Note that these are all customizable so don’t hesitate to give these your own personal touch AND if you do customize them please let us know and we can find a way to share them with your campus colleagues.  We also learned at the workshops that you want to hear what other campuses are doing so hopefully we can get these conversations started.

Tracy Seneca, the WAS service manager and project leader since its inception in 2008, is leaving the California Digital Library for a position as Digital Projects Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Tracy has been a tireless advocate for WAS, and moved it from a grant-funded development project to a production service, no small task. Tracy is a recognized leader in the field of web archiving, as well as a talented designer, project manager and systems analyst, and we will certainly miss her at CDL. CDL is committed to the Web Archiving Service and will work to provide a smooth transition.

As an important part of that transition, Rosalie Lack will serve as Interim WAS Service Manager. Some of you may remember Rosalie in her previous role at CDL as head of Digital Special Collections—there’s more about Rosalie here:  http://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2010/02/16/farewell-rosalie-lack/.

We’re very excited to be working with Rosalie again at CDL. We wish Tracy all the best in her new position, and encourage curators with any questions about the transition to contact us at washelp@ucop.edu.

Planned Network Outage, Sunday August 26

IMPORTANT: There will be a planned network outage on Sunday, August 26 that will cause total interruption of many of our services. We will post a more detail schedule of the outage to the CDLALERT-L listserv and to appropriate user groups and listservs.  The most recent CDLAlert issued and the CDLALERT-L Archive are viewable on CDL’s System Status page at http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

New partner: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Welcome to our new partner, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They are the 4th university from the CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation), joining Northwestern, Purdue and the University of Michigan.

WAS Activity, July 2012

• 98 archives actively collected
• 2,618 sites collected
• 2.1 TB of data collected

Upcoming Meetings and Webinars

WAS User’s Group Meeting, Friday August 10, in conjunction with the Society of American Archivists meeting, San Diego.

WAS Service Description

The Web Archiving Service (WAS) enables librarians, archivists and researchers to capture, curate and preserve websites and web‐published materials. WAS makes it easy to build web archives, with scheduling and other tools to help manage your archive. You control public access to your archives and can configure the appearance and navigation of each archive. We also provide collection development consultation and help desk support for web archiving questions.

WAS Service Manager

Rosalie Lack- rosalie.lack@ucop.edu or washelp@ucop.edu.

Additional WAS Information (training materials, videos, guides, etc.) More information about WAS is available at http://was.cdlib.org or by sending an inquiry to washelp@ucop.edu.

Service Monitoring and Availability Check WAS’ system status page http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

The rapidly increasing volume of environmental and Earth science data — from historic observational field notes to modern satellite imagery, to actively updated remote sensor readings — is challenging scientists to locate and integrate pertinent data in a manner that addresses important questions for science and society. How is the spread of invasive species affected by patterns of land use? What factors predict the distribution of emergent infectious diseases, and what are the associated health risks? Are climate models sufficiently predictive? DataONE addresses these needs by providing a single search interface that federates globally distributed data centers. These centers individually store and manage important digital scientific data holdings, and DataONE now helps these centers preserve the holdings, while enabling scientists around the world to discover and add their own data to them for long-term use and sharing. Research enabled by this widespread access to data will range from illuminating fundamental ecological processes to identifying environmental problems and potential solutions.

“Science is entering a new era of data-intensive research,” said William Michener, DataONE principal investigator at the University of New Mexico. “DataONE has been built to support scientists in discovering and preserving data and, most importantly, in enabling new scientific discoveries. DataONE is critically needed now to broaden the nature of, and increase the pace of, science as researchers tackle the grand challenges facing science and society.”

DataONE provides users a suite of tools and training materials that cover all aspects of the research data life cycle, from data collection to management, to analysis and publication. 

