CDLINFO LISTSERV, February 14, 2002, Vol.5, No.3
CONTENTS
- Daniel Greenstein to become CDL University Librarian
- CDL Database Transitions
- Melvyl-T Catalog Unveiling Rescheduled For Fall 2002
- Functional Acceptance Testing of the Ex Libris system
- MLA and Ei Compendex*Plus Now Available Via Ovid
- New Resources Available
- The Royal Society Journals
- Iter Italicum (Katalin Radics, UCLA)
- CHEMnetBase
- Chinese Journal Network/Chinese Academic Journals
- NSF Funds CDL to Coordinate Planning Effort In Digital Library "Actors"
- Request Update
- Instruction Workshops Report
- New Status of Services Page
- Library Staff News
- Jon Solomon Joins Melvyl-T Team
- For More Information
- CDL News
- Contacts for Questions or Problems
- Information about CDLINFO
1. Daniel Greenstein to become CDL University Librarian
We are extremely pleased to announce that Daniel Greenstein has accepted the position of University Librarian and Executive Director of the California Digital Library. He is expected to assume his new position in May 2002, and all are encouraged to help us welcome him to UC.
Dr. Greenstein is currently Director of the Digital Library Federation, based in Washington, D.C., a position he has held since 1999. The DLF consists of 28 leading research libraries (including Berkeley and the CDL) that are pioneering in the use of electronic information technologies to extend their collections and services. Through its members, the DLF has provided leadership to libraries throughout the nation by identifying standards and "best practices" for digital collections and services, coordinating leading-edge research and development, and collaborating to create digital collections and services that libraries cannot develop individually.
After receiving the Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees
from the
University of Pennsylvania, Dan was awarded a Doctor of
Philosophy degree from Oxford University in 1989. His academic
career has included appointments in Modern History at Glasgow
University, director of the Glasgow University Arts Faculty
Computing Facility, and founding director of the Arts and
Humanities Data Service of the United Kingdom, where he
led the strategic and operational development of a digital
information service to support arts and humanities research
and teaching at higher education institutions in the U.K.
Building on this success, he was named founding co-director
of the UK Resource Discovery Network in 1998.
In his new position Dr. Greenstein will assume responsibilities for providing leadership to the CDL and, in consultation with the University Librarians and the Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee (SLASIAC), for systemwide library planning.
Beverlee French, CDL's Director for Shared Content who
has been Interim University Librarian since February, 2001,
will resume her previous responsibilities for the development
of the University's shared digital collections upon Dan
Greenstein's arrival.
2. CDL Database Transitions
a. Melvyl-T Catalog Unveiling Rescheduled For Fall 2002
There is a change in schedule for the debut of the new Melvyl-T catalog. The new schedule is necessary because quality assurance testing is taking longer than anticipated and because several enhancements and developments that CDL has requested are part of a new release of the software from the vendor, Ex Libris. The CDL will be the first installation site for this new release.Current plans are for a small prototype catalog database of ~630,000 records to be made available for library staff and usability testing by March 2002. The new catalog will be released to faculty and students in fall 2002. The old version of the Melvyl Catalog will continue to be available for the entire academic year, 2002-03. The overlap period is meant to assure the reliability and functionality of the new catalog, and to allow librarians and faculty a period in which they can learn to use the new catalog efficiently and create necessary training materials and guides. (The Melvyl-T catalog rescheduling will have no impact on the A & I database transitions, which will proceed on their existing timetables.)
Initially, the database will consist of UC monograph (CAT) and serials (PE) records only, including those from affiliated libraries. Therefore, users will have access to UC holdings as early as possible, while CDL and the campus libraries continue evaluating technical and policy issues regarding the inclusion of non-UC book and periodical records. Examples of non-UC contributors for books include the California Academy of Sciences, the California Historical Society, the California State Library, the Center for Research Libraries, and the Graduate Theological Union. The entire periodicals database, including non-UC contributors' records, will be available in Melvyl-T before legacy Melvyl retires.
Several enhancements are being implemented especially for the Melvyl database above and beyond what is provided in the current Aleph software. Some of these developments are a result of staff input to the Melvyl Library Staff Survey ("hidden uses" of Melvyl) conducted in summer, 2001. Examples include the ability to maneuver among different display formats (including a review format), and the ability to view campus specific cataloging for each item in a set of equivalent records.
