CDLINFO

By Sherri Berger, Digital Special Collections Program Coordinator

CDL is pleased to announce the online publication of approximately 2,000 diverse graphic materials documenting local people, place, and events throughout California in the Online Archive of California (OAC) and Calisphere.

The content has been created as part of the Local History Digital Resources Program (LHDRP), which provides a “solution in a box” for libraries across the state seeking to become conversant with developing digital primary resource collections.  Over the past year, ten libraries each have selected, scanned, and catalogued approximately 200 items for inclusion in the OAC and Calisphere and on local websites.  They are now broadly available to the UC community and the general public.

The new material includes photographs, postcards, cartes de visite, records, and more from the late nineteenth century to the present day.  Collectively they document the built environment, civic leaders, and public life at locales throughout California.  Some highlights: a 1921 photograph of Charlie Chaplin on the Coronado polo fields, a 1970 aerial postcard of South San Francisco, and  a 1920s-era image of a track and field athlete at Mills College.

The following institutions participated in LHDRP 2008-2009; click institution name to view content:

• Ostrow Library at the American Jewish University
• City of Commerce Public Library
• Coronado Public Library
• The Pioneer Room at Escondido Public Library
• Graduate Theological Union Library
• Mills College, F.W. Olin Library
• San Diego State University, Library Special Collections and University Archives
• South San Francisco Public Library
• University of California, Riverside Libraries, Special Collections Department
• Upland Public Library

LHDRP is collaborative effort of CDL, the Califa Library Group, and the California State Library.  The project is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.

By Sherri Berger, Program Coordinator for Digital Special Collections

The Visual Resources Center at the College of Environmental Design (CED) at UC Berkeley has added more than 28,000 images to the UC Shared Images collections. The images, which represent a third of the Center’s entire digital collection, document the built environment from the pre-historical period to the early 21st century. Comprising photographs, site plans, floor plans, elevations, and more, they provide a comprehensive record of the world’s architectural history.

The collection is particularly strong in the work of architect Le Corbusier, 20th-century Japan, European Modernism, and late-20th-century Northern California — including many original materials from the CED Archives — all of which are not typically covered in such breadth in standard resource collections. Another highlight is Egyptian and Middle Eastern architecture, where in some cases the images depict structures that no longer exist or are physically inaccessible.

CED VRC Director Jason Miller calls this addition to UC Shared Images “a tremendous shot in the arm to UC’s architecture resources.”  The upload complements several thousand architecture images already available through UC Shared Images, including the recent acquisition by CDL of the Archivision Digital Research Library.

The new images are made available through ARTstor. Click on “UCB: Visual Resources Collection” in the Institutional Collections section to see all images from UC Berkeley.

UC Shared Images is a collaborative, cross-campus program for building an aggregated image collection across the UC system. To learn more about operations and current activities, visit the program wiki.

By Ellen Meltzer, CDL Information Services Manager

In its September 13, 2009 install, OCLC made improvements to the display of electronic resources in the Next Generation Melvyl Pilot. The changes were made to help users better distinguish between links to online materials for which they have access as opposed to links from other libraries to which they may not have access.

Here are some of the modifications:

• If a journal is available in both print and electronic, under “Find a copy online”, users will now see the first 3 links to electronic content that are also found in their local campus catalog. Clicking on one of the links takes a user either directly to the journal or to the UC-eLinks window.
• Links also appear for open access items such as government publications and digital content.
• Other links may be provided by non-UC libraries instead of from the campus, but are displayed separately under “Other libraries.”
• If there are no local or other links and no full text OpenURL resolver to display, then  ‘Find a copy online’ will not display at all.

See the PDF from OCLC for more details on these last changes.

(Also in the document is more complete information on the use of local holdings records (LHRs) to display some serial data in the detailed record instead of making a call to the local OAPC for the data, a feature which will be added at a later date for the UC Libraries.)

By Heather Christenson, CDL Mass Digitization Project Manager

In 2005, the UC Libraries entered into a ground-breaking partnership with the Internet Archive to digitize public domain book collections from the University of California Libraries. With the generous support of external partners such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, our collaboration grew to encompass two major on-site scanning centers at NRLF and SRLF and scores of dedicated staff at the UC Regional Library Facilities and elsewhere throughout UC, producing an impressive corpus of close to 200,000 public domain books that are now available worldwide to students, scholars, and the general public. Today, five years and over 64 million pages later, we announce the conclusion of this phase of our Internet Archive collaboration and celebrate the work we have accomplished together.