DataONE offers searchable access to data held by South Africa National Parks, the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity, the Ecological Society of America, Dryad, Oak Ridge National Laboratories Distributed Active Archive Center, the United States Geological Survey, the Long Term Ecological Research Network, the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans and the California Digital Library (CDL).  The CDL, through its University of California Curation Center (UC3), has supported the long-term preservation of the university’s digital assets for over 10 years. While originally focused on the management of cultural heritage materials contributed by campus libraries, archives, and museums, UC3 has seen increasing demands for its preservation services by the social and physical science communities. 

“We view DataONE as the continuation of our longstanding mission to protect and disseminate the university’s scholarly outputs into the scientific disciplines,” said Patricia Cruse, UC3 director. “It complements and augments a number of other important UC3 initiatives in the preservation area.”

More organizations are joining DataONE to make their data accessible. The Earth Data Analysis Center (EDAC) at the University of New Mexico is “an enthusiastic contributing member of the growing DataONE network,” said Karl Benedict, center director. “For nearly 50 years, EDAC has focused on delivering Earth science and other geospatial data and information to diverse end user communities. Participation in the DataONE network provides us with a great opportunity to extend the impact of our data holdings.”  

DataONE is a community-driven organization and the DataONE Users Group provides the opportunity for funders, users, developers, educators, and any other stakeholders to gather and contribute to DataONE products and services. Within, DataONE, experts from library, computer, and environmental sciences can bridge these worlds and provide an infrastructure to serve science for many decades to come.

Another member node soon to be added by CDL and UNM is ONEShare, a special-purpose repository that will accept spreadsheet data from researchers who do not have an explicit affiliation with another existing member node.

“Right now researchers have a hard time even finding the right data to answer complex environmental questions, and when they do, the work necessary to integrate really different types of data can be overwhelming,” said Stephanie Hampton, deputy director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara. “DataONE provides the type of platform we need to propel environmental science into the digital age.”

About DataONE: DataONE is the foundation of new innovative environmental science through a distributed framework and sustainable cyberinfrastructure that meets the needs of science and society for open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data. DataONE represents a collaboration of universities and government agencies coalesced to address the mounting need for organizing and serving up vast amounts of highly diverse and inter-related but often heterogeneous, scientific data. It is supported by a $20 million award made as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) DataNet program (Grant #OCI-0830944). DataONE features coordination nodes at the University of New Mexico, UC Santa Barbara and University of Tennessee, and member nodes including the California Digital Library,

About the UC Curation Center and the California Digital Library:
The UC Curation Center (UC3) of the California Digital Library (CDL) was established in 2009. UC3 is a central preservation and curation service provider addressing the systemwide needs of the 10 campuses of the University of California, one of the pre-eminent public universities of the world. The California Digital Library provides digital library development and support for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve. For further information contact Patricia Cruse, director, UC Curation Center, at patricia.cruse@ucop.edu or (510) 987-9016.

See also version in the UC Newsroom.

The Summer Meeting brings together people from research organisations, data canters, government, and information service providers to hear about the latest developments in data science, data citation, discovery, and reuse. It also provides opportunities to exchange experience and influence the next generation of data citation services.

This year’s program will include sessions on data citation, data publishing, and discussions on the new challenges that come with increasing access to scientific data.

The 2010 DataCite summer meeting brought together a strong program of speakers and participants (http://www.datacite.org/datacite_summer_meeting_2010). 

Highlights were published in D-Lib (http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1045/january2011-contents).

DataCite helps researchers find, access, and reuse data.  It is an international not-for-profit association founded in 2009 with members across the globe.

For those not familiar with the project Leslie Johnson, Chief of Repository Development at LC, provided a good example to illustrate how UDFR might be used:

“To illustrate how this might be useful, Johnston provides an example:  ’Say the archive of a famous writer was written with an obsolete program, such as WordStar, which would need to be either rendered for use, or migrated to a more current system.’  So, a decision would have to be made on which program or tool would be used to extract the information from the archive.  Johnston notes, ‘UDFR will provide the documentation to help make the decisions, and be incorporated into the tools themselves to make preservation format analysis and action easier.’”

 You can learn more about UDFR here.

