CDLINFO

By Catherine Mitchell, Director, CDL Publishing Group

In a joint effort to respond to substantial and often unmet publishing needs and opportunities within the UC community, the University of California Press and the California Digital Library are pleased to announce University of California Publishing Services (UCPubS).

UCPubS offers a suite of publishing services that are robust and flexible enough to support the complexities of content, format, and dissemination that increasingly define the scholarly communications sphere.  These services are available to University of California departments, centers, or publishing programs that produce scholarly research publications.

Publishing Services

• Book publication (electronic and print)
• Journal publication (electronic)
• Preprint and postprint dissemination (electronic)
• Conference proposal management and proceedings publication (electronic and print)
• Multiple/hybrid revenue models: open access and print sales
• Scholarly marketing: listing in UC Press catalog, dissemination of book information to the book industry and libraries, indexing, and search engine optimization
• Sales and distribution of print books: order fulfillment, warehousing/archiving, inventory control, credit and collections, customer service, and accounting
• Print-on-demand
• Peer review management
• Persistent access and preservation
• Sales reports and usage statistics

UCPubS represents one arm of UC’s broader effort to ensure a sustainable scholarly publishing system in the service of the University’s research and teaching enterprise.  Focused initially on supporting preprint, journal, and monographic publishing in both digital and print formats, UC Publishing Services will extend in the future to provide publishing support for non-traditional publications as they emerge in disciplines throughout the system.

Current publishing partners include the California Academic Partnership Program (CAPP); the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley; and the Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA).

For more information about UCPubS, contact:
Catherine Mitchell, Director, Publishing Group
California Digital Library
catherine.mitchell@ucop.edu
510-587-6132

Laura Cerruti, Director of Digital Content Development
University of California Press
laura.cerruti@ucpress.edu
510-643-9793

By Ellen Meltzer, Information Services Manager; PhotoCraig Thompson, Web Producer

 
Perry Willett arrived at the CDL via a path encompassing diverse specialties and passions, all within the boundaries of librarianship.  He’s now a project manager in the Digital Preservation Group, whose other members include Stephen Abrams, Patricia Cruse, Scott Fisher, Erik Hetzner, John Kunze, Margaret Low, David Loy, Mark Reyes, Tracy Seneca, Marisa Strong.  Perry started out as a business and economics librarian at SUNY-Binghamton, and morphed into an English and American Literature Librarian (his passion) when offered the opportunity there—heart winning over practicality, perhaps—but a good move in the long run.  He then moved to Indiana University and became involved in the Library Electronic Text Resource Service (LETRS) and started the Victorian Women Writers Project.  His most recent position before landing at CDL was as head of digital library production at the University of Michigan where he was responsible for both digitizing parts of the library collections and developing software for access.

Perry currently has 3 hefty projects he’s tackling at CDL.  First, he’s organizing the 2-day iPres Conference, the 6th in a series of international conferences on the topic of digital preservation planned for October in San Francisco.  [Learn more here: http://www.cdlib.org/iPres/ ]  Past iPres Conferences have been held in China and England, so we’re lucky to host this one in California.  Perry is animated when describing the high quality of the submitted papers, the terrific support from vendors who help keep the conference affordable, and the international range of attendees. 

Perry also serves as project manager for Web Arching Service (WAS) development, with his colleague Tracy Seneca as project coordinator, and for Jhove2 development, working closely with Senior Manager for Digital Preservation Technology, Stephan Abrams.  Perry sees his role as overseeing these projects, finding ways to communicate about their plans as they move forward, filling in gaps, and bridging disciplines and communities.  Perry also hopes to further build connections with UC campuses, to understand their needs and expectations for digital preservation, and to facilitate the building of tools to meet these needs.

Perry has managed collections of electronic texts and digital libraries over the past 15 years; watching the flow from production to delivery.  Along the way, Perry co-chaired early efforts in the Digital Library Federation (DLF) community to establish a set of best practices in the humanities electronic text projects.  Combined with his existing knowledge, Perry brings a deep awareness of how people use digital libraries and digital information.  This understanding helps inform his contributions to digital preservation. 

