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

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 Lisa Schiff, eScholarship Publishing Program Technical Lead

The California Digital Library (CDL) is pleased to announce the availability of an extensive self-guided tutorial for its eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) application.  XTF is an open source, highly customizable piece of software supporting the search, browse, and display of heterogeneous digital content and offering efficient and practical methods for creating customized end-user interfaces for distinct digital collections.  The tutorial provides guidance for implementing and customizing XTF, from core functionality to overall look and feel.Downloads for the Mac and Windows operating systems are available from the XTF Project page on SourceForge, along with the complete distribution and documentation.

The tutorial comes with a complete XTF package that is ready to run when uncompressed; no other installation is required.  It contains nine modules spanning the most powerful and popular features, including how to:

• Add new content
• Change metadata
• Change logo and colors
• Increase significance of titles in ranking hits
• Customize and enable default status of advanced search
• Change fields displayed in search results
• Enable structural searching
• Create a hierarchical facet
• Change footnote behavior

XTF Background and Overview
Since first developing and deploying this indexing and display technology in 2005, the CDL has worked to build and maintain XTF as a highly customizable application built upon tested components already in use by the digital library and search communities - in particular the Lucene text search engine, Java, XML, and XSLT.  By coordinating these pieces in a single platform that can be used to create multiple unique applications, the CDL has succeeded in dramatically reducing the investment in infrastructure, staff training, and development for new digital content projects.

XTF offers the following core features out of the box:

• Easy to deploy: Drops directly in to a Java application server such as Tomcat or Resin; has been tested on Solaris, Mac, Linux, and Windows operating systems
• Easy to configure: Can create indexes on any XML element or attribute; entire presentation layer is customizable via XSLT
• Robust: Optimized to perform well on large documents (e.g., text that exceeds 10MB of encoded text); scales to perform well on collections of millions of documents; provides full Unicode support
• Extensible:
• Works well with a variety of authentication systems (e.g., IP address lists, LDAP, Shibboleth)
• Provides an interface for external data lookups to support thesaurus-based term expansion, recommender systems, etc.
• Can power other digital library services (e.g., XTF contains an OAI-PMH data provider that allows others to harvest metadata, and an SRU interface that exposes searches to federated search engines)
• Can be deployed as separate, modular pieces of a third-party system
• Powerful for the end user:
• Spell checking of queries
• Faceted displays for browsing
• Dynamically updated browse lists
• Session-based bookbags

A sampling of XTF-based applications include:

• Mark Twain Project Online (http://www.marktwainproject.org), developed by the Mark Twain Papers Project, the CDL and the University of California Press.
• Calisphere (http://www.calisphere.org/), developed by the CDL.
• The Encyclopedia of Chicago (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/)
• The Chymistry of Isaac Newton (http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/) and The Swinburne Project (http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/swinburne/www/swinburne/)
• Finding Aids at the New York Public Library (http://labs.nypl.org/2007/10/30/extensible-text-framework-xtf/)
• EECS Technical Reports (http://sunsite2.berkeley.edu:8088/xtf/servlet/org.cdlib.xtf.crossQuery.CrossQuery?rmode=btr)

For more information, visit http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/xtf/.

CDL’s Director of eScholarship Publishing, Catherine Mitchell, has been re-envisioning scholarly publishing, a topic that’s of broad interest right now.   Mitchell insists in a Library Journal interview, “There are a lot of publishing needs across the UC system that are going unmet, and we can bring better service to those individuals, departments, units, and centers, really compelling services.”  Read more in Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box.

Clifford Lynch commented on the final report of ARL’s Digital Repository Issues Task Force, The Research Library’s Role in Digital Repository Services, in which Mitchell is also cited, “There’s a new report from the Association of Research Libraries that looks carefully and thoughtfully at what we have learned about the role of research libraries in Digital Repository Services, and provides an up-to-date perspective of the area in the broader context of developments in areas such as e-research.”

Want to learn more?  You can see and hear Mitchell, one of several “experts and advocates examin[ing] the state of the art in digital repositories in a new series of videos now freely available online from SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition).”

Mitchell and UC’s Press’s Laura Cerruti have an upcoming article in Against the Grain on the collaboration between CDL and the University of California Press:
Mitchell, Catherine and Laura Cerruti.  2009.  Local, Sustainable, and Organic Publishing:  A Library-Press Collaboration at the University of California.  Against the Grain 20(6): 22-28.

We are proud of Catherine’s leadership and contributions to the field of scholarly publishing on behalf of the University of California libraries.

CDL Collections and eScholarship in partnership with the UC Scholarly Communication Officers (SCOs) are piloting a ground-breaking open access publishing arrangement with Springer on behalf of UC faculty.  The two year experiment has already begun.  CDL sent out a press release about the pilot program on January 21, 2009.  The publicity was distributed to a variety of library information sources as well as the Chronicle of Higher Education and other standard UCOP media outlets.  Springer will also send the release to selected European contacts.  Information has been also posted on the CDL web site and on the Reshaping Scholarly Communication web site.

