By Sherri Berger, Digital Special Collections Program Coordinator

This December, hear renowned California writer and naturalist John Muir (1838-1914) in his own words as he travels to California, encounters Yosemite for the first time, and works to preserve the open land he calls home.

To raise awareness of Muir’s newly digitized letters, Digital Special Collections will be quoting portions of them on Calisphere’s Twitter and Facebook pages.  Each installment or “tweet” will contain a segment of Muir’s stirring prose and a link to the original document and transcript.  The story will unfold over one week, starting December 1.

To hear Muir’s story, become a fan on Facebook (www.facebook.com/calisphere) or follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/calisphere).  Not a member of either network?  No problem—both accounts are open for viewing by all.

After the event, check back in on Calisphere’s social networking pages to stay up-to-date on new content and developments, as well as learn about related news, tools, and resources scouted on the Web.  We also welcome your questions and comments in these new forums.

This online event aims to engage students, educators, and the general public with the recent online publication of more than 6,500 of Muir’s letters—a collaborative achievement of CDL, The Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley, and the University of the Pacific Library (Learn more).

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The Bancroft Library partnered with The University of the Pacific Library to digitize and publish these important historical documents, with technical support from CDL.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).

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.

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.

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.

A guide to the papers of noted Los Angeles-based architectural photographer Maynard L. Parker (1901-1976) is now online.  Parker is known for his images of midcentury modern homes and gardens on the West Coast and across the nation.  His work captures a postwar era of suburban middle class homes that were designed for indoor-outdoor living, featured innovative and new building materials and appliances, and reflected a burgeoning consumer culture.  From the late 1930s to the early 1970s, his images were featured in many of the nation’s top shelter magazines, including House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, and Better Homes & Gardens.

Browse the collection guide on OAC to learn about 58,000 negatives, transparencies, and photographs, as well as office records and business correspondence, held at The Huntington Library.  The papers relate to a wide range of American architects, publishers, and designers of the postwar era.

Also online are almost 6,000 images of interiors and exteriors photographed by Parker, many of which appeared in popular magazines.  Thirty photographs comprise a new Calisphere themed collection, “California and the Postwar Suburban Home,” that sheds light on the aesthetic and personal values of many Americans in the two decades following World War II.

Learn more about Parker, the collection, and related resources at The Huntington Library’s Maynard Parker collection webpage.

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.

UC Shared Images in ARTstor continue to grow with the addition of over 600 images from the Irvine campus, with approximately 1,200 more to be added later in May.  The new UCI collection is available, along with collections from UCB, UCSB, and UCSC, from the ARTstor home page (http://library.artstor.org) under "Institutional Collections”.

The UCI collection includes a range of academic subject areas, targeted for migration to ARTstor based upon content gaps, new areas of faculty interest, and donated images.  The largest single area represented is Contemporary art, followed by Japanese art (historical and modern, with intriguing WWII material coming soon), Ancient Roman art and architecture, American art, Medieval manuscripts, and Italian Baroque painting.  Images were selected for their instructional and scholarly value, with priority given to images specifically requested by faculty for teaching, research, and student study.;

UCI Usage of ARTstor

Recent ARTstor usage statistics indicate that UCI is one of the heaviest users of ARTstor hosted collections, having accessed almost 25,000 images since the academic year began.  Individual images were accessed and used approximately 110,000 times as part of the year-long UCI Humanities Core Course, which comprises 1,100 undergraduates and 50 faculty members and teaching assistants — the high usage due in part to the adoption of ARTstor within the curriculum.  ARTstor was used for an assignment on Weimar and Nazi Germany where the students researched, wrote, and created a Wikipedia-like document complete with images and citations.  The director of the program, Professor Julia Lupton, enthused, “ARTstor has changed my life”.  She is hoping it changes her students’ lives too.   

Background

Through UC Shared Images, campuses are strategically combining instructional images with ARTstor’s vast range of licensed images, in order to build a robust teaching collection with efficiencies for users, contributors, and the UC system.  See http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/image/ for extended information on how we are building shared image collections together.

The UC Shared Images program recently revised and published its guidelines for shareable metadata.  Version 2.0 of the "Metadata Submission Guidelines" (MSG) is now available at:
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/image/msg_ucsi.pdf.

The MSG provides image-based metadata specifications for campus visual resource centers and libraries participating in the UC Shared Images program, available through the ARTstor hosting platform.  Through the program, campuses can collaboratively develop image collections and share them across the UC system — reducing redundant effort and costs, and providing a convenient and single point of access to the essential images faculty need for teaching.

Metadata that is consistent with other collection records across UC institutions as well as with other ARTstor collections will improve the integration and discoverability of records within ARTstor.  The specifications are based on the ARTstor Core metadata scheme (and indirectly, the VRA Core schema), and also draws on the Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO) data content standard.

The guidelines were prepared by the Shared Metadata Working Group (SMWG) from December 2008 through March 2009.  A special thanks to all of the SMWG members for their time, effort, and expertise that went into preparing this document:

* Maureen Burns, Humanities, Visual Resources Curator (UCI)
* Jan Eklund, History of Art, Visual Resources Curator (UCB)
* Kathleen Hardin, Library, Visual Resources Curator (UCSC)
* Trish Rose-Sandler, Library, Metadata Analyst (UCSD)
* Susan Stone, Information Services and Technology, Data Services, Museum Informatics Specialist (UCB)