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The Publishing Group of the California Digital Library (CDL) announces the implementation of the PubMed LinkOut feature for material published by eScholarship, the University of California’s open access digital publishing platform.

A service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), PubMed is a free, online database of more than 17 million citations for and abstracts of articles on life sciences and biomedical topics.

The LinkOut feature allows the California Digital Library to link abstract- or citation-only content within PubMed to full-text articles within eScholarship, making it easier for researchers in these fields to discover and access eScholarship’s publications.

“eScholarship’s adoption of the PubMed LinkOut feature is a crucial way to increase traffic to the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine and its original research papers in eScholarship,” says WestJEM Managing Associate Editor Shahram Lotfipour, whose journal is sponsored by the Department of Emergency Medicine at UC Irvine. “It is also important to highlight the significant contribution by the UC Office of the President and the UC Regents to Open Access medical publishing through the California Digital Library.”

This PubMed Linkout integration is one of the many ways the CDL strives to enhance the visibility and reach of research published in eScholarship.

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly digital publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

The California Digital Library provides digital library development and support for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve.

California Digital Library Publishing Group Director Catherine Mitchell sees local publishing services as key for universities to reclaim their primary intellectual asset – the scholarly output of faculty.

By getting involved in the publishing process early on, as the researchers are creating work rather than after the fact, Mitchell believes that universities and their libraries can better support and drive the creation, preservation, and dissemination of scholarship.

“Despite the daunting complexity of the task, universities must take responsibility for managing their own scholarly output,” says Mitchell, “or risk losing control of that core intellectual property.”

At an OCLC Symposium on the Future of Publishing at the American Library Association’s annual conference in June 2010, Mitchell presented an overview of “The University as Publisher: Our Value/s, Ourselves” (http://vidego.multicastmedia.com/player.php?p=akz63449), outlining the University of California’s University as Publisher initiative.

At the heart of UC’s initiative is UC Publishing Services (UCPubS). A collaboration between the California Digital Library (CDL) and the University of California Press, UCPubS provides a suite of open access digital and print publishing tools to UC centers, institutes, and departments that produce scholarly books. Using a shared resource model, UCPubS enables its publishing partners to focus on scholarship, while UC Press and CDL’s eScholarship handle distribution, sales, and web platform development.

UCPubS not only allows these academic units to take control of their publishing processes, but also enables the work published through the CDL and UC Press to reach a worldwide audience, enhancing the University of California’s standing as a top-tier educational institution.

Read more about UC’s University as Publisher initiative in NextSpace, the OCLC Newsletter: http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/016/1.htm.

The California Digital Library provides digital library development and support for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve.

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly digital publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

University of California Press, is among the six largest university presses in the United States and, of these, is the only one located in the West and associated with a public university.

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The Publishing Group of the California Digital Library (CDL) announces the launch of the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) website (http://xtf.cdlib.org/), supporting a robust open-source application for providing access to digital content. Developed and maintained by the CDL, XTF functions as the primary access technology for the CDL’s digital collections and similar projects worldwide.

XTF excels in supporting rapid, customized application development and deployment. Its high degree of extensibility and performance (even for large documents and large collections) frees implementers to focus on building sophisticated presentations for their digital object collections.

“It’s all about balancing flexibility and ease of use: putting infinite customization ability in the hands of curators and scholars with a driving need to provide deep access to their special collections,” says XTF lead developer Martin Haye.

XTF-based applications range from primary source image collections to publishing platforms and archival finding aid repositories at the University of California and many other institutions, including Northwestern University, the University of Sydney (Australia), Indiana University, Visual Arkiv (Sweden), Durham University (UK), and the University of Virginia.