But there are still many challenges for Perry.  In his new position he continues to learn, especially about data sets, scientific data and the needs of researchers in the sciences, quite dissimilar from the worlds of humanists.  There’s a distinct difference between creating digital collections, he argues, and engaging in digital preservation.  Digital preservation is still a young field and he is gaining knowledge about new technologies in the field, surrounded by knowledgeable colleagues.

There is no arguing that his background encompassing experience in public services, collection development, special collections and digital libraries makes Perry an almost perfect match for his current position.  His understanding of how people use libraries is at the core anything he engages; in the back of his mind rests the thought of how people use our resources.  From past experience as a builder of print collections to his current role in facilitating the archiving of the digital, Perry has all bases covered.

By Ellen Meltzer, Information Services Manager; Photo Craig Thompson, Web Producer

 
Within Bib Services, this newly-minted librarian is a project manager for both the WorldCat Local and Request services.  In addition, she and colleague Lena Zentall are responsible for strategic planning for bibliographic services—looking at new tools and new ways of working that will enhance the user experience and make our current tools and practices more efficient.  In everything Leslie does, she relies on her strong customer service focus.

Leslie calls librarianship her “third age career” Act I: Working as a manager in financial services, such as Wells Fargo.  Act II: Serving as an independent business consultant focusing on process improvement and customer service for entities as varied as Autodesk, Mills College, and the Trust for Public Land.  Act III: Libraries!  While seeking a more stable environment than the world of consulting offered, Leslie talked to a friend who had recently attended the UCLA library school and suggested librarianship as a way forward.  SJSU School of Library and Information Science turned out to be ideal for Leslie, since she could work and attend school simultaneously.  There she was able to ramp up her technology skills with a preponderance of online classes and learn to function in a virtual world with teammates and professors she never saw in person.  Leslie quickly became adept at this kind of work and realized how valuable it would be in her new career.

Examining the themes that have traversed her career path, Leslie identified project management skills as a common thread, particularly useful in her current position.  Could it be that as the oldest of 4 sisters Leslie thrived in an ideal environment for developing project management skills and bringing people to consensus?

A fortuitous introduction at library school led to a special projects internship at UCSF Library.  At UCSF, Leslie helped with the early implementation of the Next generation Melvyl Pilot at UCSF, worked on a collection move for a renovation of library space, and developed a proposal for equitable access to library resources.  The UCSF projects became a lab for her classes.  “The UCSF library staff were so generous in answering my many questions and making themselves available to me.  I learned so much from their insights and advice”  Leslie says.  Her contributions to the UCSF projects resulted in her winning the SJSU-SLIS/Jean Wichers Award for Professional Practice in library school—a wonderful synergy!

It seems like finding a career in the University of California Libraries was a natural for Leslie.  “My parents met on the steps of the campanile at Berkeley, and 4 out of 6 in our family are UC grads,” Leslie boasts.  From banking to consulting to librarianship, Leslie’s career path displays a determination and bounding energy that will serve her (and us!) well at CDL.

By Patricia Martin, CDL Director of Bibliographic Services

This is the first in a series of reports from CDL’s Bibliographic Services team.

On Wednesday, June 24th UC Berkeley publicly introduced OskiCat, their new integrated library system purchased from Innovative Interfaces Inc.  (III), replacing the GLADIS and Pathfinder systems.  CDL congratulates UC Berkeley for pulling off a very difficult migration, in record time.  It’s a huge achievement!

But wait!  What does UC Berkeley’s achievement have to do with the CDL Bib Services team?  The Bib Services team played a huge and largely hidden role during this migration.  At the same time that UCB was laboring to go live with OskiCat, we were busy making sure that OskiCat worked smoothly with UC-eLinks, Request, Melvyl AND WorldCat Local (WCL), and prepared for UCB’s records to be reloaded into classic Melvyl (which is happening later this summer).

Here are some of the major Bibliographic Services team milestones of the past year.

