By Ellen Meltzer, Information Services Manager; Photo by Craig Thompson, Web Producer

How extraordinary to have an undergraduate senior thesis portend the themes throughout one’s career! That’s the case for Stephen Abrams, CDL’s Senior Manager for Digital Preservation Technology who arrived at CDL in February of 2008.  (Members of the University of California Curation Center, UC3 (previously known as the Digital Preservation Program),of which Stephen is a member, also include Patricia Cruse, Scott Fisher, Erik Hetzner, John Kunze, Margaret Low, David Loy, Mark Reyes, Tracy Seneca, Marisa Strong and Perry Willet.)

Stephen provides leadership in guiding the UC3 primarily in 3 areas:

First, the Digital Preservation Repository (DPR).  The DPR is the primary technical infrastructure that manages long term retention of digital objects.  The DPR is moving to a new generation of software; the earlier software was originally designed nearly 6 years ago.  In the intervening years, Stephen points out that we’ve have learned a great deal about the best way to provide preservation services and are at the beginning of a major project to re-conceive and re-implement the repository.  One of main goals we’re trying to accomplish is to ensure the new repository will be more responsive to needs of customers, especially as our customers are becoming more varied, both in the types of units that contribute to the repository and the types of contents we’re preserving.  Traditionally we have worked closely with campus libraries to preserve cultural heritage texts and images.  More recently, we’ve expanded our scope to include new campus constituencies interested in data sets in the social and experimental sciences.

Stephen states that we need to expand our capacity to deal with new content types and an increasingly diverse set of users while still continuing to support our traditional users.  One way to do this is by a new conceptualization of the repository.  Previously, we thought of the repository as a large monolithic system or place, managed centrally.  That concept breaks down when dealing with diverse sets of content with diverse sets of requirements.  CDL is now working on devolving our preservation functions into a set of independent, but interoperable micro-services.  Since each is small and self-contained, they are collectively easier to develop, maintain, and enhance.  Although each is narrow-scoped in function, complex behavior can nevertheless emerge through the strategic combination of the services.

Second, Stephen oversees the Web Archiving Service (WAS), keeping an eye on it to ensure that it remains consistent with our other initiatives. The Web Archiving Service, ably run by Web Archiving Coordinator Tracy Seneca, has been in operation for about a year; recently, we began providing public access to web resources (see http://cdlinfo.cdlib.org/blog/2009/07/08/public-access-to-web-archiving-service-goes-live/).

Third, Stephen serves as lead on the multi-year, multi-institutional, NDIIPP-funded JHOVE2 initiative.  In this project, the CDL is collaborating with Stanford and Portico to develop a next- generation open source format-aware characterization system.  (At this point, I needed to ask what that was.) 

Stephen explained that characterization is an automated process of determining the significant properties of digital objects.  Any digital object is a representation governed by rules of format that specify syntactic and semantic requirements.  During characterization we can examine an object and, by being cognizant of the underlying format rules, we can extract the significant properties.  In a digital document, for example, we want to know the fonts used to be able to ensure that we can properly continue to display the text in the future. For digital images, we need to understand the way in which color is represented to ensure accurate reproduction.

JHOVE1, which Stephen helped create, was widely used in the preservation community; now it’s 5-6 years old and has some inadequacies.  One of the goals of JHOVE2 is to remedy that, and to provide new features.

Characterization becomes important when operating a Preservation Repository.  Sometimes it’s clear what format you’re expecting to receive—depositors can tell you in great detail; other times you don’t know what you have until it arrives.  It’s useful, still, to verify what you did actually receive; people and systems make mistakes. Sometimes you get things you don’t expect.  Characterization also helps to categorize items in order to take advantage of efficiencies by automating processes.  This can only be done effectively if parallel workflows are properly classified.  Characterization is a way to decide which workflow something goes into.  Audio files are different from documents; color images are different from bi-tonal ones.  This is far more than you may want to know on these subjects, but Stephen is someone who is passionate about what he does and I felt he could have continued to speak rapturously about these subjects.

Immediately before arriving at CDL, Stephen served as Digital Library Program Manager at Harvard University Library. And prior to his work at Harvard, he spent 9 years at MIT working as a research engineer in the Department of Ocean Engineering where he worked on grant-funded software for the design and manufacture for naval vessels.  His expertise was on scientific and engineering visualization, where he turned numbers into pictures.  As the Cold War wound down in the late eighties, there were fewer funding sources for these projects.  He began working on information retrieval problems for the Department of Commerce and Interior.  The information retrieval problems lead Stephen to the world of digital libraries.

