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The Bancroft Library partnered with The University of the Pacific Library to digitize and publish these important historical documents, with technical support from CDL.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

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).

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

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.

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.

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.)

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/ .

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.