7 million records, multiple snapshots, detailed analysis, WorldCat configuration – OskiCat Transition!
When faced with the decision by UCB to migrate to III, CDL veterans and survivors of the UCLA migration to Voyager paused, gulped and pulled out their notes.  Rebecca Doherty served as the Project Manager and main liaison with UCB, and Lynne Cameron assured us it was only a matter of “export, delete, add in the new UCB records, import all, index and merge”; it takes about 6 weeks of indexing and merging to process all 33 million records.  If all goes well, this should be complete by the end of August, in time for UCB’s fall semester.

WorldCat Local
In addition to keeping UCB’s catalog records up to date in Melvyl (now known as “classic Melvyl”), Bib Services and Ellen Meltzer’s Information Services team have been working on the WorldCat Local pilot, with Leslie Wolf as our project manager.  CDL is moving to a more formalized “evaluation phase” of WorldCat Local, scheduled to start in late August, when UCM and UCB begin classes.  This will allow us to stress-test WorldCat Local during our peak active months of October and November, and will provide valuable performance information.  At the end of the evaluation phase in December 2009, CDL will present its evaluation and recommendations to the Executive Team and University Librarians.  We will continue to run classic Melvyl for the foreseeable future.

ERMS
Lena Zentall, our Electronic Resources Management System (ERMS) project manager, along with Margery Tibbetts and Adam Brin, have been working collaboratively with Ivy Anderson’s Collection Development & Management team — both at CDL and distributed throughout UC — to implement our long dreamed of electronic resources management software.  UCLA has also recently purchased the same Serials Solutions ERMS product and Lena is in regular contact with them to share information and expertise.

Request and UC-eLinks
Sherry Willhite, Michael Thwaites, Debra Bartling and Bob Brandriff have been working steadily on implementing Request in WorldCat Local, at the same time dealing with the daily challenges of keeping the Request service and its components up and running.  Debra has been faced with some tough troubleshooting for VDX (UC’s consortial borrowing software) but has still found time to document and prepare VDX for the upcoming migration to VDX 4.1, and to develop a data warehouse approach to VDX reporting. Claudia Woo is now the Bibliographic Services JReport (database reporting interface tool) expert, and Leslie Wolf has taken on the role of project manager for the Request team. 

For UC-eLinks, Margery Tibbetts, Adam Brin, and Lena Zentall have implemented direct linking to electronic articles, making our endusers’ lives significantly easier.

HathiTrust
Lynne Cameron is CDL’s HahtiTrust co-Technical Lead and is working with Bob Brandriff and Adam Brin on bibliographic metadata issues.  Adam has also been tasked with overseeing the tight integration of HathiTrust into WorldCat Local.  To round out our efforts here, Stephanie Collett is working on an improved page turner for the public interface, and the Bib Services Technical Team has provided feedback on the HathiTrust Data API.

Strategic Planning and KPIs
Leslie Wolf and Lena Zentall have been leading the effort to structure Bib Service’s strategic planning, and to make sure planning aligns with CDL’s and UCOP’s efforts.  They have led the team in developing accountability measures, including key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics.  Look for more in this area over the next few weeks.

By Holly Eggleston, CDL Resource Liaison Coordinator and Electronic Resource Analyst

CDL is pleased to announce the following resource liaison assignments within the CDL Resource Liaisons (RL) program.  Resource Liaisons provide a crucial link between the UC system and our licensed resource vendors, as well as providing a link between CDL and the campuses.  Resource Liaisons serve as the primary conduit to communicate resource issues to vendors and CDL, as well as offering expertise and assistance for activities during the resource’s lifecycle.  Some Resource Liaisons are responsible for several databases on the same platform.

Anthropology Plus - Martha Ramirez (mram@ucsc.edu)
CINAHL Plus with Full Text - Bruce Abbott (babbott@lib.ucdavis.edu)
Declassified Documents Reference System - Juri Stratford (juris@lib.ucdavis.edu)
Digital National Security Archive - Juri Stratford (juris@lib.ucdavis.edu)
Historical Statistics of the United States - Joseph Yue (josephyue@library.ucla.edu)
Patrologia Latina Database - Sheila Smyth (smyths@uci.edu)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Sheila Smyth (smyths@uci.edu)
Stat!Ref - Judy Bube (jlbube@uci.edu)

We thank the Resource Liaisons themselves, as well as the campus libraries that are contributing staff to this important program.