As a reminder, the new system will also allow users to do the following, which CDL is unable to provide with current technology:
- Combine books and periodicals (CAT & PE) in
one database: Currently, users must search for books in
the CAT databases separately from periodical titles in the
PE databases. For example, over the years, many long-standing
conference series have been catalogued by some campuses
as monographs, and by others as serials, resulting in holdings
being divided between CAT and PE. Merging these files together
will better integrate the holdings of these important campus
resources and address this frequent complaint.
- General keyword search: Currently, users can search keyword(s) within an index (e.g., keyword(s) in title). Keyword searching in the new database will be primarily subject-oriented, including titles, subject headings, notes, and genre fields. Other examples of searchable indexes include notes, publisher, conference and others, some listed below.
- Limit search to electronic resources only: This would return only bibliographic records that have a link (URL) to electronic format.
- Phrase and proximity searching: The ability to search for words adjacent or near to each other (e.g., searching for the phrase "online catalog").
- Sorting results: Ex Libris allows users to select and change the order in which their search results are sorted and displayed, for example, sorting by title or by date.
- Call number searching: A call number search will return an ordered scan display of call numbers and titles
- Multilingual character set support: The ability to sort and display using characters from languages (e.g., Chinese) used in UC catalogs. Later enhancements will add a search capability on the vernacular fields.
- Music searching and display: It will be possible to provide better access to music materials by creating special indexes and displays that account for uniform titles, music publisher numbers, and other aspects of retrieving music scores and recordings.
- Browsing (heading searches): A heading search (e.g., author, series, subject) will return a list of headings. The user can then move forward or backward through this list, and scan and select the most appropriate heading, which will then return a list of bibliographic records that used that particular heading.
- Name and subject cross references: The ability to load cross references so these will be displayed in browse displays to aid in the selection of the most appropriate name or subject term.
Telnet access is likely to be available with the release
of the prototype database and will also be test driven before
the production database is released.
b. Functional Acceptance Testing of the Ex Libris System
On January 28, CDL staff and campus members of the Melvyl-T Services team started a 2-week first phase of functional acceptance testing, a process that reviews each function that was delivered by the Ex Libris system to support the new Melvyl Database. Functional acceptance testing is an important milestone for the project because it analyzes where the system functions as it should and where corrections need to be made. This first phase tests navigational functions only, against a test database of only 50,000 records.Soon the second phase of testing will begin, against the prototype database of 630,000 carefully selected records (see new schedule information in the previous story). The second phase will test all the indexing, searching and retrieval features, as well as re-testing navigational functions with more data. This testing will be conducted by campus members of all the Melvyl-T Transition Teams (Database and Technology Team, Services Team, and Education and Usability Team), and by all staff members at CDL.
The Ex Libris out-of-the-box interface is being used during this testing period, but it contains all the indexes and database architecture that CDL has developed over these months of planning for the new system. Parallel activity continues on the CDL interface that customizes this basic interface into something recognizably CDL's, and which will be unveiled with the Melvyl Prototype Database.
c. MLA and Ei Compendex*Plus Now Available Via Ovid
MLA Bibliography and Ei Compendex*Plus are now available via Ovid. Users can access them from the "More databases" second pull-down menu on the CDL-hosted databases home page or from the Article Databases menu on the CDL Collections and Services page. In accessing these databases via these pages, users will encounter an interim page that gives them more information about features of other versions of the database, and retiring dates for alternate versions. Similar interim pages, recommended by the Transition Steering Committee, will be used for transitioning databases during periods when more than one version is available.d. UC-eLinks
The UC version of SFX linking technology, dubbed UC-eLinks [see http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/uc-elinks ], has been put into operation on the first of the transitioning databases, MLA on Ovid. UC-eLinks will be activated on other Ovid, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA), and Gale databases as soon as is technically possible. The CDL acquired the SFX software(http://www.sfxit.com ) from ExLibris as part of the Aleph purchase for the Melvyl Catalog and Periodicals database.Initially, UC-eLinks will link to three services: links to e-content, links to holdings, and links to Request. As with the current CDL linking system, links to e-content will be at the most specific level possible. CDL Principles for development of UC-eLinks are available on the web http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/uc-elinks/principles.html.
The CDL's first goal in using SFX is to implement and stabilize it in the transitioning databases. Subsequently, it will be implemented with other vendors, so that users will see a consistent service from the databases CDL and UC libraries license. While three linking services are currently being used, eventually there can also be links to author citations, web resources, biographical information, and other kinds of information.
