Limited View

Those books not in the public domain, around 7,000,000, are now labeled HathiTrust Digital Library Limited view (search only). See the following example:

With this message, users know that the full text is not accessible, but that the text is available for searching for words or phrases.

Finding full text materials

Users determine if any of the 3,000,000 HathiTrust books in the public domain are available in full text by the presence of the “View Now” link on the results screen.

Clicking the “View Now” link displays the link to the full text of the item. For public domain works in HathiTrust, a new label displays on the results and item level screens: HathiTrust Digital Library Full View.

From the results screen

From the item record screen

Another easy way to find public domain works is by conducting a keyword search such as “cookery” and using the facets to limit to ebooks, and the year 1902 (or a year prior to 1923).

OCLC is now working on a process to find and relabel the records that are added each month.

Thanks for your persistence

Thanks to the pressure and persistence of many UC public services staff, faculty and students, the UC University Librarians, and in particular, Kathryn Stine, Alison Ray, Lynne Cameron, Lena Zentall and Patti Martin at CDL and Jeff Penka and Bill Carney at OCLC.

CDL recently hosted a webinar series for Users Council that’s now widely available to UC staff.  (The CDL’s Users Council is a group responsible for communicating information between the CDL and the campuses concerning use of CDL tools, services and collections.  Users Council consists of a liaison from each UC campus, including LBNL, LLNL and the Regional Library Facilities.  A CDL representative is an ex officio member. ) 

The topics covered were chosen through a member survey, with survey expertise provided by CDL’s Senior Assessment Analyst Jane Lee. 

This year there were six lively sessions covering the following ground:

• Melvyl: A Snapshot of Issues, Patricia Martin, Director, Discovery & Delivery and Lena Zentall, Project Manager, Discovery & Delivery
• Services Today & Tomorrow, Laine Farley, Executive Director, CDL
• What’s Happening in Collections: 15 Triumphs in 30 Minutes, Wendy Parfrey, Shared Content Coordinator
• User Experience Design and CDL, Rachael Hu, User Experience Design Manager
• eScholarship: Supporting OA Scholarly Communication at UC, Catherine Mitchell, Director, Access& Publishing; Justin Gonder, eScholarship Product Manager; and Katie Fortney, Copyright Policy & Education Officer
• HathiTrust and Mass Digitization, Heather Christenson, Mass Digitization Project Manager

Each of the one-hour recordings, along with PowerPoint slides, is available for your viewing at:   http://www.cdlib.org/groups/users_council/

(The presentations are password protected because some of the information is not for public consumption.)

Members of the California Digital Library are always looking for ways to get closer to the people and tools we connect through our digital services. Although we communicate through email and phone calls, nothing can replace true face-to-face contact. So with much excitement, Alison Ray and Leslie Wolf of CDL’s Resource Sharing team headed down to UC Santa Cruz for two days to get some hands on experience at the “brick and mortar” library.

We were welcomed with open arms by the UC Santa Cruz interlibrary loan staff:

From left to right: Katie Elstad, Josh Alper, Mandy Stevens (sitting), Tara Gooden, Sarah Troy, Jesus Espinoza

UC Santa Cruz interlibrary services unit blends the borrowing and lending functions; every staff member is trained in both functions. This cross-training within the department fosters communication between staff members and also with their resource sharing partners.

In addition to the UC resource sharing consortia, UCSC is also part of a regional cooperative library system: Monterey Bay Area Cooperative Library System (MOBAC). Being part of a local regional group gives UCSC more options to efficiently fulfill requests for their patrons. UCSC is a net lender in the MOBAC consortium, especially for CSU Monterey Bay and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

Working side-by-side with the UCSC library team showed us that interlibrary loan isn’t just about software — it’s also about the manual processes involved in managing a physical collection and delivering items to users.

Leslie Wolf helps pull materials from shelves.

The ILL unit runs with great efficiency, but the staff couldn’t do it without the support of trained student workers. They know just what to do every day by checking the whiteboard in the staff room (see photograph below). Tasks that are currently in process are labeled with a circle; completed tasks are marked with an X. The photograph below was taken early in the morning. By the afternoon, every task had an X by it. It’s not that easy — new student workers take approximately one year to become independent in these tasks.

Student workboard in the morning.

UCSC is also supported by mentors from other campuses — power users who are expert in the ILL software (called VDX). The UCSC ILL team praised their mentors for teaching them techniques to save time and effort. Their mentors are always available for a question, a problem, and a solution. The team cited Jenny Lee (UCLA), Scott Hathaway (UCSB), and Debbie Cox (UCSD) as invaluable mentors to UCSC.

As eager as we were to learn about their process, the UCSC team was eager to learn more about CDL‘s plans to continuously improve its services. They report that the in-person interaction was very valuable and everyone gained from the visit. Working together, we were able to identify processes and local settings that could be changed to help the unit run more efficiently.  UCSC was happy in return to share “real-world” examples of the process that CDL supports. It was a great exchange of information.

