Before coming to CDL Sherry worked at Carlsbad City Library and was a Chemistry Librarian and Online Coordinator at the UC San Diego Library.  She was User Services Librarian for the UC Division of Library Automation before the birth of CDL. Sherry has always been a fierce advocate for making life better for librarians and end-users, always trying to make tools user friendly instead of “user vicious,” as she would sometimes say.

Those of us who had the pleasure of working with Sherry know that she was always ready to dig into a problem, get to the bottom of it, and come up with an elegant solution.  She excelled as an analyst, and some of her analytical reports will be held up as models of elegance and usefulness.  Sherry did seminal work in the world of interlibrary services and metasearching, as well, with her work on SearchLight.  We are sorry to say goodbye to someone who was so passionate about service to the library community.  Sherry retires from the UC having accomplished so much on behalf of all UC’s library users.

We wish Sherry all the best in her retirement.

University of California (UC) libraries are running out of space for print journals at the same time that circulation of print journals has declined. In response, print archiving programs like the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) are proving that UC libraries can eliminate redundant print copies, reclaim precious shelf space and assure that a print copy is available if it is needed. All ten UC campuses are WEST members.

How do you make print archiving a reality?

First, print archiving member libraries analyze which of their print journals are held in common, then the libraries with the longest journal runs are asked if they will agree to retain a print copy for a long period of time.  Libraries agree to do this for their own benefit as well as for other member libraries.    Software to analyze the collections and a web interface to display those commitments are the other  components of PAPR.  The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) entered into a partnership with the California Digital Library (CDL) to create the system that will perform collection analysis and identify likely candidate titles for archiving for the WEST partner libraries.  That system is known as the Print Archives Preservation Registry (PAPR).  The WEST archiving program is the pilot has been driving initial requirements for PAPR, but CRL envisions PAPR will be open to other archiving programs as well.

CDL’s Discovery & Delivery group formed the CDL PAPR Team

Drawing upon staff expertise developed over 20 years in building and running massive bibliographic management systems, coupled with its comprehensive understanding of bibliographic metadata,  the PAPR team at CDL worked closely with both CRL and WEST to identify requirements and then build the system.  This complex project took less than a year to get up and running in support of WEST’s needs.   The team continues to work closely with CRL and WEST project managers to develop, implement, and refine requirements for the heart of PAPR—the collection analysis system.

What’s been achieved so far?

The WEST project managers asked participating libraries to submit bibliographic records for all their journal titles. The WEST libraries responded enthusiastically—providing the PAPR team with TWICE as much data as originally expected!  Specifically, the PAPR team processed 2.75 million journal titles provided by 106 libraries at 83 institutions from September 2011 to January 2012. Each institution’s records went through a series of rigorous analysis and transformation steps before being loaded into the database.

What’s next? This is where it gets really interesting.

The PAPR team has recently produced collection analysis reports for WEST, indicating  which titles are widely held among member libraries so that WEST members can select titles that will offer the greatest benefit in being archived. The collection analysis system is designed to identify widely held titles based on input criteria from an archiving program. Once titles are selected for archiving, PAPR identifies the institution with the longest run in order to make recommendations for archiving. Reports containing the information necessary to make local decisions are  provided to libraries to assist in their archiving workflows. Finally, reports will be produced for member libraries showing which titles can be de-selected based on archiving work done by partner libraries. PAPR was built to allow flexibility so that any archiving program can use its own decision-making criteria to produce reports and assist libraries with archiving and de-selection decisions.

What’s important for UC libraries to know about the PAPR project?

• Nine of the ten UC campuses have contributed their serials records to PAPR. Only UC Merced, which does not have any print journals, is not participating.
• It’s an opportunity for UC libraries who are WEST members to de-select titles and reclaim scarce shelf space.
• PAPR strives to automate the highly complex and variable processes of managing print serials archiving for WEST member libraries.

The CRL website has more information about PAPR: http://www.crl.edu/archiving-preservation/print-archives/papr

The Council of University Librarians, in consultation with several All Campus Groups and SOPAG, has endorsed CDL’s plan to move the management of UC’s VDX application from in-house at CDL to hosting at OCLC. The completed implementation is targeted for mid-June of 2012.

This change will allow CDL to continue its responsibility for VDX production services while sharing some of the system management duties with OCLC.  Looking to the future, UC will be well positioned to work with OCLC on implementing a new software solution when VDX is retired in 3-5 years, as OCLC has previously announced.

 What will change for UC?

•  CDL will continue to provide first level triage of all of the ILL units’ user support tickets, but OCLC will now have the ultimate responsibility for ensuring timely and satisfactory resolution of all tickets.  CDL will continue to work very closely with OCLC here.
• OCLC will now have primary responsibility for all software upgrades. CDL, along with campus participants will test and certify the upgrades before they are put into production.

 What will change for ILL units?

•  ILL units will use a new “Windows” login to access the VDX application at its new host location. (The current “Web” login will not change.) CDL will communicate separately with the ILL units to provide detailed instructions and ensure a smooth transition to the new “Windows” login.
• The two campuses that run special reports, UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara, will receive their data by a slightly different method. CDL will work with OCLC and these campuses to ensure they receive the data they need.

 What will change for our end users?

•  Nothing. This change will be transparent to our end users.

 Moving forward

•  CDL has begun working with OCLC to develop a timeline and project plan, which we will share within the UC libraries when it is finalized.
• CDL will be asking the CDL ILL Operations Team and each of the campus ILL units for assistance in testing during April 2012. We will keep you updated on our progress and let you know well in advance the dates when we will ask for your help to test or review the rollout.

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.