Webinars are scheduled twice a month on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays from 2-3pm PDT, but check the schedule for exceptions and additions to the summer series.  Other topics may be to the initial list. We will use ReadyTalk to provide both desktop and audio access, and will add links to this page for slides, audio recordings, and notes after each webinar. Please feel free to drop in to whatever portion of the session that you can.

We hope to see you there and are looking forward to your questions, ideas, and feedback.  If you have a topic that you would like to hear about or would like to present, please contact: patricia.cruse@ucop.edu

Webinar information:

Phone number: 1-866-740-1260

Access code: 9879016

Readytalk webconference site: http://bit.ly/jdjMAP

Please share this information with your campus colleagues.   This series is open to the entire UC community.

Please contact UC3 for more information and refer researchers with long term access and preservation needs at <http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/contact.html>.

(These services are a part of UC3’s strategy for curation micro-services.  Learn more at:

<http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/curation/index.html>.)

For more details about Merritt and EZID, see below:

Merritt http://merritt.cdlib.org/  (and for additional information, http://cdlib.org/services/uc3/merritt/ ) is a new cost-effective service that provides the UC community with an easy to use tool to manage, archive, and share their content. Merritt provides significant features for valuable digital objects:

* permanent storage
* access via persistent URLs
* tools for long-term management
* easy-to-use interface for deposit and updates

Merritt is a next generation service from CDL’s UC Curation Center (UC3) (working with the UC libraries) that provides a trustworthy and dependable environment for the long-term management of a range of digital materials including images, videos, datasets, texts, and more. Merritt enables collection managers to take control of their materials and deposit, archive, share, and disseminate information via an easy to use interface or API.  While UC3 will continue to manage content arising from historical partnerships with the UC libraries, the new features of Merritt will allow UC3 to extend the reach of its services to new UC constituencies such as museums, archives, research groups, academic departments, and data centers.

EZID (ee-zee-eye-dee) http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/ezid/index.html  is a service providing researchers and others a way to manage identifiers persistently for datasets, files, and resources of all types. The service is available via a machine to machine programming interface (an API) and as a web user interface.

What’s so important about identifier management? Persistent identification of and access to a scholar’s research is critical to the long-term distribution and availability of her or his work. EZID lets you update not only a description of the work, but also its “forwarding address,” so no matter where the work moves, the citable, clickable link to the resource will continue to provide access.

Currently, EZID allows you to acquire DataCite <www.datacite.org <http://www.datacite.org> > Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) or Archival Resource Keys (ARKs), and we plan to add other identifier schemes going forward. In the future, we will also support object deposit options.

All disciplines can benefit from using EZID. It transcends domain boundaries and is applicable to the sciences, humanities and the social sciences.  It will work with a range of data types including numerical, images, text sequences, text, digital audio, digital video, modeling data and more.

JHOVE2 http://jhove2.org  JHOVE is software widely used in libraries, archives, and museums for managing digital collections. In 2008, CDL, Stanford University Libraries and Portico were awarded a grant from the Library of Congress, through the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), to develop the next generation of this software, called JHOVE2.  JHOVE2 improves the design of the existing architecture of JHOVE, adds key enhancements, and includes new modules that support preservation-related processes.

JHOVE2 is a powerful tool for determining important properties about a digital file:

   1) What is its file format?

   2) Is it valid?

   3) What are its technical properties?

   4) Does it conform to local policy rules?

This information is critical to the long-term preservation of digital collections.

The software is open source, available at <http://jhove2.org>. There have been several beta releases in past 2 years. The next beta release will be Friday, September  17. This release is meant primarily for developers interested in reviewing the current state of the code.  A production release of the JHOVE2 application will follow in October.   More information can be found on the JHOVE2 website: <http://jhove2.org>.

Please also see flyers for Merritt and EZID services.

One of today’s most important priorities for academic scholarship and research is providing long term access to datasets. Data are now seen as the building blocks of scholarship and research in the sciences and humanities. Scholars and archivists recognize the potential for increasing collaboration and synthesis when data are archived, published, and shared, forging the possibility for new discoveries built upon the research of others.