It was hard for me to imagine that even before this, Stephen spent 9 years at a small company in Pennsylvania: Swanson Analysis Systems—leading developers of finite element analysis used in structural analysis.  There he also worked on the development of engineering visualization solutions.

Now, back to where we began.  Stephen’s undergraduate thesis was on a problem in celestial mechanics — the Three-body problem (I encourage you to look this up in Wikipedia, or elsewhere). One aspect of his research was to develop a graphics display system, in which he had to program the math involved and program for visualization.  With an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Boston University and a Master’s Degree in art and architecture from Harvard, Stephen went looking for work on the scientific side of the two choices “It pays better”, he quipped.  The themes that interested him in his undergraduate thesis have followed him throughout his career.

Stephen was aware for some time of the interesting and innovative work going on at the CDL, the University of California, and partner institutions. Coming here provided Stephen with the opportunity to apply himself more deeply to the “incredibly important” problems in digital preservation.  Of course, transplanted easterners always are drawn by the weather, but there were many things professionally and personally that drew him here.

The challenges are real: There is more useful work that could be done than time to do it.  The main thing is trying to prioritize appropriately—you put together a multi-year road map so that we can be where we need to be at the end of the day; approaching larger problems through small incremental steps.   In addition, he finds there’s such a broad constituency at UC with people working on amazingly innovative things.  Attempting to come up with comprehensive and effective solutions for any one thing can be a great challenge–just trying to ensure our services remain responsive to users as their needs are known now and as they change is daunting.  We’re so glad Stephen is on board to help tackle these demanding issues.

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.

 
Perry Willett arrived at the CDL via a path encompassing diverse specialties and passions, all within the boundaries of librarianship.  He’s now a project manager in the Digital Preservation Group, whose other members include Stephen Abrams, Patricia Cruse, Scott Fisher, Erik Hetzner, John Kunze, Margaret Low, David Loy, Mark Reyes, Tracy Seneca, Marisa Strong.  Perry started out as a business and economics librarian at SUNY-Binghamton, and morphed into an English and American Literature Librarian (his passion) when offered the opportunity there—heart winning over practicality, perhaps—but a good move in the long run.  He then moved to Indiana University and became involved in the Library Electronic Text Resource Service (LETRS) and started the Victorian Women Writers Project.  His most recent position before landing at CDL was as head of digital library production at the University of Michigan where he was responsible for both digitizing parts of the library collections and developing software for access.

Perry currently has 3 hefty projects he’s tackling at CDL.  First, he’s organizing the 2-day iPres Conference, the 6th in a series of international conferences on the topic of digital preservation planned for October in San Francisco.  [Learn more here: http://www.cdlib.org/iPres/ ]  Past iPres Conferences have been held in China and England, so we’re lucky to host this one in California.  Perry is animated when describing the high quality of the submitted papers, the terrific support from vendors who help keep the conference affordable, and the international range of attendees. 

Perry also serves as project manager for Web Arching Service (WAS) development, with his colleague Tracy Seneca as project coordinator, and for Jhove2 development, working closely with Senior Manager for Digital Preservation Technology, Stephan Abrams.  Perry sees his role as overseeing these projects, finding ways to communicate about their plans as they move forward, filling in gaps, and bridging disciplines and communities.  Perry also hopes to further build connections with UC campuses, to understand their needs and expectations for digital preservation, and to facilitate the building of tools to meet these needs.

Perry has managed collections of electronic texts and digital libraries over the past 15 years; watching the flow from production to delivery.  Along the way, Perry co-chaired early efforts in the Digital Library Federation (DLF) community to establish a set of best practices in the humanities electronic text projects.  Combined with his existing knowledge, Perry brings a deep awareness of how people use digital libraries and digital information.  This understanding helps inform his contributions to digital preservation. 

But there are still many challenges for Perry.  In his new position he continues to learn, especially about data sets, scientific data and the needs of researchers in the sciences, quite dissimilar from the worlds of humanists.  There’s a distinct difference between creating digital collections, he argues, and engaging in digital preservation.  Digital preservation is still a young field and he is gaining knowledge about new technologies in the field, surrounded by knowledgeable colleagues.

