of the AmWest grant is focused on Assessment. Two assessment activities were conducted using the prototype site, focusing on the user experience: 1) comparative analysis of the site and published best practices, and 2) heuristic evaluation. The findings define the user interface enhancement that would need to be made if this prototype were to go live. These findings will help others in the digital library community creating faceted browse interfaces for rich information sources such as AmWest.  The findings will be included in the AmWest final report (due fall 2007).

In addition, assessment activities focused on the Calisphere Themed Collections are now underway. The Themed Collections are a special K-12 component of the Calisphere site and were the direct result of the focus groups and interviews conducted during Year 1 of AmWest and subsequent work with the UC Berkeley Interactive University in Year 2. It will be very helpful to go back and gather end user feedback now that Calisphere is live.

All UC campuses now have access to CiNii, the Times Digital Archive, and the Journal of Pathology backfile as part of CDL consortial licenses.

CiNii: Citation Information by National Institute of Informatics, NII Scholarly and Academic Information Navigator (Systemwide access via National Institute of Informatics (NII) [Japan])
http://ci.nii.ac.jp/cinii/servlet/CiNiiTop?USELANG=en

A Japanese-language database service that enables searching of information in papers published in academic society journals or university research bulletins, or included in the National Diet Library’s Japanese Periodicals Index Database. The National Institute of Informatics has incorporated approximately 2.8 million full text articles (PDF) in NII-ELS, from 1,000 published academic journals. Currently NII has obtained permission to include the papers of 271 academic societies.  NII-ELS also provides full text (PDF) of Research Bulletins of Japanese universities. All of the full text articles incorporated in NII-ELS are available through CiNii along with bibliographical information on other academic papers.

(London) Times Digital Archive, 1785-1985 (Systemwide access via Thomson Gale)
http://uclibs.org/PID/112897

CDL has purchased the Times Digital Archive (TDA).  We have perpetual rights for 115 years (1785 – 1900) and online access to over 200 years (1785 - 1985, with 1986 - 2003 added later this year) of The London Times.  The Times is the "world’s newspaper of record" and covers all major international historical events from the French Revolution to the Falkland War. Users are able to search the full text of the entire newspaper, including articles, editorials and advertising.

CDC approved this purchase in December 2003, but at the last moment the copyright holder, Rupert Murdoch, revoked perpetual rights to the 1900-1985 portion of the file and CDL ended the negotiation.  We have since re-negotiated a fair price for the 115 years included in the perpetual rights license.   The resource is on the CDL Work Plan 2007, since it was highly recommended by a number of bibliographer groups.

The “Sunday Times is a distinct newspaper with no editorial connection to The Times London, and is not included in this database.”   This information is repeated in the TDA Navigation Guide:
http://www.gale.com/pdf/navguide/tda_nvg.pdf

Journal of Pathology (Systemwide access via Wiley)
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/search/allsearch

CDL purchased over 100 years of perpetual rights on behalf of all campuses to an important backfile, the Journal of Pathology.  Health & life sciences selectors ranked this as the top priority of the Wiley backfiles available in 2007.