Laine Farley, CDL Executive Director, and Ivy Anderson, CDL Director, Collection Development and Management, have requested that the University Librarians communicate with appropriate faculty on their campuses to notify them of this pilot.  It will be important to the success of the pilot that as many UC faculty as possible know about this open access opportunity.  According to Springer, approximately 1,500 articles with at least one UC author are published annually in Springer journals. CDL will also be working with the SCOs on additional campus outreach as well as on an evaluation plan.

An article is eligible for Springer’s open access publishing option (called Springer Open Choice) if even one of the authors of an article is from UC. To invoke the Open Choice option, the corresponding or submitting author simply selects a UC campus affiliation from a drop-down box that appears on the acceptance screens that he or she completes once the article has been accepted for publication.  Therefore, the submitting author, if not from UC, must know about the program and indicate that one of their co-authors possesses a UC affiliation. This requires that the UC authors be familiar with the pilot and remember to inform their co-authors about the program.  A message on the acceptance screen will indicate that the Open Choice option is being made available to them at no charge through an arrangement with the University of California Libraries.

CDL will clarify some remaining issues about placing the final published Springer OA articles in the eScholarship Repository and we expect to begin this part of the pilot soon.

Please address questions to Jacqueline Wilson (jacqueline.wilson@ucop.edu), Senior Associate for Collections, California Digital Library.

It is with delight that I announce the arrival of Elise Proulx, eScholarship’s new Outreach and Marketing Coordinator.  Elise comes to us with a remarkable convergence of extremely relevant and promising professional experiences.  Most recently, as a literary agent at Frederick Hill Bonnie Nadell, she worked with authors to establish and negotiate book contracts with publishers.  Simultaneously, as the executive director of LitQuake, she developed, produced and promoted an annual, week-long San Francisco literary festival involving 450+ authors and 60+ venues.  Elise has worked in media for the past 15 years, including time as an associate editor at the venerable Berkeley journal The Threepenny Review and as a reporter for the Napa Valley Register.  And, to top it all off, she is currently working toward an M.L.I.S. at San Jose State University.  Elise lives in Bernal Heights (SF) with her husband Eric and 18-month-old son, Errol.

In her new role, Elise will serve as the official spokesperson for the eScholarship suite of services.  As such, she will be responsible for working with UC faculty, researchers, academic department staff and librarians to promote the use of eScholarship publishing services throughout the UC system.  She will also lead our market research and needs assessment efforts to enhance existing publishing services and to develop new eScholarship projects that respond to the publishing needs of UC’s academic community.

We count ourselves enormously lucky to have Elise joining our team in such a crucial role at such a crucial time.  Please join me in welcoming her to the CDL!

The Publishing Group had a very successful trip to the ELPUB2008 conference (http://www.elpub.net) in Toronto, where Kirk Hastings and Martin Haye lead a well-received hands-on workshop on the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) and Lisa Schiff presented a paper on the Mark Twain Project Online.  A copy of the paper can be downloaded from the ELPUB Digital Library here:  http://elpub.scix.net/cgi-bin/works/Show?_id=363_elpub2008&sort=DEFAULT&search=schiff&hits=2

The California Digital Library (CDL) is pleased to announce a new release of its search and display technology, the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) Version 2.1.   XTF is an open source, highly flexible software application that supports the search, browse and display of heterogeneous digital content.  XTF offers efficient and practical methods for creating customized end-user interfaces for distinct digital content collections.

Highlights from the 2.1 release include:

• Extensive interface improvements, including new search forms, built-in faceted browsing, and new look and feel.
• Increased support for document and information exchange formats.
• XHTML and OAI-PMH output
• NLM article format indexing and output
• Microsoft Word indexing
• Streamlined XSLT stylesheets for simpler deployment and adaptation.
• Updated documentation that has been moved to the XTF project wiki, allowing XTF implementers to share solutions with entire user community.
• "Freeform" Boolean query language, offered as an experimental feature.
• Backward compatibility with existing XTF implementations.

A complete list of changes is available on the XTF Project page on SourceForge, where the distribution (including documentation) can also be downloaded.

Since the first deployment of XTF in 2005, the development strategy has been to build and maintain an indexing and display technology that is not only customizable, but also draws upon tested components already in use by the digital library and search communities - in particular the Lucene text search engine, Java, XML, and XSLT.  By coordinating these pieces in a single platform that can be used to create multiple unique applications, CDL has succeeded in dramatically reducing the investment in infrastructure, staff training and development for new digital content projects.

