Also included is information on the HathiTrust Research Center that describes the creation of “Meandre workflow components (Meandre is part of the SEASR infrastructure) that retrieve texts from the HTRC using the HTRC data API, spell-check the texts, correct OCR errors, and then perform topic modeling on the texts. The HTRC has demonstrated this functionality, creating topic models of all pages returned from the data API from single-word queries on a full-text index of volumes. For example, a search for “dickens” in the non-Google digitized public domain corpus returns more than 100 topics with associated keywords. The diagrams below show tag clouds of keywords for the topics ‘lady’ and ‘men’.”  The tag clouds are fascinating—take a look.  

In other news, the HathiTrust collection continues to grow, with over 80,000 volumes ingested in April. HathiTrust is now approaching 3 million volumes in the public domain—2,903,378 volumes, or approximately 28% of total.

RecordEXPRESS is a simple web form contributors can use to create a single-level, minimum collection record and immediately publish it on the OAC. Specifically, the utility enables contributors to:

• Quickly fill in a handful of fields to create a collection guide that is compliant with Describing Archives: a Content Standard (DACS, the national standard for archival description).
• Immediately preview and directly publish the guide to the OAC with the push of a button.
• Attach one or more PDF documents to the guide. This may be handy in cases where contributors have detailed listings or inventories of materials in the collection, or a legacy finding aid that has not been encoded in EAD. These PDFs will soon be fully integrated with and searchable in the OAC.
• Obtain an Encoded Archival Description (EAD)-formatted export of the guide, for local use.

RecordEXPRESS was designed for institutions that either do not have the means or resources to easily create EAD- or MARC21-based collection guides, or may have legacy finding aids that are not worth converting into EAD at this time. With this and other services, the CDL is hoping to support institutions with “more product, less process”-based approaches to expose archival and special collections materials that would otherwise be hidden.

View an example of an OAC collection guide created with RecordEXPRESS.

Development of this tool was supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources as part of its Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives Program.

I don’t work in a public library; I work in an academic library, and specifically, an academic digital library. In recent years academic libraries have been grappling with the social and economic changes arising from a new and ever-changing technological environment. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s the power of libraries getting together and collaborating. In the case of the University of California, my employer, collaboration has enabled us to do more with less: very large scale digitization, providing wide access to library materials, getting better deals from content vendors, creating a community around open scholarship, and tapping into a richer variety of funding opportunities.

Like academic libraries, public libraries already have collaborative networks and organizations in place, and some public libraries are in and of themselves large consortia, so what role can the Digital Public Library of America fill? Although the DPLA initiative is being spearheaded by an academic institution, an ideal outcome would be for it to be an additional means for public libraries to come together to articulate and advocate for their users’ digital needs, and for shared technology to extend public libraries’ capability to serve library users. I’d like to see DPLA as a space for public libraries to collectively work out how to leverage technology to remain as vital anchors in the physical (non digital!) community as well as providing access to the digital.

I attended the recent DPLA West meeting, and from the discussion there, here’s what I see, from where I sit, as spaces for collective action by public libraries:

• Create best practices for public libraries to extend and leverage shared digital services while continuing to offer a rich combination of local print and digital services
• Establish shared pools of resources to help with digitization, and to develop access mechanisms for digitized materials.
• Network across libraries to provide local and regional digital content to users of all public libraries (here especially is where shared technical infrastructure could play a role).
• Work together on new mechanisms for direct community and user engagement with digital content.
• Continue to advocate for the digital rights of library users, especially for the rights of “have nots” and those who cannot pay.
• Continue to be champions for digital access to current materials for library users.
• Involve the larger library community wherever and whenever possible, as content contributors, as technology collaborators, and as policy partners, leveraging existing relationships and forging new ones.

A shared infrastructure–both technical and social/organizational–could play a role in all of the above. DPLA has already generated the very beginnings of such an infrastructure, and there is a great deal of digital library expertise (including from academic libraries) with much potential.

As someone who is a higher-education librarian but a public library user, I would like to see DPLA be primarily about public libraries serving their constituencies by building on their many strengths; local collections, an active user base, a community presence, and librarians who connect directly with the public. DPLA should be about knitting together digital services with all the other services our wonderful public libraries already provide. The DPLA initiative, to its credit, has started the wheels turning.

• One stop for EZID and all EZID information, including webinars, FAQs, and more.
  

  Image by Simon Cousins

• A clean, bright new look.
• No more hunting across two locations for the materials and information you need.

• NEW Manage IDs functions:
• View all identifiers created by logged-in account;
• View most recent 10 interactions–based on the account–not the session;
• See the scope of your identifier work without any API programming.

• NEW in the UI: Reserve an Identifier
• Create identifiers early in the research cycle;
• Choose whether or not you want to make your identifier public–reserve them if you don’t;
• On the Manage screen, view the identifier’s status (public, reserved, unavailable/just testing).

In the coming months, we will also be introducing these EZID user interface enhancements:

• Enhanced support for DataCite metadata in the UI;
• Reporting support for institution-level clients.

So, stay tuned: EZID just gets better and better!

The overlap period for locally licensed and systemwide licensed resources is intended to begin the week of May 6, with a full transition to the new platform for these resources on August 1.  The August 1 date is tentative, dependent on the resolution of outstanding technical issues that affect off-campus access at UCD, UCI, UCR and UCSF. CDL has been working closely with these campuses to resolve the connectivity issues. The overlap access period allows users and library staff to allow for gaining familiarity and experience with the new platform while having the legacy platform available as needed. 

