CDLINFO

By Catherine Mitchell, CDL Acting Director of Publishing Services

The University of California announced this week that its widely-used eScholarship® Repository has surpassed the 5 million mark for full-text downloads of its open access scholarly content.  This major milestone reflects the impressive adoption and usage rate the Repository has enjoyed since its inception in 2002, with University of California academic units and departments from its 10 campuses publishing or depositing over 20,000 papers and works.

The eScholarship Repository, a service of the California Digital Library, provides a robust full-spectrum, open access publishing platform for pre-prints, post-prints, peer-reviewed articles, edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals.  The Repository houses a broad range of scholarly content from disciplines across the Humanities, Social Sciences, Mathematics and Sciences.

The rate of usage of these materials has grown exponentially in the past 5 years, now often exceeding 55,000 full-text downloads per week.

As evidenced by this rate of activity, the eScholarship Repository represents one of the University of California’s most successful and sustained efforts to improve and provide innovative alternatives to the troubled scholarly publishing system – a system that increasingly struggles to serve the needs and requirements of the academic community.

“We’re very excited about the uptake and use of the eScholarship Repository at the University of California,” says Catherine Candee, Executive Director, Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Services at UC’s Office of the President.  “Our open access publishing platform represents a critical component of UC’s broader effort to strengthen university-based publishing services and integrate them into the research, teaching and public service mission of the University.”

Part of a suite of innovative publishing services developed by the CDL in recent years, the eScholarship Repository serves the scholarly publishing needs of individual faculty and academic departments, laboratories and research units across the University of California system.  It is also a central mechanism in the collaborative publishing efforts between the CDL and the University of California Press.

By Ellen Meltzer, CDL Information Services Manager

UC campuses now have access to these electronic resources as part of CDL consortial licenses.  (Some campuses may have already had access to these titles through previous local campus subscriptions):

Global Financial Data (Systemwide access [minus UCSF] via Global Financial Data)
http://uclibs.org/PID/106641

Contains long runs of historical data (over 6,000 series) on security markets and macroeconomic trends for more than 200 countries.  Includes Long-term Financial, Interest Rate, United States Daily Stock Market, Global Stock Market, Total Return, Annual Data, and Dow Jones Industrial Average Intraday.  Includes online encyclopedia that describes the database.

Source OECD (Tier 2 resource does not include Berkeley, Santa Cruz and SF.  Berkeley and Santa Cruz receive through other vendors; Santa Cruz will join this license next year.  An optional add-on product, IEA Statistics, has been selected by 3 campuses:  Irvine, Riverside, and San Diego)
http://uclibs.org/PID/21193

Full-text publications and statistical data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including country studies, forecasting publications, reports, and socioeconomic datasets.  The statistics section includes data in the areas of international trade, telecommunications, foreign aid, migration, and many other categories.

By Steve Toub, UC-eLinks Project Manager

CDL recently conducted an assessment concerning existing and potential service options for the UC-eLinks service menu. This assessment was conducted at UCSC and UCLA in November 2007. The scope of the assessment was broader than last February’s assessment and the modest redesign that was completed last summer: it covered such issues as how users enter the service menu, whether want to go directly to full text items (bypassing the service menu entirely), and the "UC-eLinks" name.

The report is available for your review at: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/assess/evaluation_activities/docs/2007/UC-eLinks_report_nov2007.pdf

The most significant recommendation is to “explore the potential for changing the service menu window to feature direct linking in a frame”. Another significant recommendation is to retain the existing UC-eLinks name and orange button.

Pending the blessing of our campus partners, CDL will begin a design and development effort to implement direct linking in a frame. If users validate that they prefer this implementation over the existing service menu, we plan to implement the change in production.

By Ellen Meltzer, CDL Information Services Manager

While Request functionality will be accessible from the UC-eLinks service menu at the start of the Next Generation Melvyl pilot, easier and more intuitive access to the current Request system has been postponed from June to early fall.  The delay is due to the complexity in building UC Request (Interlibrary Loan) into OCLC WorldCat Local (WCL) and the desire to have as successful and robust a system as UC currently has.

What will this mean for us?
The pilot will still be launched in April.  Each campus will have its own local version of Melvyl (e.g., ucla.worldcat.org) with its local records displayed first, followed by other UC records, followed by global WorldCat records.  The union catalog view will not preference any one campus; it will display UC libraries records followed by global WorldCat records.  

For the April release, the Request option in UC-eLinks will be used for interlibrary loan purposes, as is now the case when using licensed resources.  Until Request is improved in early fall, users will have an extra step in borrowing books.  Currently in Melvyl, users can find books in Melvyl and click directly on the Request button to get the item. In the pilot, from April to fall 2008, they will have to use Request option within UC-eLinks.  After direct access to Request is implemented in WCL, borrowing books will be easier, involving fewer steps and a better end-user experience.  The look and feel of these services may be different from the way they currently appear.

All in all, it’s good news.  The takeaway message is this: users will be able to borrow books and other items throughout the life of the pilot; in fall 2008, it’ll be easier by a step or two.  But the best news is that OCLC, after having worked with the UC libraries, is changing its strategy concerning interlibrary loan delivery.  Influencing OCLC’s research agenda was one of the goals of the UC-OCLC collaboration…mission accomplished.