There is no arguing that his background encompassing experience in public services, collection development, special collections and digital libraries makes Perry an almost perfect match for his current position.  His understanding of how people use libraries is at the core anything he engages; in the back of his mind rests the thought of how people use our resources.  From past experience as a builder of print collections to his current role in facilitating the archiving of the digital, Perry has all bases covered.

 
Within Bib Services, this newly-minted librarian is a project manager for both the WorldCat Local and Request services.  In addition, she and colleague Lena Zentall are responsible for strategic planning for bibliographic services—looking at new tools and new ways of working that will enhance the user experience and make our current tools and practices more efficient.  In everything Leslie does, she relies on her strong customer service focus.

Leslie calls librarianship her “third age career” Act I: Working as a manager in financial services, such as Wells Fargo.  Act II: Serving as an independent business consultant focusing on process improvement and customer service for entities as varied as Autodesk, Mills College, and the Trust for Public Land.  Act III: Libraries!  While seeking a more stable environment than the world of consulting offered, Leslie talked to a friend who had recently attended the UCLA library school and suggested librarianship as a way forward.  SJSU School of Library and Information Science turned out to be ideal for Leslie, since she could work and attend school simultaneously.  There she was able to ramp up her technology skills with a preponderance of online classes and learn to function in a virtual world with teammates and professors she never saw in person.  Leslie quickly became adept at this kind of work and realized how valuable it would be in her new career.

Examining the themes that have traversed her career path, Leslie identified project management skills as a common thread, particularly useful in her current position.  Could it be that as the oldest of 4 sisters Leslie thrived in an ideal environment for developing project management skills and bringing people to consensus?

A fortuitous introduction at library school led to a special projects internship at UCSF Library.  At UCSF, Leslie helped with the early implementation of the Next generation Melvyl Pilot at UCSF, worked on a collection move for a renovation of library space, and developed a proposal for equitable access to library resources.  The UCSF projects became a lab for her classes.  “The UCSF library staff were so generous in answering my many questions and making themselves available to me.  I learned so much from their insights and advice”  Leslie says.  Her contributions to the UCSF projects resulted in her winning the SJSU-SLIS/Jean Wichers Award for Professional Practice in library school—a wonderful synergy!

It seems like finding a career in the University of California Libraries was a natural for Leslie.  “My parents met on the steps of the campanile at Berkeley, and 4 out of 6 in our family are UC grads,” Leslie boasts.  From banking to consulting to librarianship, Leslie’s career path displays a determination and bounding energy that will serve her (and us!) well at CDL.

Earlier this month, Stephanie Lew joined the California Digital Library as our Research Services Analyst.  Stephanie comesto us from the Immediate Office of Academic Affairs at UCOP where she’s been serving as the Financial and Contract Analyst.  Prior to that, Stephanie served in several departments at both UCOP and UCSF.  She has brought with her 10 years of extensive financial and grants management experience with the University.  Her major role will be managing all pre-award and post-award activities related to contracts and grants in CDL.

Stephanie loves to travel and has visited many countries around the world.  Next up: a trip to South Africa in December.  Welcome, Stephanie!

Question:  Which CDL staffer began life in Alaska?

Answer:  It’s Holly Eggleston, the new Electronic Resource Analyst in CDL’s Collection Development and Management Program.  (Other members of this group include Ivy Anderson, Heather Christenson, Paul Fogel, Barbara Glendenning, Curtis Lavery, Chan Li, Andy Mardesich, Wendy Parfrey, Nancy Scott-Noennig, Emily Stambaugh, and Jackie Wilson.  Part of this crew is also located at UCSD:  Maria Figueroa, Tony Harvell, Adriana Moran, and Brian Pierini.)

Holly’s primary responsibility is to lead development of technical standards and policy pertaining to licensed resources, and ensure that the functionality of these resources support the educational and research needs of UC students and faculty.  Holly has several portions to her portfolio in support of this goal.

First, she organizes and manages the CDL Resource Liaisons program, comprised of 100+ subject area expert librarians across all ten campuses who serve as key links between the UC system and CDL licensed resource vendors, as well as between CDL and the campuses.  She also manages the technical integration of licensed electronic resources into CDL systems and services, including defining and communicating technical requirements, facilitating vendor relationships, and managing ongoing lifecycle management activities from resource evaluation and transition between platforms to resource cancellation.  In this work, Holly collaborates closely with the Launch and Lifecycle, Collections, and Resource Wranglers groups at CDL, as well as with the Resource Liaisons, other UC campus contacts and vendor representatives.