To learn more about the Resource Liaisons program, please see http://www.cdlib.org/inside/groups/rl/.

By Beaumont Yung, Manager, CDL Business Operations

Earlier this month, Stephanie Lew joined the California Digital Library as our Research Services Analyst.  Stephanie comesto us from the Immediate Office of Academic Affairs at UCOP where she’s been serving as the Financial and Contract Analyst.  Prior to that, Stephanie served in several departments at both UCOP and UCSF.  She has brought with her 10 years of extensive financial and grants management experience with the University.  Her major role will be managing all pre-award and post-award activities related to contracts and grants in CDL.

Stephanie loves to travel and has visited many countries around the world.  Next up: a trip to South Africa in December.  Welcome, Stephanie!

By Wendy Parfrey, Shared Content Coordinator

As part of its collaborative mission and if one-time funds are available, CDL acquires digital rights in perpetuity to important scholarly resources.  CDL was able to purchase perpetual rights to eight new resources with end-of-year funds in June 2009.

The resources purchased by CDL were all top priorities requested by UC bibliographer groups, particularly African Studies, Califa, English and American Literature, GILS, News, and Performing Arts.  Because such decisions must be made within a short period of time, preference is generally given to resources that can be accommodated under an existing license or whose licensing terms are expected to be straightforward.  All UC campuses will have access to the new resources at no additional cost in FY 2009/2010.

Following is a brief summary of the new consortial acquisitions.

CDL End-of-Year Acquisitions in FY 2008/2009

Archivision Digital Research Library   [http://uclibs.org/PID/44518] – 28,000 images of art, architecture, gardens, parks and historic or contemporary sites from all over the world.  The Visual Resources group has requested Archivision as their #1 priority for a number of years.  Archivision is hosted on the ARTstor platform and is now available to all UC users.

LexisNexis Congressional Hearings Digital Collection Part A (1824-1979) – [Note:  This resource has not yet been activated.  The PID will be distributed as soon as the licensing process has been completed.]  Public policy starts and ends with Congressional committee hearings.  In these hearings, Congressional committees assess, amend, approve or kill legislation, as well as oversee the implementation and effectiveness of previously enacted legislation falling under their jurisdiction.  The LexisNexis Congressional Hearings Digital Collection forms an unparalleled documentary record of events and public policy issues faced by America, as well as the objectives and actions of Congress in dealing with these events and issues.  In addition to responding to long-standing selector recommendations, this acquisition will also facilitate shared collection management initiatives for government documents.

San Francisco Chronicle , 1865-1922 (ProQuest)  [http://uclibs.org/PID/131928]  – Founded by two brothers in 1865 when the West was still wild, the San Francisco Chronicle covers the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the Klondike gold rush, the S.F. earthquake and fire of 1906, America’s entry into World War I, and the many events that shaped the San Francisco Bay region.  The Historic S.F. Chronicle can be cross searched with the Historical Los Angeles Times (an earlier CDL purchase) for complete historical coverage of the State of California.

African Writers Series (ProQuest) [http://uclibs.org/PID/115824] –The Heinemann’s African Writers Series includes seminal works from the canon of African literature of the 20th century: influential stories, drama, poetry, author biographies and literary works from notable authors such as Nelson Mandela and Nadine Gordimer.

The next four resources were purchased from Alexander Street Press, an independent publisher of highly acclaimed and unique digital collections.

Latin American Women Writers  [http://uclibs.org/PID/142275]  – A collection of over 100,000 pages of literature by Latin American women from the colonial period in the 17th century forward to the present.  Latin America and its literary culture encompass twenty diverse countries, each with its unique voice and struggle for independence after the end of colonization.  The collection includes memoirs, essays and literature in the original language of the writers.

North American Theatre Online  [http://uclibs.org/PID/142278]  – More than 40,000 pages of critical, in-copyright reference works about authors, plays, theatres, productions, production companies, casts and related information covering the world of theatre from colonial times to the present.  This reference collection includes upgrades to CDL’s previously purchased Black Drama (Vol. 2 upgrade) and Twentieth Century North American Drama as well as a new resource, North American Indian Drama.