Sherry Willhite, Michael Thwaites, Debra Bartling and Bob Brandriff have been working steadily on implementing Request in WorldCat Local, at the same time dealing with the daily challenges of keeping the Request service and its components up and running.  Debra has been faced with some tough troubleshooting for VDX (UC’s consortial borrowing software) but has still found time to document and prepare VDX for the upcoming migration to VDX 4.1, and to develop a data warehouse approach to VDX reporting. Claudia Woo is now the Bibliographic Services JReport (database reporting interface tool) expert, and Leslie Wolf has taken on the role of project manager for the Request team.

This is the first in a series of reports from CDL’s Bibliographic Services team.

On Wednesday, June 24th UC Berkeley publicly introduced OskiCat, their new integrated library system purchased from Innovative Interfaces Inc.  (III), replacing the GLADIS and Pathfinder systems.  CDL congratulates UC Berkeley for pulling off a very difficult migration, in record time.  It’s a huge achievement!

But wait!  What does UC Berkeley’s achievement have to do with the CDL Bib Services team?  The Bib Services team played a huge and largely hidden role during this migration.  At the same time that UCB was laboring to go live with OskiCat, we were busy making sure that OskiCat worked smoothly with UC-eLinks, Request, Melvyl AND WorldCat Local (WCL), and prepared for UCB’s records to be reloaded into classic Melvyl (which is happening later this summer).

Here are some of the major Bibliographic Services team milestones of the past year.

7 million records, multiple snapshots, detailed analysis, WorldCat configuration – OskiCat Transition!
When faced with the decision by UCB to migrate to III, CDL veterans and survivors of the UCLA migration to Voyager paused, gulped and pulled out their notes.  Rebecca Doherty served as the Project Manager and main liaison with UCB, and Lynne Cameron assured us it was only a matter of “export, delete, add in the new UCB records, import all, index and merge”; it takes about 6 weeks of indexing and merging to process all 33 million records.  If all goes well, this should be complete by the end of August, in time for UCB’s fall semester.

WorldCat Local
In addition to keeping UCB’s catalog records up to date in Melvyl (now known as “classic Melvyl”), Bib Services and Ellen Meltzer’s Information Services team have been working on the WorldCat Local pilot, with Leslie Wolf as our project manager.  CDL is moving to a more formalized “evaluation phase” of WorldCat Local, scheduled to start in late August, when UCM and UCB begin classes.  This will allow us to stress-test WorldCat Local during our peak active months of October and November, and will provide valuable performance information.  At the end of the evaluation phase in December 2009, CDL will present its evaluation and recommendations to the Executive Team and University Librarians.  We will continue to run classic Melvyl for the foreseeable future.

ERMS
Lena Zentall, our Electronic Resources Management System (ERMS) project manager, along with Margery Tibbetts and Adam Brin, have been working collaboratively with Ivy Anderson’s Collection Development & Management team — both at CDL and distributed throughout UC — to implement our long dreamed of electronic resources management software.  UCLA has also recently purchased the same Serials Solutions ERMS product and Lena is in regular contact with them to share information and expertise.

Request and UC-eLinks
Sherry Willhite, Michael Thwaites, Debra Bartling and Bob Brandriff have been working steadily on implementing Request in WorldCat Local, at the same time dealing with the daily challenges of keeping the Request service and its components up and running.  Debra has been faced with some tough troubleshooting for VDX (UC’s consortial borrowing software) but has still found time to document and prepare VDX for the upcoming migration to VDX 4.1, and to develop a data warehouse approach to VDX reporting. Claudia Woo is now the Bibliographic Services JReport (database reporting interface tool) expert, and Leslie Wolf has taken on the role of project manager for the Request team. 

For UC-eLinks, Margery Tibbetts, Adam Brin, and Lena Zentall have implemented direct linking to electronic articles, making our endusers’ lives significantly easier.

HathiTrust
Lynne Cameron is CDL’s HahtiTrust co-Technical Lead and is working with Bob Brandriff and Adam Brin on bibliographic metadata issues.  Adam has also been tasked with overseeing the tight integration of HathiTrust into WorldCat Local.  To round out our efforts here, Stephanie Collett is working on an improved page turner for the public interface, and the Bib Services Technical Team has provided feedback on the HathiTrust Data API.

Strategic Planning and KPIs
Leslie Wolf and Lena Zentall have been leading the effort to structure Bib Service’s strategic planning, and to make sure planning aligns with CDL’s and UCOP’s efforts.  They have led the team in developing accountability measures, including key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics.  Look for more in this area over the next few weeks.

Leslie Wolf, Bib Services newest Project Manager, will be working on WorldCat Local and Request, as her major projects.

Leslie Wolf is an experienced project manager and a newly-minted librarian.  She has worked most recently as a contract project manager at UCSF Library, where she worked on several large projects.  She is most proud of her work – with two teammates at UCSF – teaching project management skills to help create a “culture of project management success” at the library.

Leslie lives in San Francisco, where she enjoys walking and Pilates, and ushering at cultural events.

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Lena Zentall, previously CDL’s project manager for UC Shared Images, has joined the Bib Services team as a Project Manager.  Lena will be working on UCeLinks and ERMs to start.

As the project manager of UC Shared Images, Lena worked with campus visual resources curators to collaboratively develop image collections and share them across the University of California system, reducing redundant effort and providing a convenient, single point of access to the essential images faculty need for teaching.

In addition, Lena spent the last year promoting access to the Calisphere K-12 website, including planning for a blog to tell the story behind many of the rich historical images in Calisphere.

Lena recently earned a certificate in Integrated Marketing — complementing her experience in design and project management, and she’s busy planning how to bring marketing strategies to the digital library world.