CDLINFO

By Mary Elings, Archivist for Digital Collections at The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley and Sherri Berger, Digital Special Collections Program Coordinator, CDL

Muir Letters Online

CDL’s Digital Special Collections, The Bancroft Library, and The University of the Pacific Library are pleased to announce the availability on the OAC and Calisphere of over 6,500 letters from the correspondence of John Muir, 1838-1914.

One of the most important historical figures in California history, Muir was a renowned California naturalist, explorer, writer, and conservationist.  Online access to his correspondence will provide users with new insight into Muir’s life, as well as topics such as California history, Yosemite National Park, the Sierra Club, and the American environmental conservation movement.

Previously, access to the thousands of letters written and received by Muir was limited to original copies scattered across the United States and a few microfilm versions in California.  Now the digital collection is available to everyone online.

The Bancroft Library partnered with The University of the Pacific Library to digitize and publish these important historical documents, with technical support from CDL.  The project was supported by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.

Coming Soon: Follow Muir on Facebook and Twitter!

To celebrate the publication of the Muir letters and engage a broad audience with them, Digital Special Collections will be hosting a Web 2.0 “event” in early December, details forthcoming.  For a week, Muir will “speak” to the public, quoting portions of his correspondence through a series of chronological installments on Calisphere’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.  Hear Muir in his own words as he explores Yosemite and works to protect the vast American West.

To participate in the event and stay updated on Calisphere news and developments, become a fan on Facebook (www.facebook.com/calisphere) or follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/calisphere).

By Jayne Dickson, CDLINFO Editor

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is initiating a new series of invited reports addressing emerging roles for research libraries.  The New Roles for New Times series will begin publication with five reports in 2010.  The reports will identify and delineate emerging roles for research library staff and present research on early experiences among ARL member libraries in developing the roles and delivering services.

Emily Stambaugh, CDL’s Manager of Shared Print, is writing the report on New roles in providing print collections: remote storage and collection consolidation.  Other reports being developed are:

• Transforming liaison librarian work
  Karen Williams, University of Minnesota
• Repository services
   Sarah Shreeves, University of Illinois
• Digital curation and preservation
   Tyler Walters, Georgia Tech
• Library roles in promoting graduate students’ development of research skills and understanding of scholarly communication
  Lucinda Covert-Vail and Scott Collard, NYU

Each report will describe the emerging role, articulating the audience affected by the new role and the benefits various constituencies experience as a result of the new role.  Reports will highlight existing work, report authors’ findings, and offer analysis of trends, best practices, and key issues. Reports will be freely available as PDF files on ARL’s New Roles for New Times Web site http://www.arl.org/rtl/nrnt/.

Complementing the report set, ARL will work with the New Roles authors to organize corresponding webcasts on each topic.  Webcasts will be scheduled to follow a report’s release.

By Joan Starr, Manager, CDL Strategic and Project Planning

CDL has joined many of our colleague and partner institutions, like UC Riverside Libraries, UCSF Libraries, UC Press, Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, OCLC, and many others in creating a Twitter account.  We have done this for several reasons, including:

• as an additional way to get CDLINFO out into the world;
• as a way to amplify the voice and message of the accounts the main CDL account will follow. “Following” simply means to receive the other Twitter account’s updates, or “tweets;”
• and as a way to promote our visibility, in keeping with our values of openness and sharing.

The CDL account is called CalDigLib (http://www.twitter.com/caldiglib) and we encourage you to follow it if you are a Twitter user.  Even if you are not a Twitter user, you can view it by simply going to the URL. You will find this content:

• CDLINFO articles: the headline  with a link to the full article
• Tweets from accounts followed by CalDigLib — accounts that feature CDL Program and Service news, announcements, resources, etc.

If you currently receive CDLINFO via RSS and you are a Twitter user, you may wish to consider following the new CDL Twitter account and receiving your CDL news in this manner.  If you currently receive CDLINFO via email, and have been looking for a reason to try Twitter, this might be a good time to take the leap!

The first CDL Program we will be following is the brand-new eScholarship account.  As time goes by, more Programs and Services will build Twitter into their marketing and communication plans.  Why? Because, as our friend Roy Tennant recently blogged, "Twitter is the new RSS" (http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1090000309/post/290048229.html).  For some of our audiences, at least, this is increasingly the best way to connect.

We hope some of you will join us by following this new account.  Of course, we know some of you are already there! We look forward to a lively exchange as we all get to know this new channel for communication.

For any questions and more information, please contact Joan Starr (joan.starr@ucop.edu) or (@joan_starr on Twitter).

Elise Proulx, Outreach & Marketing Coordinator, eScholarship Publishing Program

eScholarship (www.escholarship.org) launched a redesigned website October 19 with a substantial array of digital publishing services for the University of California scholarly community and a dynamic research platform for scholars worldwide.