Implementations include:

• CDL’s eScholarship (http://www.escholarship.org/), UC’s open access scholarly publishing platform, which publishes recent research from across the 10 campuses as well as nearly 40 UC-based scholarly journals
• CDL’s Online Archive of California (http://www.oac.cdlib.org/), a collection of more than 20,000 archival finding aids and 200,000 digital primary sources (images and texts) from more than 150 archives, libraries, and other institutions in the state of California
• The Encyclopedia of Chicago (http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/), a collaboration between the Chicago Historical Society, Northwestern University, and the Newberry Library
• Indiana University’s The Chymistry of Isaac Newton (http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/), a digital repository of transcriptions of Newton’s alchemical manuscripts

The new site serves as an expanded resource for programmers, librarians, and the general public to explore and implement the Java and XSLT 2.0-based framework. Features include:

• XTF application download – full release or core updates to maintain customizations (http://xtf.cdlib.org/download/)
• Documentation, including downloadable deployment guide, programming guide, and tag reference (http://xtf.cdlib.org/documentation)
• Video tutorials focusing on basic setup and customization of XTF (http://xtf.cdlib.org/getting-started-tutorials)
• Example XTF implementations highlighting customized features. (http://xtf.cdlib.org/xtf)

For a full list of XTF’s features and benefits, as well as a technical overview, please visit http://xtf.cdlib.org/about or address queries to Martin Haye at martin.haye@ucop.edu.

The Publishing Group of the California Digital Library (CDL) announces the release of version 2.2 of its search and display technology, the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF).

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.

XTF 2.2 Release Highlights

• “Sub-document” feature for fine-grained searching of structured texts. Useful for documents with many unrelated parts (e.g., books of poetry).
• Index enhancements, including:
  • Simple index validation, including number of hits on a given page or in the index. Validation helps ensure that only high-quality search indexes reach the end user.
  • Support for index rotation, to prevent the display of partially completed indexes.
  • New indexer option (“-force”), to force indexing regardless of whether objects have changed.
• Efficiency improvements, including enabling of profiling for search results stylesheets and new caching options.
• Enhanced PDF support, including stylesheets generating a PDF file instead of an HTML page or appending to an existing PDF file using XSL FO (Formatting Objects) with the Apache FOP library.
• Maintenance of XTF source code in Mercurial (hg), easing development and enabling XTF users to maintain a unified code base with the primary XTF code in the default branch and changes in another – allowing for more seamless upgrades.

Experimental Additions

• Support for ERC metadata output from crossQuery.
• Support for OpenURL resolving in crossQuery stylesheets.

XTF version 2.2 is now available for download, along with viewable documentation and a complete list of upgrades, on the XTF Project page on SourceForge.

A Powerful, Flexible Access Platform

Commissioned by the CDL to be the primary access tool for its collections, XTF provides a powerful, flexible platform for providing access to digital content. It consists of Java and XSLT 2.0 code that indexes, queries, and displays digital objects.

The software allows end users to:

• Search using Boolean commands, truncation/wildcard operators, and exact phrases.
• Perform structure-aware searching (e.g., search only this chapter) and view search terms in context.
• Browse hierarchical facets.

XTF provides developers the following benefits:

• Simple deployment: Drops right into a Java application server such as Tomcat; has been tested on SunOS, Linux, and Windows.
• Easy configuration: Can create indexes on any XML element or attribute; entire presentation layer is customizable via XSLT.
• Robustness: 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.
• Extensibility:
  • 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., OAI-PMH data provider that allows others to harvest metadata, SRU interface that exposes searches to federated search engines).
  • Modular components can be deployed as separate pieces of a third-party system (e.g., the module that displays snippets of matching text).

National and International Use

XTF is a widely used technology, both within the CDL and worldwide. A small sampling of its implementation:

• eScholarship access interface (http://www.escholarship.org), developed by the Publishing Group of the CDL.
• Mark Twain Project Online (http://www.marktwainproject.org), co-developed by the Mark Twain Papers Project, the CDL, and the University of California Press.
• The Encyclopedia of Chicago (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/), co-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.
• Frontiers of Science (http://frontiers.library.usyd.edu.au/), University of Sydney Library.

Issues in Applied Linguistics aims to publish “outstanding research from students, faculty, and independent researchers in the broad areas of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, language analysis, language assessment, language education, language use, and research methodology.” It is published under the aegis of the UCLA Department of Applied Linguistics and is edited by the department’s graduate students.

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly digital publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

Browse the entire list of eScholarship journals: http://escholarship.org/uc/search?smode=browse;browse-journal=aa.

The Publishing Group of the California Digital Library announces the open access digital publication of Mark G. Yudof’s book When Government Speaks: Politics, Law, and Government Expression in America.

The book has joined more than 32,000 University of California–associated publications in eScholarship, the University’s open access digital publishing platform. All content in eScholarship is freely accessible worldwide.