Our visit made us realize once again that we are all part of a team whose goal is to get the right resources to students, faculty, and other partners when they need them the most.

• DOI – Digital Object Identifier
• PMID – PubMed Identifier

Why is this good?

When you enter either a DOI or PMID identifier in Citation Linker, UC-eLinks gets the additional metadata associated with the identifier, so UC-eLinks can build a more complete citation in the UC-eLinks menu window.

For example, you don’t have to type the article title to have it appear in the UC-eLinks window if you have entered a DOI or PMID in the Citation Linker form since this metadata will be gathered from the DOI or PMID. This saves you some typing and ensures accurate metadata.

How does it work?

1. Below is a screenshot of the Citation Linker form with the new DOI and PMID fields. In this example, the user has entered the PMID, journal title, and date.

2. This is the resulting UC-eLinks window with additional metadata — article title, volume, and issue — all retrieved from the PMID:

Why are Journal Title and Date fields still required?

If you have an authoritative identifier such as a DOI or PMID, why do you have to enter additional citation information, i.e., journal title and date? This requirement ensures you get results and not an error message. If you enter an invalid DOI or PMID in Citation Linker, having the journal title and date gives UC-eLinks enough metadata to build a UC-eLinks menu window.

Learn more about DOI or PMID.

The Thatcher report identified four main issues with UC-eLinks:

1. Image “alt” text missing
2. In-page navigation needed (add headings and use roles to define content spaces.)
3. Form navigation needed (add labels to specify fields and use roles to define content spaces)
4. UC-eLinks button color contrast was not sufficient (change the color of the UC-eLinks button text from white to black.)

The first thing the UC-eLinks team did was to identify the fixes controlled by CDL, and those controlled by Ex Libris, who provides the SFX software that runs UC-eLinks. Most of the accessibility issues had to do with making it possible for visually impaired users to easily navigate through web pages and forms.

For UC-eLinks, we asked Ex Libris to make the accessibility fixes to SFX that Jim Thatcher identified.  We also asked Ex Libris to generalize the fixes across SFX, and wherever possible to do further accessibility testing.

Yisrael Kuchar, SFX product manager wrote to us on 11/28/12:  “I very much appreciate you sharing the report [Thatcher report] as it does pinpoint specific issues and offers the way to fix them. I can confirm that we will be looking into accessibility issues as part of the roadmap in 2013, and this is a good few pointers to start with.”

In November 2012, the SFX user community voted for the top ten product enhancements for SFX and elected “functional accessibility of SFX public interfaces” as #2 (Mobile was #1.) Ex Libris plans to make all SFX public interfaces functionally accessible to the visually impaired and to users who cannot use a mouse beginning third quarter 2013 with the SFX menu and A-Z lists as the highest priority.

Since CDL has customized the look and feel of the UC-eLinks user interface, we needed to make accessibility improvements independent of Ex Libris’ fixes to SFX in these parts of UC-eLinks:

Phase 1 (Completed)

• UC-eLinks window
• Report a Problem form
• Ask a Librarian (the version when a user is off-campus)
• Citation Linker end user form

Phase 2 (See Next Steps)

• Citation Linker ILL staff form
• Copy & Paste form
• A-Z ejournal lists

Margery Tibbetts, technical lead for UC-eLinks, completed the phase one accessibility fixes in March 2013. She tested the UC-eLinks forms and windows using these standard accessibility tools:

• WAVE – Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
• AMP – Accessibility Management Platform

UC-eLinks button change

We changed the button text color from white to black to increase the contrast. This is the new button image:

Are you using this UC-eLinks button? Here’s how you can help: If you are using this small UC-eLinks button anywhere on a website, we ask you to use this URL rather than copying the button image locally: http://ucelinks.cdlib.org:8888/sfx_local/sfx.gif

Why? The UC-eLinks button URL will not change. So, if we make further changes to the button and you are using the URL, you will get the changes automatically.

Now, UC-eLinks meets or exceeds the recommendations in the Thatcher report. These are UC-eLinks’ Accessibility Management Platform (AMP) scores as of March 18, 2013:

UC-eLinks window:

• 508.22 – 100%
• WCAG2 A – 100%
• WCAG2 AA – 100%

UC-eLinks window with linking within a frame:

• 508.22 – 93% (varies with publisher)
• WCAG2 A – 94% (varies with publisher)
• WCAG2 AA – 100%

Citation Linker (End User form):

• 508.22 – 100%
• WCAG2 A – 100%
• WCAG2 AA – 100%

Report a Problem form:

• 508.22 – 100%
• WCAG2 A – 100%
• WCAG2 AA – 100%

Ask a Librarian form:

• 508.22 – 100%
• WCAG2 A – 100%
• WCAG2 AA – 100%

After UC-eLinks is moved to Ex Libris cloud hosting in summer 2013, the CDL UC-eLinks team will do additional work on the Citation Linker form for ILL staff and the Copy and Paste form. The CDL will wait for the ExLibris enhancements for A-Z ejournal lists. We will also do further accessibility testing to ensure integrated services such as Request meet or exceed accessibility standards.