Previously known as UC’s eScholarship Repository, the new eScholarship offers a robust scholarly publishing platform that enables departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars associated with the University of California to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship.

eScholarship’s relaunch coincides with the first international Open Access Week (October 19 – 23), an event that marks the growing trend toward providing unfettered access to academic research and publications throughout the world.

Read more at the UC Newsroom, which sent out a press release this morning:

The press release can also be found http://www.cdlib.org/ and http://www.cdlib.org/news/index.html

By Perry Willett, CDL Digital Preservation Services Manager

On October 5-6 2009, over 300 people from 22 countries attended iPRES 2009 at the Mission Bay Conference Center on the UCSF Mission Bay campus. iPRES 2009 was the sixth in an annual series of conferences devoted to digital preservation, and with the 300 attendees, the largest ever.  This year’s conference was coordinated by the UC Curation Center (the new name of CDL’s Digital Preservation Program), with the program committee chaired by Trisha Cruse.  Perry Willett was the project manager for the conference; Beaumont Yung and Rondy Epting-Day provided significant administrative support, as did Megan Amaral, CDL’s student intern from SJSU.

The theme of this year’s conference was "Moving into the mainstream.  Enabling our digital future."  The program was packed with thoughtful and thought-provoking presentations on all aspects of digital preservation. Some notable presentations included keynote addresses by David Kirsch (University of Maryland) on public interest in corporations’ business archives; Micah Altman (Harvard University) on public archives for scientific data; and a panel discussion by members of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.

The conference was extremely successful, and we’ve received much "iPraise." In addition to hosting the conference, this was an important opportunity for CDL to showcase our recent work on curation micro-services and web archiving, and to speak with current and potential partners interested in working with us.  The paper by Stephen Abrams, John Kunze and David Loy (delivered by Stephen) on curation micro-services was particularly well-received, with several highly positive Twitter tweets and blogposts during and after the conference.

CDL staff participated in many ways, with Stephen Abrams, Trisha Cruse, John Kunze, Tracy Seneca, and Perry Willett serving on the program committee.  Stephen and Tricia were also presenters at the conference, and Tracy and Heather Christenson gave poster sessions.  Many people served as reviewers for the program, including (in addition to the CDL staff members already mentioned) Scott Fisher, Martin Haye, Erik Hetzner, John Ober and Lisa Schiff.  Many people from UC campuses also served as reviewers and helped with the local arrangements.  Thanks to all of them for their contributions.

In addition to the scholarly program, we had a full slate of social events including the conference reception at the California Academy of Sciences on Monday evening.  During the conference, Rick Prelinger presented "Lost Landscapes of San Francisco," a film that includes rare footage of the city from newsreels, industrial documentaries and amateur films.  A special "après iPRES" event was held at the Hi Dive in San Francisco on Tuesday evening after the conference.  The conference was part of what was informally called "digital preservation week in San Francisco," with additional events and meetings later in the week sponsored by the International Internet Preservation Consortium, the JHOVE2 project, and Sun Microsystems.

The conference website at http://www.cdlib.org/iPres contains the complete program, along with an archive of Twitter tweets by conference attendees, photographs from the conference and social events on Flickr, and (eventually) video, PowerPoint and full papers from the presentations.  See the Amplified Conference page for photos, blogposts and tweets.

Special thanks go to the vendors who supported the conference: Sun Microsystems, Isilon Systems, ExLibris, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Tessella, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), NetApp, FileTek, Library of Congress and the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), and DuraSpace.  Their support went a long way toward underwriting the costs of the conference.

By Sherri Berger, Digital Special Collections Program Coordinator

CDL’s Digital Special Collections Program is excited to announce that we have created a Calisphere page on Facebook.  Facebook pages enable organizations to promote their services and connect with individuals.  We’ll be using the page to engage educators, students, and the general public.  Take a look at http://www.facebook.com/calisphere.

If you have a Facebook profile, you can “become a fan” of Calisphere to stay up-to-date on new developments and content.  We’ll be linking to photographs, texts, and other items related to holidays, historical anniversaries, and current events; highlighting related programs, events, and educational resources of interest; and doing much more to grow the online Calisphere community.

The page also provides undergraduates with a fun and convenient way to discover primary sources and get ideas for their projects.  We’ll be updating the page on an ongoing basis, so there will always be something new for them to explore.

Tell us what you think about the links and images we share by leaving a comment on the page.  We’d love to know how you, your faculty, and graduate student instructors are using Calisphere.

Calisphere offers free public access to more than 200,000 primary sources such as photographs, documents, newspapers, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, and other cultural artifacts selected from the libraries and museums of the UC campuses and cultural heritage organizations across California.&nbsp These materials reveal the history and culture of the state and its role in the nation and the world.