The DMPTool is an online service for creating data management plans, and was developed in response to requirements from funding agencies that researchers include data management plans in their grant proposals. The DMPTool now supports requirements of 5 major US federal funders, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Studies, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The DMPTool also supports one private funder, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

The DMPTool is available to all researchers, regardless of institutional affiliation, and allows them to:
•  Create ready-to-use data management plans for specific funding agencies
•  Meet funder requirements for data management plans
•  Get step-by-step instructions and guidance for your data
•  Learn about resources and services available at local institutions to help fulfill the data management requirements of grants

The DMPTool was developed by UC3 in collaboration with NSF-funded DataONE project, Digital Curation Centre, Smithsonian Institution, UCLA Library, UCSD Libraries, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and University of Virginia Library. By joining together, these partners were able to develop the tool efficiently and quickly by consolidating their expertise. The primary goal of the partnership is to support researchers and keep their grant proposals competitive, while highlighting services and resources that we provide to researchers.

The award will be presented at the annual UC Computing Services Conference (UCCSC) at UC Berkeley in August.

SNAC is a two-year research project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, that is creating a set of authority records by extracting information from archival finding aids and enhancing it with other sources.  The project uses the new standard Encoded Archival Context—Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF).  Data for the research is being provided by the Online Archive of California, among several other sources.  Learn more about SNAC.

CDL’s role in the SNAC project is to build a prototype interface that links the authority records in a “historical social network.”  Such a system has the potential to significantly expand access to a range of humanities resources, as well as our knowledge of the connections between people, families, and organizations over time.

The user prototype is being developed using an iterative approach.  This first release of the system provides the most basic functionality required for researchers to imagine how they might interact with archival authority records.  Development of further iterations of the prototype will continue through Spring 2012.

Tell us what you think!

We welcome your suggestions on both the design of the prototype interface and the processing of the data.  What features do you think would be most useful for researchers?

Direct access to the prototype system, a description of project work to date, and a link to the feedback forum can be found at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/prototype.html.

The images were produced during the 2009-2010 Local History Digital Resources Project (LHDRP), a training and digitization program for libraries with local history materials.  Over the past year, six libraries each selected, scanned, and catalogued approximately 200 items for inclusion in OAC, Calisphere, and local websites.  They are now broadly available to the UC community and the public.

The new material includes photographs, records, and ephemera from the late nineteenth century to the present day.  Collections, by institution, include:

• California Historical Society: photographs documenting members and activities of the Peoples Temple in the United States and Guyana, including candid images of members working and playing.
• Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society: photographs of gay figures and events in the 1970s-1990s, including those of Harvey Milk, Pride Parades, White Night Riots, and more.
• Kern County Library: images documenting historic people and places in Bakersfield and other areas of Kern County.
• Liberty High School: photographs chronicling the high school and its students, as well as school-related artifacts such as dance cards, invitations, and report cards.
• Loyola Marymount University: materials from the archives and special collections documenting the impact of Catholic education and activism on Los Angeles history.
• Sonoma State University: selections from the North Bay Historic Preservation Collection documenting local buildings that date to the mid-1800s.

Congratulations to this year’s LHDRP participants!

LHDRP is supported by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.  Learn more.

Images courtesy of (left-right): Kern County Library; Loyola Marymount University Library, Department of Archives and Special Collections; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

As people have used it over the past five years, they have proposed many improvements. Three organizations have partnered to develop the next generation tool, JHOVE2. The California Digital Library, Portico and Stanford University were awarded a grant in 2008 from the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) at the Library of Congress, and have been working the past 18 months on the project. There is now a beta prototype of the software available on the project wiki.

The production release of JHOVE2 is scheduled for September 2010, and we’re starting to think about how to maintain the software into the future. The JHOVE2 software will be available as free and open source software, with the 3 partnering institutions continuing to provide support, maintenance, training and documentation. At the same time, we’re planning for how to sustain and expand into the future. As part of this planning, we have an online survey:

http://polldaddy.com/s/FC4A887638DC8C40

Please take a few minutes and take the survey; your answers will help us determine the most effective ways of providing training and support. For more information on the JHOVE2 project, see the project wiki.

In organizing archival records, archivists research and describe the individuals, families, and organizational groups that create and are represented in them. However, because archivists traditionally have described records and their creators together, this valuable information is tied to specific resources and institutions.

The SNAC Project builds on the recent release of an archival authority control standard (Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families [EAC-CPF]) to “unlock” descriptions of people from descriptions of their records and link them together in new ways. Our collaborators will derive archival authority records from existing archival descriptions and enhance them through matching and merging with existing records and thesauri.

CDL’s role is to create a prototype access system that links the creator records to each other and to related resources in a “historical social network.” The goal of the project is to demonstrate the extent to which archival authority records can be used to provide better context for and access to a broad array of humanities materials.

A project website—to be developed in the coming weeks—will provide detailed information and distribute software developed for the project at its conclusion.

The SNAC Project has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the amount of $348,000 over two years, starting in May 2010. Data for the research will be provided by the Library of Congress, Getty Vocabulary Program, Virginia Heritage, Northwest Digital Archive (NWDA), Online Archive of California, OCLC, and the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF).

Researchers worldwide will soon have access to previously inaccessible collections of documents, photographs, and other rich archival materials related to California’s environmental history.

CDL’s Digital Special Collections Program, in partnership with nine California institutions, has been awarded a competitive grant to catalog thirty-three collections documenting a range of important issues—including irrigation, mining, forestry, agriculture, industry, land use, activism, and research—in the state’s environmental history. Until now, these collections have been effectively hidden to researchers who have not known of their existence or contents.