Holly has also assumed a significant role in CDL’s implementation of Serials Solutions Electronic Resources Management System (ERMS), by documenting the collections and resources lifecycle workflow, and collecting use cases and reporting needs to assist in the storage and retrieval of data from the ERMS and integration with external information.  No small feat!

What’s especially satisfying to Holly in her new position is the opportunity it provides to communicate with a large network of people and work on a variety of projects—that’s a good thing, since she has to do so much of it.

Holly’s had an interesting career path, with a number of positions in the Pacific Northwest.  Prior to becoming a librarian, Holly worked for eight years at Microsoft in product support and quality assurance testing, including work as the product support lead for Microsoft Office, facilitating communication between the customer support sites and product development group.  After two years as a systems development, staff training, and project management consultant, Holly began her library career at The University of Montana, initially as the business and economics librarian, and later as the head of technical services.  Holly comes to us most recently from UC San Diego where she was the Assistant Head of Acquisitions, with responsibilities in all areas of electronic resource management, including license negotiation, troubleshooting escalated issues, and workflow implementation and documentation.  Holly has a degree in Computer Science from the Evergreen State College and received her MLIS from the University of Washington.  CDL is definitely benefiting from Holly’s former experiences—which added together include database design, automation, library acquisitions, instruction, collection development, project management, community building, and product improvement.  Her reassembled past all combined sounds mighty similar to her current position at CDL.

Not surprisingly, the challenge to Holly as Electronic Resources Analyst is time and resources: so much to do, so little time.  And of course, you can’t do a job like Holly’s alone.  Combined with the fact that everyone else has so much going on (from CDL colleagues to Resource Liaisons), it can be difficult to move things along quickly.  “I want to figure out ways to save time by streamlining routine tasks, and identifying ways to make it easy for people to collaborate on projects and share information,” says Holly.  Holly admits to being impressed by the knowledge and experience at CDL and the UC campuses.  “There is an incredible wealth of current and institutional knowledge at the UC system - we’re in an opportune position to implement updated processes and tools that integrate new technologies while incorporating and learning from the tremendous breadth and depth of local expertise."

Is it Holly’s Alaskan roots that make her willing to explore just a little further?  We’re delighted she has chosen to share her passion for understanding, documenting, and improving workflow and enabling better communication at CDL.  Welcome aboard!

E-books and e-book readers are taking hold.  The mainstream media and the blogosphere are abuzz with announcements of new technological developments, debates surrounding intellectual property rights, and speculation about the future of books and reading.  This article (PDF) covers the e-book essentials that will help you make sense of the headlines and get involved in the conversation.

Elise Proulx is the new Outreach and Marketing Coordinator in the eScholarship Publishing Group of CDL.  Her teammates in this group include Catherine Mitchell, Kirk Hastings, Martin Haye, Suzanne Lim, Lisa Schiff, and Matthew Winfield.   Elise’s role is to inform faculty members, researchers, and others associated with the University of California that eScholarship publishing services exist and how authors, editors, and unit heads can benefit from them.  Her aim is to raise the visibility of these services and increase their usage.  Elise has already been visiting campuses consulting with subject specialist librarians and library staff, since the next phase of promoting these services will be performed with the aid of campus librarians. Coming soon: marketing collateral including notepads, t-shirts, bookmarks, and more.  Another of Elise’s tasks is to ensure that the eScholarship website makes it clear to faculty that using these services is not as daunting as it now might seem.

Elise followed a tantalizing path to the CDL.  She was a literary agent in SF and the executive director of San Francisco’s Litquake, a literary version of the city’s music, film, and cultural festivals, with “a mix of readings, panel discussions, themed events, and general literary mayhem.  ” Her previous positions definitely involved substantial outreach to diverse audiences, a wonderful foundation for working with UC eScholarship users.

Elise is also tackling a library degree from San Jose State University, which she’ll wrap up in December.  This summer she’s taking a copyright class through the University of Pittsburgh.  Combined with her past experience with contracts and copyright as a literary agent, this course will provide her with additional chops for her current position.  She is also pursuing an externship at San Francisco Public Library, working on marketing their “one city, one book” program (http://sfpl.org/news/ocob/onecity.htm).