UC’s book digitization partnership with Internet Archive began in 2005 as a founding member of the Open Content Alliance. In February 2006, the first on-site digitization center comprising ten Scribe scanning machines was installed at NRLF; a second 10-station scanning center was opened at SRLF later that year.  In August 2008, UC’s on-site Internet Archive digitization center at NRLF was de-commissioned and relocated to an Internet Archive facility in San Francisco, leaving the SRLF scanning center as our only remaining on-site facility. One year later in August 2009, the UC-hosted Internet Archive scanning center housed at SRLF was closed and relocated to a new off-site facility in the Los Angeles area, marking the conclusion of a digitization project that has made available to the world an unparalleled digital corpus of public domain books drawn from the renowned collections of the University of California Libraries.

Although the closing of the SRLF facility is an ending of sorts, it also marks an impressive milestone in the work that we have achieved in digitizing public domain materials from UC library collections. UC books comprise the second-largest public domain corpus digitized by the Internet Archive. These books come from the collections of all ten UC campuses housed at our two RLFs, as well as selected collections from the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, The Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA and its Department of Special Collections, and the UC Davis Libraries. Notable collections include Italian Comedies, the Center for Oral History Research, the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale Collection, the Maurice N. Beigelman Collection of Ophthalmology, Robert E. Gross Collection of Rare Books in Business and Economics, The Bulletin of the California Division of Mines and Geology, and the Bulletin of the California Department of Water Resources, among many others. UC Libraries can be particularly proud to have completed the digitization of a major corpus of English language books published prior to 1923 housed at our two regional library facilities (excluding items rejected due to condition or other technical reasons). We were fortunate to be able to continue digitizing additional pre-1923 roman language content at SRLF in recent months with remaining funding from Microsoft, CDL, and the Internet Archive.

While this phase of our work with Internet Archive is coming to an end, we look forward to continuing our collaboration for many years to come as opportunity and resources permit.

CDL is honored to acknowledge the outstanding dedication and efforts of the many individuals involved in this project, including: Internet Archive managers Julie Lefevre, Kris Brix and their teams; Scott Miller, Jutta Wiemhoff, Shondell Beck, Jeanette Kalchik, Tom Hudgens, and Sarah Schrader at NRLF; Colleen Carlton, Matthew Smith, Carlos Mendiola, and Ryan Tanaka at SRLF; Mary Elings and David Zuckerman at UC Berkeley; and Karen Andrews and Sylvia Villa at UC Davis.

The collections created by this project will be included in the HathiTrust Digital Library for preservation and access, along with UC’s Google books. CDL is currently working with the University of Michigan to develop the process needed to add our Internet Archive-digitized books to the HathiTrust in the coming months.

Digitized collections from the University of California Libraries can currently be viewed on the Internet Archive site at the following location:
http://www.archive.org/details/university_of_california_libraries

More information on the UC Libraries’ mass digitization projects can be found on the InsideCDL web site: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/massdig/ .

By Lena Zentall, Project Manager, Bibliographic Services

In November 2008, CDL convened a team to implement an Electronic Resources Management System (ERMS) to manage CDL’s shared licensing activities for Tier 1 and CDL-supported Tier 2 resources.  The ERMS is hosted on the Serials Solutions 360 platform.  For more information about CDL’s selection of Serials Solutions ERMS, see the CDLINFO article “Serials Solutions Chosen as Electronic Resources Management System (ERMS)” from September 22, 2008.

The ERMS implementation team (iTeam) achieved a major milestone on July 31, 2009 when they finished the initial phase of loading CDL data into Serials Solutions.  During August and September, the iTeam will complete remaining data entry, review the data, and ensure holdings and titles are in sync with the various CDL tracking systems including shared cataloging data and UC-eLinks data.  At the same time, CDL staff will begin adapting their workflow routines to adjust to the new system.

CDL staff have already started using the system to support licensing activities.  CDL Helpline staff are consulting the ERMS on a daily basis and have been pleased with the accuracy of the data loaded by the team. In the coming months, the iTeam will consult with the Collection Development Committee (CDC) to determine the best way to make relevant data available to campuses.

We’ll provide further updates as implementation progresses.  Campuses should feel free to contact Lena (lena.zentall@ucop.edu) with any questions about CDL’s implementation plans.