XTF offers a suite of customizable features that support diverse intellectual access to content.  Interfaces can be designed to support the distinct tools and presentations that are useful and meaningful to specific audiences.  In addition, XTF offers the following core features:

• Easy to deploy: Drops directly in to a Java application server such as Tomcat or Resin; has been tested on Solaris, Mac, Linux, and Windows operating systems.
• Easy to configure: Can create indexes on any XML element or attribute; entire presentation layer is customizable via XSLT.
• Robust: Optimized to perform well on large documents (e.g., a single text that exceeds 10MB of encoded text); scales to perform well on collections of millions of documents; provides full Unicode support.
• Extensible:
• Works well with a variety of authentication systems (e.g., IP address lists, LDAP, Shibboleth).
• Provides an interface for external data lookups to support thesaurus-based term expansion, recommender systems, etc.
• Can power other digital library services (e.g., XTF contains an OAI-PMH data provider that allows others to harvest metadata, and an SRU interface that exposes searches to federated search engines).
• Can be deployed as separate, modular pieces of a third-party system (e.g., the module that displays snippets of matching text).
• Powerful for the end user:
• Spell checking of queries/li>
• Faceted displays for browsing
• Dynamically updated browse lists
• Session-based bookbags

These basic features can be tuned and modified.  For instance, the same bookbag feature that allows users to store links to entire books, can also store links to citable elements of an object, such as a note or other reference.

A sampling of XTF-based applications both within and outside of the CDL include:

• Mark Twain Project Online (http://www.marktwainproject.org), developed by the Mark Twain Papers Project, the CDL and the University of California Press.
• Calisphere (http://www.calisphere.org/), a curated collection of primary sources keyed to the curriculum standards of California’s K-12 community, developed by the CDL.
• The Encyclopedia of Chicago (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/), developed by the Chicago History Museum, The Newberry Library, and Northwestern University.
• The Chymistry of Isaac Newton (http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/) and The Swinburne Project (http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/swinburne/www/swinburne/), Indiana University.
• Finding Aides at the New York Public Library (http://labs.nypl.org/2007/10/30/extensible-text-framework-xtf/).
• EECS Technical Reports (http://sunsite2.berkeley.edu:8088/xtf/servlet/org.cdlib.xtf.crossQuery.CrossQuery?rmode=btr), UC Berkeley.

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.

University of California is pleased to announce the launch of the beta version of the Mark Twain Project Online (www.marktwainproject.org), a digital critical edition of the writings of Mark Twain.

The Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO) applies innovative technology to more than four decades of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project.  It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.

MTPO is a joint undertaking of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, the California Digital Library, and University of California Press.  It is funded in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Mark Twain Project, and is supported by a number of institutions and individuals.  The Mark Twain Foundation, a perpetual charitable trust that possesses the publication rights to all of Mark Twain’s writings, has given UC Press and the Mark Twain Project Online exclusive rights to publish copyright-protected writings by Mark Twain, both in print and electronically.

At beta launch, the site will include more than twenty-three hundred letters written between 1853 and 1880, including nearly 100 facsimiles of originals.  Users will also be able to search for information about Mark Twain’s complete correspondence across his entire life, including letters to him and his family. In future years, the site will release more of the nearly ten thousand known letters, including many never-before published; electronic editions of many of Mark Twain’s most famous literary works; the most complete catalog of Mark Twain’s writings currently available; and, in 2010, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, never before published in its complete form.

"The Mark Twain Project Online is an extraordinary resource for scholars, teachers, and ordinary readers.  Materials that previously could be examined only by scholars fortunate enough to be able to visit the Mark Twain Project in The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley will now be available worldwide to anyone with an interest in Mark Twain—and that’s a cause for celebration," Shelley Fisher Fishkin, author of Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture, said.

The customizable interface provides a powerful reading and research experience.  The site offers users unprecedented access to authoritative transcriptions of Mark Twain’s writings and the ability to compare those transcriptions side by side with facsimiles when available. Researchers can gather and store digital citations and links to selected documents, images, and other resources.  These features are supported, in large part, by the California Digital Library’s eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) and the ongoing work of the Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI).

The Mark Twain Project Online demonstrates the great advantages of digital presentation and will be a model for future digital scholarly work.  “The Mark Twain Project Online is an exciting initiative that will make a fundamental literary and biographical archive available to scholars and students.  MTPO offers easy access through a sophisticated web interface that is growing and comprehensive scope.  This project has the potential to become a model for Web accessibility to foundational scholarly resources,” Richard Terdiman, author of Body and Story: The Ethics and Practice of Theoretical Conflict, said.

View the Mark Twain Project Online and access information about the making of this landmark online publication, by visiting http://www.marktwainproject.org.  You can also contact Catherine Mitchell (Catherine.Mitchell@ucop.edu; 510.587.6132), Acting Director of CDL’s eScholarship Publishing Group for additional information.