Highlights from the collections include the corporate records of Unocal, a major oil company; the papers
of Frank Sherwood Rowland, the Nobel-prize winning scientist who discovered the effects of CFCs on the
ozone layer; the records of prominent California leaders in the Sierra Club; and materials on the state’s
tidelands controversy, with a complete environmental profile of Los Angeles Harbor.

Scholars in California and beyond are excited about the many research possibilities that the collections hold. “They will shed light on the interdependence between nature and culture in California’s recent environmental past,” says Professor John Mack Faragher of Yale University.

The CDL will collaborate with the following institutions to arrange and describe the collections for scholarly use, then make the records available online in the Online Archive of California
(http://www.oac.cdlib.org/) and library catalogs:

• California State University, Chico
• California State University, Fresno
• Humboldt State University
• UC Berkeley
• UC Davis
• UC Irvine
• UC Los Angeles
• UC Riverside
• University of Southern California

The project is particularly exciting because it is a collaborative effort across universities to uncover a bulk of material. While each institution will independently undertake the cataloging work, CDL will host tools,
training, and a virtual meeting space to promote the exchange of ideas and advance the archival profession’s approach to uncovering hidden collections.

The Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation and administered by Council for Library and Information Resources, totals $446,817. More information about the grant is available at http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/index.html.

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.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of California Libraries a nine month planning grant to organize the “Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST)” — a shared print repository service, focused initially on retrospective journal archives. UC Libraries in collaboration with regional library partners will band together to prepare service models for consolidating print journal holdings in responsible ways to provide efficiencies throughout the libraries. WEST is envisioned as a robust partnership that will allow libraries to build and manage a cooperative regional archive at the network level.  The proposal calls for library leaders in the Western Region of the United States to convene in Oakland, CA to (1) design operating, governance, and business models to support cooperative print archives among diverse partners; (2) establish standards for low-level validation and disclosure; and (3) develop selection criteria incorporating risk-management principles to ensure persistence within the broader context of similarly intentioned national and international efforts.

Library leaders from UC, Orbis-Cascade, GWLA, SCELC, Stanford, CalTech, Occidental College and more will band together to design the Western Regional Storage Trust incorporating sustainable models for participation amongst a wide variety of partners.  We are pleased to announce that Lizanne Payne, Director of the Washington Research Library Consortium, will serve as the consultant for this process.

For more information, please contact Emily Stambaugh, CDL Shared Print Manager.

CDL is pleased to announce the online publication of approximately 2,000 diverse graphic materials documenting local people, place, and events throughout California in the Online Archive of California (OAC) and Calisphere.

The content has been created as part of the Local History Digital Resources Program (LHDRP), which provides a “solution in a box” for libraries across the state seeking to become conversant with developing digital primary resource collections.  Over the past year, ten libraries each have selected, scanned, and catalogued approximately 200 items for inclusion in the OAC and Calisphere and on local websites.  They are now broadly available to the UC community and the general public.

The new material includes photographs, postcards, cartes de visite, records, and more from the late nineteenth century to the present day.  Collectively they document the built environment, civic leaders, and public life at locales throughout California.  Some highlights: a 1921 photograph of Charlie Chaplin on the Coronado polo fields, a 1970 aerial postcard of South San Francisco, and  a 1920s-era image of a track and field athlete at Mills College.

The following institutions participated in LHDRP 2008-2009; click institution name to view content:

• Ostrow Library at the American Jewish University
• City of Commerce Public Library
• Coronado Public Library
• The Pioneer Room at Escondido Public Library
• Graduate Theological Union Library
• Mills College, F.W. Olin Library
• San Diego State University, Library Special Collections and University Archives
• South San Francisco Public Library
• University of California, Riverside Libraries, Special Collections Department
• Upland Public Library

LHDRP is collaborative effort of CDL, the Califa Library Group, and the California State Library, and is supported with LSTA funding.

The California Digital Library is pleased to announce public access to its Web Archives.  CDL’s Web Archives are built and published using its Web Archiving Service (WAS), which enables librarians to capture, curate, and preserve websites for the benefit of researchers and the general public.  New archives are continually being built and published, and will appear along with the current archives available at http://webarchives.cdlib.org/.

This first set of archives includes materials from the California state government agencies, and local government agencies from Orange County, San Diego, Los Angeles and more.  Also included are archives of Middle Eastern political organizations, American left-wing organizations, and web content related to events such as the 2007 Southern California Wildfires and the 2003 California Recall Election.

As government agencies and public policy organizations increasingly turn to the web as a primary means of publication, libraries are challenged to provide lasting access to the budgets, studies and reports that they have long collected for the benefit of the research community.  The WAS service also allows libraries to expand their collecting scope to more ephemeral materials such as press releases, local commission meeting minutes, public forum sites, and blogs.  All of these provide a glimpse of history in the making for future researchers.  The value of this service is described in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, Scholars Race to Preserve Guantánamo Records, which focuses on an archive currently being built by New York University using CDL’s Web Archiving Service.

The Web Archiving Service also enables the University of California (UC) libraries to work collaboratively on a monumental task: archiving the web sites of the State of California.   The State of California web domain (.ca.gov) represents the third largest subdomain of the U.S. government web presence.  The UC campuses have worked individually to capture and archive local information, and collectively to archive state publications.  Together, these archives represent a major achievement and a series of rich resources for California researchers.  These archives can also provide lasting access to the individual state publications that are catalogued and made available via UC’s Melvyl catalog.

The archives represent the culmination of the Web-at-Risk grant, funded by Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, and led by the California Digital Library.  With our grant partners at the University of North Texas and New York University, and our curatorial partners at the UC campuses, NYU and Stanford University, we are embarking on new era in collection building for libraries.

If you have any questions about the archives or about the Web Archiving Service, please contact washelp@ucop.edu.