CDLINFO LISTSERV, January 24, 2002, Vol.5, No.2
CONTENTS
- New Resource Available
- Literature Resource Center (LRC)
- Library Staff News
- Alvin Pollock Joins the CDL
- For More Information
- CDL News
- Contacts for Questions or Problems
- Information about CDLINFO
1. New Resource Available
A list of recently added content is always available at: http://www.cdlib.org/news/whatsnew.html
a. Literature Resource Center (LRC)
Literature Resource Center (LRC) [http://www.cdlib.org/hlp/directory/litrc.html] from Gale Group has been licensed by the CDL for all 9 campuses.
Recommended by History and Reference bibliographer groups and endorsed by the CDL Joint Steering Committee on Shared Collections, the Literature Resource Center (LRC) is available and being licensed by the CDL. A relatively new Gale product, the LRC was funded as a combined "one-time" purchase by the CDL with annual maintenance fees to be supported by the campuses, beginning in 2005. The JSC recommended that the CDL license the LRC after negotiations with Gale changed the offering from an annual subscription to a "one-time purchase" (of the Contemporary Authors and Dictionary of Literary Biography files) with dramatically improved pricing, especially on the annual fees. UC campuses will have unlimited access to the LRC.
LRC provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline; combining core literary databases (Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism Select, Dictionary of Literary Biography, etc.) into a single online service. The Literature Resource Center covers more than 120,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,500 of the most-studied authors.
This unique resource allows users to search in a number
of different ways, including keyword, title, advanced, authors
by type, by document, as well as the ability to see a literary-historical
timeline of the authors life in context. By looking for
Authors by type, users can select an author ethnicity, Hispanic
American, for example, and combine it with a genre such
as social novels. Other ways to search are by literary movement
or time period, author nationality or theme. There is also
a feature called Authors on the Highway from Publishers
Weekly, which gives dates and locations for author readings
and book signings.
2. Library Staff News
a. Alvin Pollock Joins the CDL
The Online Archive of California (OAC) is pleased to announce that Alvin Pollock is officially devoting 50% of his programming time to OAC projects. Alvin worked closely with Daniel Pitti on the development of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard at UC Berkeley when it was known as the Berkeley Finding Aid Project (BFAP).
Alvin's knowledge, skills and abilities were instrumental in the success of the UC EAD Project, precursor to the CDL OAC program. The UC EAD Project applied the EAD standard to UC Special Collections and University Archives finding aids. During the UC EAD project, Alvin led us through the difficult terrain of ingesting and publishing over 4,000 finding aids using the Dynaweb software.
Most recently, Alvin's skills have been applied to the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA) and the Museum Online Archive of California (MOAC). Currently, Alvin has completed work on the first phase of the OAC Ingest Tool release that has automated the process of uploading finding aids into the OAC. The Ingest Tool is available from the CDL Libstaff site: http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/oac/ . Periodically, OAC participants ftp finding aids to the CDL servers where they are automatically parsed and checked for compliance with EAD encoding standards and with the OAC Best Practice Guidelines for Encoding New Finding Aids (OAC BPG). A log is generated indicating errors and needed corrections. In phase two of the OAC Ingest Tool release, the generated error messages will link directly to relevant sections of the OAC BPG.
Alvin has also recently completed some revisions to the OAC Dynaweb User Interface. During the Fall 2001, Rosalie Lack completed a series of OAC user evaluation studies with archivists and graduate students. These studies resulted in the OAC Usability Report that is available at http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/oac/. Based on these results, Alvin enhanced the interface of the OAC in the hope of improving navigation and retrieval on the website.
We are very thrilled to have Berkeley's support of this
co-library project and to have Alvin's continued expertise
in support of the OAC
3. For More Information
a. CDL News
Several items of interest, including "Milestones," "Progress Reports," "What's New," and previous issues of CDLINFO are posted on the CDL web site (http://www.cdlib.org/) under News and Developments. Please share news of this resource with your colleagues!Remember also that reports, working documents, and status information of particular interest to library staff, are all available at http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/.
b. Contacts for Questions or Problems
If you have problems accessing or using the system or have questions, including questions about the status of electronic journal collections and Internet resources, you can contact CDL staff in one of the following ways:- For immediate assistance, call the CDL Helpline at (510) 987-0555. Callers with TDD equipment, please call 1-800-735-2929 in California for the telephone relay operator.
- Send an e-mail message to cdl@www.cdlib.org.
- Click on "News" at http://www.dbs.cdlib.org/ (also known as http://www.melvyl.ucop.edu) for information about system outages, problems with particular databases, the status of a resource, etc.
For information about whether your UC campus has access to a particular electronic journal or Internet resource, contact your local collection development officer.
c. Information about CDLINFO
CDLINFO is designed to inform UC Librarians, and the UC community, about the progress of the CDL, policy issues under discussion, and newly available electronic resources. We hope that subscribers from the UC libraries will pass on selected information from the newsletter to faculty, staff, and students on their campuses, as appropriate. More complete information about the CDL, as well as the Directory of Collections and Services which leads to digital resources, is available at the CDL website at http://www.cdlib.org.
Eligible subscribers: UC library employees
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CDLINFO is also published on the web at http://www.cdlib.org/news/cdlinfo/
Frequency of publication: Biweekly, or as new information warrants.
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