Theatre in Video  [http://uclibs.org/PID/142276]  – Theatre in Video contains over 250 of the world’s most important 20th century plays together with over 100 video documentaries, including the BBC Shakespeare Series, delivered in streaming video.  When using Theatre in Video together with North American Theatre Online, students will be able to find the complete performance of a play in streaming video, its full text, production background, reference materials and related ephemera.

Women and Social Movements in the United States: 1600 to 2000  [http://uclibs.org/PID/142277]  – CDL originally purchased this award-winning collection in 2005 and we are now upgrading to the Scholar’s Edition, featuring 75,000 additional pages of scholarly material about women’s activism in public life since 1963.

Lastly, the remainder of CDL end-of-year funds have been used to extend the SCOPUS pilot through the end of December 2010.  This will allow the CDC Scopus evaluation task force as well as individual UC libraries and research departments more time to complete their evaluation and analysis of this tool.

By Tracy Seneca, Web Archiving Coordinator

The California Digital Library is pleased to announce public access to its Web Archives.  CDL’s Web Archives are built and published using its Web Archiving Service (WAS), which enables librarians to capture, curate, and preserve websites for the benefit of researchers and the general public.  New archives are continually being built and published, and will appear along with the current archives available at http://webarchives.cdlib.org/.

This first set of archives includes materials from the California state government agencies, and local government agencies from Orange County, San Diego, Los Angeles and more.  Also included are archives of Middle Eastern political organizations, American left-wing organizations, and web content related to events such as the 2007 Southern California Wildfires and the 2003 California Recall Election.

As government agencies and public policy organizations increasingly turn to the web as a primary means of publication, libraries are challenged to provide lasting access to the budgets, studies and reports that they have long collected for the benefit of the research community.  The WAS service also allows libraries to expand their collecting scope to more ephemeral materials such as press releases, local commission meeting minutes, public forum sites, and blogs.  All of these provide a glimpse of history in the making for future researchers.  The value of this service is described in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, Scholars Race to Preserve Guantánamo Records, which focuses on an archive currently being built by New York University using CDL’s Web Archiving Service.

The Web Archiving Service also enables the University of California (UC) libraries to work collaboratively on a monumental task: archiving the web sites of the State of California.   The State of California web domain (.ca.gov) represents the third largest subdomain of the U.S. government web presence.  The UC campuses have worked individually to capture and archive local information, and collectively to archive state publications.  Together, these archives represent a major achievement and a series of rich resources for California researchers.  These archives can also provide lasting access to the individual state publications that are catalogued and made available via UC’s Melvyl catalog.

The archives represent the culmination of the Web-at-Risk grant, funded by Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, and led by the California Digital Library.  With our grant partners at the University of North Texas and New York University, and our curatorial partners at the UC campuses, NYU and Stanford University, we are embarking on new era in collection building for libraries.

If you have any questions about the archives or about the Web Archiving Service, please contact washelp@ucop.edu.

By , Sherri Berger, Program Coordinator for Digital Special Collections

The Online Archive of California (OAC) has a new look, advanced functionality, and significantly more content.  Visit it now at: http://oac.cdlib.org

New features
One of the most exciting new features of the OAC is the new design of the collection guide (also known as a “finding aid”), which enables users to effectively and efficiently navigate even the most complex descriptive records.  Using the interactive table of contents, quickly scan the collection contents or drill down into the level of detail you’re looking for.  With the new frame design, users can scroll through the entire guide while retaining context at the institution, series, and box levels.  And there’s also now a PDF version of the entire collection guide.

Researchers will be thrilled to discover the interactive “Browse Map” feature, which graphically displays institutions across the state and links to collection information. 

Users can now easily narrow their search result sets with new facets for date, institution, and online items.

New content
We’ve added more than 30,000 MARC records, providing increased access to California’s most valuable cultural and historical artifacts.

Changes reflect user needs
Every change to OAC came out of a specific need identified by our users.  We reviewed feedback, met with contributors, and performed several rounds of usability tests.  All of these activities helped shape the new site’s functionality and refine its look and feel.  The result is a flexible, powerful, content-rich OAC that meets the needs of researchers of all kinds.