A link to a list of the CDL-licensed ProQuest databases is below.   (Your campus may have additional databases from ProQuest not included here, which will also be transitioned when the systemwide databases are transitioned in August.)  The PIDs for the CDL-licensed databases will be updated to go to an interim screen where users can choose between the legacy and new versions of the databases.  The interim pages also provide a space for detailed information and caveats regarding access to the new platform.

When the transition is complete, the PIDs will be directed to the new platform. 

A full list of the databases with their PIDs as well as additional information is available at:

http://www.cdlib.org/services/collections/rl/docs/transitions/ProQuest_Systemwide_Database_Transition.doc

Training Materials for the New ProQuest Interface

ProQuest has a rich array of training materials for their new interface.  For the bulk of materials, go to

http://proquest.com/go/training

The materials range from links to YouTube tutorials, Quick Start Reference Overview, user guides, posters, table tents and more.  (Ignore the links on the upper left hand corner and focus on the links in the middle of the page.)  Some training materials are available in multiple languages, so if you’re an English language speaker, make sure you choose one in English. 

ProQuest has also created a number of LibGuides for their resources, available at

http://proquest.libguides.com/

On the LibGuides Web pages, you can find guides to specific databases, links to live Webinars and recordings, as well as screencasts and tutorials. 

UC’s ProQuest Trainer Aimee Leverette has already or will be contacting the campus libraries to conduct in-person training sessions.  Stay tuned for more information on face-to-face training.

Last month we distributed the first set of records for the Alexander Street Press collection, Theatre in Video (350 titles). This is also the first time SCP has distributed bibliographic records for videos. Theatre in Video contains performances of plays and film documentaries. Included are live television broadcasts of New York productions from the 1950s, experimental performances from the 1960s and 70s, and revivals of classical works. The collection contains performances from as early as the 1930s.

Other major monograph distributions for the month were for Open Access (801 titles, of which 782 were National Academy Press titles), Springer (486 titles), Wiley (136 titles), ACM (124 titles), IEEE (121 titles), and Apabi (52 titles). The only significant serial distributions were for Open Access (147 titles), most of which were DOAJ titles.

In response to a request from CDL’s Joint Steering Committee, quarterly package cataloging statistics now show if a package’s title count had a net increase or net decrease from the previous quarter. The first quarter statistics are posted at http://www.cdlib.org/services/collections/scp/docs/2012q1.pdf. Additionally, the Chinese language packages are grouped together and presented at the end after the statistics for California documents. We hope these changes will help make our work efforts more visible and allow you to find information of interest more quickly.

SCP is now ready to move forward on the Unicode transition. Test files have been posted for each of the campuses which contain records for the same set of titles we sent for testing earlier this year. The files include Chinese records with problem characters, a record in each JACKPHY language except Yiddish, and records in Cyrillic, Thai, and Vietnamese, as well as a few Western European languages. The records contain a 599 with the text UPD |b Unicode test |c 120419. A text file of the records is provided for comparison purposes. Please report any problems you have with the test file records to either Kate (kgarveyclasby@ucsd.edu) or Adolfo (atarango@ucsd.edu) within the next three weeks. The timeline below list the type of files you will be receiving over the next several weeks. Assuming no problems are reported, permanent distribution of the SCP files in Unicode will commence with the files posted on May 14, 2012.

SCP Unicode transition timeline:

Apr 16   MARC8 files
Apr 19   Unicode test file
Apr 23   MARC8 files
Apr 30   MARC8 files
May 7    MARC8 files
May 9    Deadline for problem reports on Unicode files
May 14  Unicode files
 

Until next month …

 You can see the OCLC Print Archives Disclosure Pilot final report here.

The top ten papers from the first quarter of 2012, by campus:

• UCB “Library Terms That Users Understand” by John Kupersmith, LAUC-B and Library Staff Research
• UCD “Using Natural Gas Transmission Pipeline Costs to Estimate Hydrogen Pipeline Costs” by Nathan Parker, Institute of Transportation Studies
• UCI “A Spectral Analysis of World GDP Dynamics: Kondratieff Waves, Kuznets Swings, Juglar and Kitchin Cycles in Global Economic Development, and the 2008/2009 Economic Crisis” by Andrey V Korotayev, Sergey V. Tsirel, Structure and Dynamics
• UCLA “An Introduction To Green Marketing” by Michael Jay Polonsky, Electronic Green Journal
• UCM “Recently Discovered Accounts Concerning the “Lone Woman” of San Nicolas Island” by Travis Hudson, Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology
• UCR “Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change” by S Lyubomirsky, K M Sheldon, D Schkade, UC Riverside Postprints
• UCSB “Twain’s Rhetoric of Irony in ‘the War-Prayer’” by Helen Lock, Journal of Transnational American Studies
• UCSC “The World Distribution of Household Wealth” by James B. Davies, Anthony Shorrocks, Susanna Sandstrom, Edward N. Wolff, Mapping Global Inequalities
• UCSD “A Tale of Two Borders: The U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada Lines After 9/11” by Peter Andreas, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
• UCSF “Machine Learning Benchmarks and Random Forest Regression” by Mark R Segal, Center for Bioinformatics and Molecular Biostatistics

Launched in 2002, eScholarship provides a suite of open access, scholarly publishing services and research tools that enable departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars associated with the University of California to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship.  To learn more about helping your faculty and colleagues participate in this exciting open access service, contact your campus Scholarly Communications Officer or Justin Gonder at the CDL (help@escholarship.org).