For Melvyl: The accessibility issues with Melvyl (WorldCat Local) will be fixed in the coming year with OCLC’s introduction of a new user interface that combines FirstSearch with WorldCat Local. OCLC is consulting with their in-house accessibility expert on the design. In addition, CDL will change the Melvyl button color to a higher contrast dark blue.

Why now? The SFX servers at UC are reaching end of life and the software must be migrated to a new environment. By moving hosting to Ex Libris, CDL will gain some cost savings, and will avoid costs by reducing time spent planning and implementing infrastructure changes for a new host environment at UC.

What does this mean for campuses?

In effect, nothing is changing for campuses. There will be no change to the user interface for end-users, staff, or UC-eLinks administrators who maintain their specific campus-managed titles in UC-eLinks.

CDL will continue to manage UC-eLinks on behalf of University of California libraries. SFX software and knowledge base updates will continue to occur on a regular, weekly basis.

We will need help testing

CDL will ask UC-eLinks administrators and staff to do testing to ensure the system has been successfully moved over to the Ex Libris Cloud.  CDL will coordinate testing with Heads of Public Service (HOPS) , Users Council and the UC-eLinks campus liaisons. We’ll have at least two rounds of testing with the first round tentatively in late May.

UC Davis is joining CDL

As an Ex Libris customer of the Aleph catalog software, UC Davis was the one campus that had its own version of UC-eLinks.  UC Davis recently decided to discontinue hosting UC-eLinks on its own server, and will merge with the other UC campuses– all managed by CDL.  UC Davis will move its SFX instance onto the cloud at Ex Libris shortly after CDL makes the migration. This change will reduce staff time maintaining, testing, and coordinating updates between UC Davis and CDL.

The UC Berkeley Law Library is not a participant in UC’s Request (Interlibrary Loan) service, so items will not be loaned from this collection.

Welcome, Berkeley Law!

Where do you inquire about Melvyl technical questions, configuration or customization requests?  Send a message to MelvylOps@cdlib.org. Your question will be directed to CDL’s WorldCat Local operating team ticketing system and be viewed by the whole technical team.  This ensures that no message will be overlooked, if, for example, it is sent to an individual who may be out of the office.  The question may be answered by CDL staff or OCLC experts can also be brought in depending on the nature of the question.

User experience questions

For content, user interface or other public services concerns, please use the feedback link at the bottom of any of the Melvyl screens. Click on the WorldCat: Feedback link and fill your comments/corrections into the form that appears.

All comments submitted to any version of Melvyl are sent to the CDL for response.   We may direct some requests for bug fixes or further information or explanation to OCLC.

This, and other information, can be found in the Melvyl FAQ.

Thanks for helping us to be more effective in addressing your concerns.

What is the WCL KB?
The WCL KB combines data about the library’s electronic resources and linking features that enable access to the content and help manage the workflows associated with these materials.  Melvyl currently uses the UC-eLinks Knowledgebase for linking.

Why ‘not quite yet’?
The effort for the campuses and CDL to implement and maintain the WCL KB would be substantial, and the features important to the University of California libraries that depend on the WCL KB are still fairly immature or have functioning solutions already in place.

The CDL team is continuing to monitor developments in tools that would make it easier to populate and maintain the WCL KB, and they are observing the experience of peer institutions. Finally, the team will encourage vendors to work together to facilitate data sharing between systems such as Ex Libris’ SFX and Serials Solutions.

Read the full report on the CDL website: http://www.cdlib.org/services/d2d/melvyl/policies/wcl_kb_analysis_dec2012_final.pdf

A description of the presentation follows:

Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is an important service that is highly valued by faculty, students, and staff at UC Irvine. Providing access to information resources quickly and efficiently is an ongoing goal of the UCI Libraries. Internal factors such as budget cuts and reduced staffing and external factors such as the ease and affordability of on-demand purchases made the time ripe to investigate and improve interlibrary loan services. A series of pilot projects involving staff from Access Services, Collections and Acquisitions were conducted to measure the cost of services, decrease time to delivery and improve workflow. These pilot projects included purchasing items on demand, using staff expertise in other departments to assist in processing foreign language ILL requests, using existing technology to enhance workflow, and using short-term loans available from publishers through patron initiated acquisitions. Our objective is to show how a number of smaller projects can make a big difference. Attendees can expect to learn strategies to help change workflow using existing staff and resources, manage staff expectations and to hear about our victories as well as our defeats.

The session features speakers Kristine Ferry, Head of Access Services; Gerry Lopez, Head of Document Access & Delivery; John Novak, Acting Head of Collection Development; and Keith Powell, Head of Acquisitions.

Kudos to our UC Irvine colleagues for their original work in this area; we’re looking forward to their next steps.