California Digital Library » Jayne Dickson

Temporary Changing of the Guard at UC3

Jayne Dickson — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 18:50:51 +0000

Patricia Cruse, CDL’s Director of Digital Preservation (UC3), will be reducing her duties at the CDL between January 14 and June 30, 2013. Trisha will be working remotely from Italy and Spain while she accompanies her husband on his sabbatical from the University of San Francisco (USF). During this time Trisha will continue working on various initiatives on a limited basis and will be available via email at patricia.cruse@ucop.edu. Please don’t hesitate to contact Trisha about work or great places to see or eat in Italy or Spain!

Rosalie Lack, who has returned to CDL to assume the duties of the Web Archiving Service (WAS) manager, will take on many of the responsibilities for the day-to-day running of UC3. These include administrative and systemwide activities as well as budgetary, communication, outreach, marketing and UC3 team management. Rosalie can be reached at rosalie.lack@ucop.edu.

CDL office closure Dec. 21, 2012 PM – Jan. 1, 2013

Jayne Dickson — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:10:29 +0000

This year, UC’s Office of the President, including the California Digital Library (CDL), will be officially closed during the Winter and New Year holiday periods from Friday, December 21, 2012 at 3 PM through Tuesday, January 1, 2013.

During this closure, if you need to report an urgent problem with any of the CDL services (Melvyl, Request, UC-eLinks, etc.) you can call the UCOP Computer Center at 510.987.0349 for assistance.

Melvyl Enhancements – August 2012

Jayne Dickson — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 23:05:49 +0000

Enhancements to the user experience in Melvyl were recently implemented by OCLC and officially rolled out during OCLC’s Sunday, August 5 install. All improvements are listed in detail in the attached PDF. (There are some items that do not apply to the UC libraries’ versions of Melvyl because they refer to features that UC has not yet turned on, or work slightly differently in our versions. Features that are not currently turned on for UC may be added in the future.)

Emailing of Search Results Problem

The problem of emailing an item from the detailed search results page to an email address has been resolved. In the past, this feature was becoming unreliable where search results selected for emailing would not arrive to the intended email address provided. This problem has been fixed.

General Performance Enhancements

In addition, several performance enhancements were introduced. These improvements are primarily ‘behind the scenes’ but overall, users should see improved response times for displaying search results and the loading of web pages in general.

CDLers (and UCBer) in Print

Jayne Dickson — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:14:23 +0000

UC librarians Sherri Berger (CDL), Lynn Jones (UCB) and Ellen Meltzer (CDL) have contributed a chapter to Past or Portal? Enhancing Undergraduate Learning through Special Collections and Archives, edited by Eleanor Mitchell, Peggy Seiden, and Suzy Taraba. Their chapter, also deposited in the open access eScholarship Repository, is entitled “’The Links in the Chain’: Connecting Undergraduates with Primary Source Materials at the University of California”. It describes undergraduate usage of archive and special collections mainly at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, often using OAC for discovery. The article also explores instruction in a lower division gateway history class and the UC Berkeley Prize for Undergraduate Research as significant factors in encouraging undergraduate usage of special collections.

Melvyl Mobile Stats Debut

Jayne Dickson — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:50:47 +0000

Have you wondered which campus Melvyl gets the most mobile searches or if iPad users do more catalog searches than iPhone users? Are you a mobile-stats watcher?

Beginning with the January 2012 usage statistics, monthly search statistics include the number of mobile searches done in Melvyl by campus. Additionally, the mobile search numbers display the number of searches from all mobile devices (iPhone, Motorola Droid) that represent 5% or more of the monthly totals. The number of monthly mobile searches for each campus Melvyl is tallied separately from the number of monthly desktop searches. Together the two numbers provide a more accurate overview of the total use of each campus Melvyl.

See Melvyl Statistics for more information.

CDL office closure Dec. 23, 2011 PM – Jan. 2, 2012

Jayne Dickson — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:24:02 +0000

During this closure, if you need to report an urgent problem with any of the CDL services (Melvyl, Request, UC-eLinks, etc.) you can call the UCOP Computer Center at 510.987.0349 for assistance.

New Custom URL for PubMed

Jayne Dickson — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 19:04:12 +0000

Recently, it came to our attention that PubMed had changed its URL, which subsequently changed the custom URL used by the UC campuses. PubMed’s custom URL includes specific components (tool & otool) that allow the interface to incorporate linking and interlibrary loan services. Because of this, UC’s users see UC-eLinks buttons in the interface and the PubMed Order feature links to UC’s Request service rather than the PubMed default, LoansomeDoc.

The new customized URL for the UC campuses is
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?tool=cdl&otool=cdlotool and the PID (http://uclibs.org/PID/17708) has been updated to reflect this.

If you have a library-specific URL for PubMed that begins with either of the following then please update your URL to use the customized URL or the PID listed above.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi

New Look/New URL for the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS)

Jayne Dickson — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:28:18 +0000

(All campuses except UCR, UCSF; on the Univ. of Michigan platform)
http://uclibs.org/PID/271

A new version of the Bibliography of Asian Studies was recently launched, along with an upgrade having close to 800,000 entries. This new version offers a state-of-the-art discovery system with simplified searching and facet-based browsing. Refinements based upon such categories as Author, Subject, Country/Region, Journal, Publication date, or Type of publication are provided through facets, and can be easily combined; the number of entries in each category is provided. A new category, Language, has been added. In addition, all records have been converted to standard Unicode, which means that the diacritic-rich entries of the BAS are now accessible to any modern browser without any need for special settings on the part of the user; these can be easily copied, pasted and printed in standard programs and are compatible with all generally available Unicode fonts. Export to bibliographic management programs has also been improved and is provided through the RIS format.

The Shared Cataloging Program (SCP) has updated the PID to go to the new URL for this resource.

Mark Twain Project Online Receives Award for Best Reference Web Site 2011

Jayne Dickson — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 18:27:23 +0000

The Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO), a joint project of the Mark Twain Papers and Project of The Bancroft Library, the California Digital Library, and the University of California Press, was selected as one of the MARS Best Free Reference Web Sites of 2011. MARS (Machine-Assisted Reference Section) is the “MARS: Emerging Technologies in Reference” section of the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association (ALA).

The MTPO web site (http://www.marktwainproject.org/) was voted for by member librarians from around the United States. The MTPO web site is one of 25 web pages to be recognized by MARS this year as an outstanding site for reference information and is included in the list of MARS Best of Free Reference Web Sites of 2011 (http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/sections/mars/marspubs/marsbestfreewebsites/marsbestref2011.cfm).

Congratulations to all who worked on this fantastic resource!

SciFinder is now Web-only

Jayne Dickson — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:56:58 +0000

As of June 30, 2011, SciFinder Scholar – the research discovery tool provided by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) – is available only as a web resource. Previously, SciFinder Scholar was available via client-downloadable software. For the past two years, the web and client-software versions of SciFinder Scholar have been running in parallel. In August of 2010, CAS reported that “due to increasing popularity and new development of the web version of SciFinder, the client version of SciFinder will be discontinued for all U.S. and Canadian academic institutions on June 30, 2011.

In addition to the retirement of the client version, the UC SciFinder Scholar information & registration pages that had been supported by UCLA’s Chemistry Department have been moved to the CDL website (http://uclibs.org/PID/132375). Campuses that link to the UCLA Chemistry Department web pages at http://software.chem.ucla.edu/scifind/ on their Databases A-Z web pages should immediately begin using the PID. For additional information, a list of UC SciFinder Campus Contacts is available at http://www.cdlib.org/groups/scifinder_campus_contacts.html.