Emily Stambaugh, CDL Manager of Shared Print

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of California Libraries a nine month planning grant to organize the “Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST)” — a shared print repository service, focused initially on retrospective journal archives. UC Libraries in collaboration with regional library partners will band together to prepare service models for consolidating print journal holdings in responsible ways to provide efficiencies throughout the libraries. WEST is envisioned as a robust partnership that will allow libraries to build and manage a cooperative regional archive at the network level.  The proposal calls for library leaders in the Western Region of the United States to convene in Oakland, CA to (1) design operating, governance, and business models to support cooperative print archives among diverse partners; (2) establish standards for low-level validation and disclosure; and (3) develop selection criteria incorporating risk-management principles to ensure persistence within the broader context of similarly intentioned national and international efforts.

Library leaders from UC, Orbis-Cascade, GWLA, SCELC, Stanford, CalTech, Occidental College and more will band together to design the Western Regional Storage Trust incorporating sustainable models for participation amongst a wide variety of partners.  We are pleased to announce that Lizanne Payne, Director of the Washington Research Library Consortium, will serve as the consultant for this process.

For more information, please contact Emily Stambaugh, CDL Shared Print Manager.

Do you know what the name Bibliographic Services means? We couldn’t agree on it either, so we decided to change the name of our team from Bibliographic Services to a name that better describes the services we provide as a CDL team.  The team that brings you Melvyl®, Next Generation Melvyl®, UC-eLinks, and Request is now the Discovery & Delivery team.

How is this name more relevant to what we’re doing? We’ve seen a shift in the way scholars do research. Discovery and delivery are tightly aligned services — researchers expect access to publications at the same time as they find them. The core library services we provide extend beyond managing bibliographic data — we’re connecting people to what they want. UC-eLinks, for example, is a popular web application that provides UC faculty and students with a quick and reliable way to link directly to articles from the library catalog or other sites like PubMed or Google Scholar.

What can you expect from the Discovery & Delivery team looking forward? We’re building on our years of metadata expertise and expanding further into the delivery realm. We’re exploring new territory in collaborative initiatives like Hathi Trust, where members of our team recently implemented an open-source page turner for the mass digitized books on the Hathi Trust website.

Where will you see our team’s new name? You will see Discovery & Delivery on the CDL website early next year. Our name is 100% acronym free, but you can call us the D&D team for short. We have already garnered several nicknames, including “disco-tech” for our technical team.

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).

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.

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.