In the text – published by the University of California Press in 1983 while Yudof was a faculty member at the University of Texas Law School – Yudof argues that government’s ever-increasing participation in communication processes threatens key democratic values that the First Amendment was designed to protect.

Readers of this digital version are able to view an abstract, do keyword searches across the entire publication, “share” news of the title through various Web 2.0 social networking sites, and click through to UC Press’s website to purchase the print version.

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly digital publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the death of one of America’s favorite writers, thinkers, and humorists: Mark Twain. The Mark Twain Project Online – a collaboration between the Mark Twain Papers and Project of The Bancroft Library, CDL’s Publishing Group, and UC Press – includes a wealth of materials for Twain fanatics eager to celebrate the author’s legacy by combing through some 2,300 letters Twain wrote between 1853 and 1880 (including nearly 100 facsimiles of originals). A recent blog post in the Chronicle of Higher Education lauded the project, calling it “a massive online archive of the writer’s manuscripts and letters and other Twainiana.”

Hundreds of the letters included in the Mark Twain Project Online were warmly written to his wife, Olivia Clemens, and illustrate why Twain is so beloved despite his often acid tongue. One such letter begins, “My Dear dear dear dear dear dear dear Livy (that is the tamest word that ever I saw—you have to repeat it 6 or 7 times to make it express anything).” The collection also includes digital editions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2003) and Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians (1989).

For more information, including the history of the project and contributor credits, see the “About MTPO” page at http://www.marktwainproject.org/about_mtpo.shtml.

eScholarship is pleased to announce the inaugural double issue of California Italian Studies Journal (http://escholarship.org/uc/ismrg_cisj), a digital, peer-reviewed, open access journal committed to publishing innovative and influential scholarly work in the field of Italian Studies. The nascent journal will feature interdisciplinary, comparative, and critical scholarship.

The journal’s editorial board includes faculty from across the University of California, including UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Santa Cruz. Its advisory board spans the global field of Italian Studies.

“Open access is a key component of today’s efforts to integrate specialized-knowledge-production institutions with the wider network of information exchange generated by the digitalization of media culture,” said Editor Claudio Fogu. “We are proud and excited to connect Italian Studies with this global trend.”
eScholarship (http://escholarship.org/) provides open access, scholarly digital publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

Browse the entire list of eScholarship journals: http://escholarship.org/uc/search?smode=browse;browse-journal=aa.

Outreach & Marketing Coordinator, Publishing Group

The digital scholarly monograph collection formerly known as eScholarship Editions has been renamed “UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2008” (www.escholarship.org/editions).

A joint project of UC Press and the California Digital Library’s Publishing Group, the E-Books Collection includes nearly 2,000 UC Press-published scholarly books on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.

Access to the digital books is free for all University of California faculty, staff, and students; more than 750 titles are also freely available to the public. Print versions of many of the books can be purchased directly from UC Press (www.ucpress.edu).

The collection’s new name more accurately reflects its scope and provenance – and helps differential these books from the scholarly material currently published in eScholarship, the CDL’s open access publishing service for the UC academic community (www.escholarship.org).

Since 2005, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting research to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication.

The center’s final report on this multi-year research project, Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines (available at http://escholarship.org/uc/cshe_fsc), brings together the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions in seven selected academic fields: archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.

“Our premise has always been that disciplinary conventions matter and that social realities (and individual personality) will dictate how new practices, including those under the rubric of Web 2.0 or cyberinfrastructure, are adopted by scholars,” says Principal Investigator and Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project, Diane Harley, Ph.D. “That is, the academic values embodied in disciplinary cultures, as well as the interests of individual players, have to be considered when envisioning new schemata for the communication of scholarship at its various stages.”

The report’s executive summary concludes that scholarly communication traditions, “which rely heavily on various forms of peer review, may override the perceived ‘opportunities’ afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category.”

In addition, the report targets five key topics in the current scholarly communication system that require attention: the development of more nuanced tenure and promotion process; a reexamination of peer review; competitive high quality and affordable journals and monograph publishing platforms; new models of publication that can accommodate material of varied length, as well as rich media and embedded links to data; and support for managing and preserving new research methods and products.

Visit http://escholarship.org/uc/cshe_fsc to download or view the full report.