Elise is knowledgeable about traditional publishing but she began looking at the field of publishing with increasing dismay.  As web publishing began to flourish and the role of literary agents began changing drastically, she was ready for a change.  She’s very excited to be moving into the world of digital publishing. Added to this is her love of the UC libraries: she’s a UCB grad and has a brother who’s a professor at UCSB interested in open access publishing.

Having arrived at CDL in January, Elise is still wrangling with the challenge of having offices in Oakland and knowing there are faculty, researchers, librarians at 10 campuses, plus UC laboratories out there to meet.  It’s a daunting prospect to collaborate with them all.  An additional challenge for Elise was making the transition from a home office (where the appropriate attire is yoga pants and clogs) to a more traditional office.  Although not completely… when one of the members of the eScholarship Publishing Group, Martin Haye, commutes from home, he has a computer running in his CDL office with a webcam online.  Colleagues regularly talk to him and even sit down to chat over lunch.  What strikes Elise odd is that this now seems normal!

A recent positive experience for Elise arose in traveling to UC Merced just a few days before graduation and Michelle Obama’s visit there, with the feel of excitement on the campus.  Elise admits to being thrilled to be at CDL, especially with the end in sight for her library degree.  And we’re equally thrilled to have her on board.

Lisa Schiff, Technical Lead in CDL’s eScholarship Publishing Program recently had an article published entitled “Creating the Mark Twain Project Online” in Learned Publishing, 22: 191–8.

From the abstract: The partners involved in the building of MTPO – the Mark Twain Papers, the California Digital Library, and University of California Press – created the site on the premise that Web-accessible versions of this content, enhanced by innovative design and site architecture and a suite of research tools, would greatly improve scholars’ ability to discover and work with this unique material.   Anecdotal feedback supports this premise.

Congratulations, Lisa!

Rachael Hu is CDL’s User Experience Design Manager, a member of the Assessment, Design and Production Group.  This team also includes Felicia Poe, Robin Davis-White, Jane Lee, Eric Satzman, and Craig Thompson.  Rachael has the weighty responsibility of ensuring that CDL’s outward facing interfaces work well for users.  Interfaces are not designed at CDL without following a process of talking to end users with their behavior patterns, needs, and priorities in mind.  (When you see some of the CDL websites from now on, think: Rachael!)  Rachael has put her stamp on the OAC redesign and the CDL website redesign project, as well as consulting on the UC-eLinks direct linking design, the new eScholarship interface, and the Web Archiving Service (WAS).  Having been at CDL a year and a half already, Rachael falls into the old-new category.  (Or is it new-old?)

Rachael’s road to the CDL began in the internet industry, where she worked for 10 years, beginning on the content side attending to writers and illustrators on a commercial web site.  She then learned the design and development process for web interfaces that served both commercial and non-profit companies.  Rachael was drawn to library school so that she could formalize the training she was learning on the job.  Her degree from the School of Information at the University of Michigan provided her with a framework to understand information from all angles, from the historical and social aspects to the technical.  She also pursued her interests in archives, conservation, and human computer interaction (HCI).  After completing her master’s degree, she moved on to work for JSTOR and Portico.

At JSTOR, Rachael was surprised to find herself enjoying interacting with an institution with an academic mission and very interesting projects—she could take part in understanding not just the interfaces of websites, but the technical underpinnings and changes and shifts in the field of information as well. “I’m glad I had experience in both the commercial and academic worlds.  I gained business-oriented grounding in the commercial sector; and it’s been interesting to adapt what I learned there to an academic setting.  It’s also been a real challenge to understand a different kind of culture.  It’s been good!” says Rachael.

And coming to the CDL has provided a further melding of Rachael’s skills, education and interests.  The OAC project, for example, brings together the world of archives and her HCI experience, and these are combined with her innate skills in observing and listening.  Something she hones on BART rides. “I especially like watching people use their mobile devices during their morning commute.”

Rachael’s been impressed about how much everyone cares about their jobs and what they do at UC—they’re passionate about their work.  “On the one hand it’s a challenge to design for so many different, sometimes conflicting, passionate voices; on the other hand, it’s very refreshing to find that people are really invested in their work, not only at CDL, but in the constituencies we serve.”

“CDL was a great place to extend my journey,” enthuses Rachael, “not to mention gaining a great public transportation system, and leaving behind Michigan winters.”