To facilitate the sharing of datasets, the University of California’s California Digital Library (CDL) has become a founding member of the international DataCite consortium, a group of leading academic and scientific memory institutions providing data publishing opportunities for researchers lacking appropriate publication channels and incentives for their datasets.  

See the press release from the UC Newsroom at http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/23055

Researchers at the University of California have partnered with dozens of other universities and agencies to create DataONE (http://dataone.org), a global data access and preservation network for earth and environmental scientists that will support breakthroughs in environmental research. DataONE (Data Observation Network for Earth) is one of two $20 million awards made this year as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) DataNet program. The collaboration of universities and government agencies coalesced to address the mounting need for organizing and serving up vast amounts of highly diverse and inter-related but often incompatible scientific data. Resulting studies will range from research that illuminates fundamental environmental processes to identifying environmental problems and potential solutions.

The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara, the Department of Computer Science and Genome Center at UC Davis, and the California Digital Library at the UC Office of the President are integrally involved in the NSF DataONE initiative. Across these UC partners, the several million dollar award will drive advanced research and data acquisition, storage, mining, integration, and visualization for DataONE. The resulting computing and processing “cyberinfrastructure” will be made permanently available for use by the broader UC community and international science communities. DataONE is led by the University of New Mexico, and includes additional partner organizations across the United States as well as from Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia.

Read more at the UC Newsroom, which sent out a press release on 11-18-2009.

The press release can also be found http://www.cdlib.org/ and http://www.cdlib.org/news/index.html.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY

TITLE: Digital Preservation Services Manager

CATEGORY: Full-Time

SALARY: Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience.
Excellent benefits.

TO APPLY:  http://jobs.ucop.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=52447

POSITION DESCRIPTION:

Want to be part of a dynamic team that is working to preserve digital information for future generations?  At the California Digital Library (CDL), we’ve developed a world-class program to preserve digital material that supports the University of California’s research, teaching, and learning mission and you can be a part of it.  A key member of the team is the Digital Preservation Services Manager — reporting to the Director of the Digital Preservation Program the Manager is responsible for the day-to-day management of digital preservation services (production and development) through project management, the provision of support services (whether offered in person or online), and liaison with digital preservation service providers and support staff.  In addition, the Services Manager will be responsible for translating experience of users’ needs and perceptions of system capabilities in a manner that informs further refinement and extension of the digital preservation technology and service infrastructure.

This is an ideal opportunity for someone with solid people skills and a passion for working in a collaborative and dynamic environment.

The California Digital Library (CDL) supports the assembly and creative use of the world’s scholarship and knowledge for the UC libraries and the communities they serve.  In partnership with the UC libraries, the California Digital Library established the digital preservation program to ensure long-term access to the digital information that supports and results from research, teaching and learning at UC.

JOB REQUIREMENTS:

Bachelor’s degree in the social sciences, public administration, library and information science or a related field and at least three years’ relevant experience with development or delivery of online information services in educational, digital preservation, library, research, and/or cultural heritage settings or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

Demonstrated experience to plan, evaluate, budget for and manage complex projects from their inception through to their final delivery.

Plans projects and assignments and monitors performance according to priorities as demonstrated by regularly meeting established deadlines in an environment of multiple projects and changing priorities.

Strong logic and quantitative reasoning skills as demonstrated by ability to review and assess a range of variables to define key issues, evaluate reasonable alternatives and translate findings into recommended changes, actions or strategies.

Proven experience with and general understanding of the academic user community and the digital library/scholarly information services domain.

Demonstrated experience working with user community and technology/programming staff to build use cases, functional requirements and user interface design.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills as demonstrated by the ability to understand and articulate technical ideas and issues at a conceptual level and explain them clearly and concisely to non-technical staff.

Demonstrated ability to operate under general direction, able to develop creative solutions to problems, and tackle issues in a self-motivated manner in a service-oriented geographically distributed team environment.

Demonstrated ability to plan, evaluate, budget for and manage complex projects from their inception through to their final delivery.