For more information on CDL's Vision for Services Integration,
see [CDL Vision for Services Integration http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/uc-elinks/vision.html
]
3. New Resources Available
NOTE: New resources listed below are not yet in the CDL Directory of Collections and Services; they will be added within the next 2 weeks. You can access them directly from the URL provided.
A list of recently added content is always available at: http://www.cdlib.org/news/whatsnew.html
a. The Royal Society Journals
The Royal Society is the independent scientific academy of the United Kingdom, dedicated to promoting excellence in science. Its original journal Philosophical Transactions is, at 336 years old, the world's oldest continuously published academic journal. It has published the work of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, William Herschel and many more celebrated names in science.Full-text access for all UC campuses to the four Royal Society journals that trace their history back to Philosophical Transactions is now available. This agreement combined with the backfile access via JSTOR gives comprehensive access to:
Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences Proceedings: Biological Sciences Proceedings: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences
For general information and access to the Royal Society
journals, select "journals" from the pulldown
menu at: http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/
b.Iter Italicum (Katalin Radics, UCLA)
The 2002 renewal of Iter: Gateway to the Renaissance includes a new resource, the online version of the Iter Italicum. The database is of primary importance not only for medievalists and Renaissance scholars, but for classicists, ancient historians, and historians of philosophy. Iter Italicum is the most comprehensive finding list available of previously uncatalogued or incompletely catalogued Renaissance humanistic manuscripts found in libraries and collections all over the world.
The URL is
<http://imdatabases.library.utoronto.ca/iter/iter/query.htm> where users need to click on "select a database"
to get there.
c. ChemnetBase
The CDL has purchased perpetual access to the five titles currently available via ChemnetBase [http://www.chemnetbase.com] and all nine campuses will share the annual access fees.The CRC Handbook license originally began as a Tier 2 negotiation. When physical sciences subject selectors recommended the acquisition of ChemnetBase in response to the Joint Steering Committee survey, the vendor contacted the CDL and offered attractive one-time pricing with a relatively low annual access fee. CDL negotiations succeeding in reducing even further both the purchase price and annual access fees. Both the science subject selectors and the Joint Steering Committee recommended proceeding with the license.
ChemnetBase includes:
Combined Chemical Dictionary: Contains chemical, structural and bibliographic data on almost 450,000 compounds, including the Dictionary of Natural Products.
The Handbook of Chemistry & Physics: Contains the most frequently used data in science, including the periodic table of the elements, basic constants and units, thermodynamic and spectroscopic data; electric, magnetic, thermal and structural properties of solids, key data from nuclear science, astronomy and geophysics; and up-to-date health and safety information.
Polymers - A Property Database: A new database of physical properties for 1000 polymers, specially prepared to include those of most interest to polymer chemists & technologists.
Dictionary of Commonly Cited Compounds: Contains the 25,000 most commonly cited compounds in the chemical literature.
Properties of Organic Compounds: Contains over 29,000
of the most commonly sought organic compounds, featuring
physical data, spectral data, and structures.
d. Chinese Journal Network/Chinese Academic Journals
The CDL has licensed a subset of the China Academic Journals database for all campuses (available at: http://china.eastview.com/). Note: Users must click either the "IP address access" button above the usename/password boxes or "Login" in order to access the site.This resource was a high priority for the EADLG (East Asian Digital Library Group); it was purchased on the recommendation of both the EADLG and the Joint Steering Committee on Shared Collection (JSC).
The licensed materials consist of the full text and full
images of 1,710 journals Chinese Language journals found
in the Literature/History/Philosophy, Economics/Politics/Law,
and Education/Social Science sections of the database. For
those of you familiar with the Chinese Journal Network this
is "Series Code F-G-H" sections of the China Academic
Journals database. The full database contains 9 series and
includes over 3000 journal titles.
In addition to content for the current year, the CDL has
purchased the archival file that covers content from 1994-2001.
The database is produced by Tsinghua Tongfang Optical Disc
Co. (TTOC) at Tsinghua University in Beijing and is distributed,
and mirrored, in the U.S. by East View Information Services.
Access is currently available, however, cataloging content
will be added as a staged project over the next year.
Technical Note: Due to the Chinese characters this site
can only be viewed using IE or Netscape 6.X and in order
to view full-text users will have to download a Windows-only
application (CAJViewer)--users should be prompted by their
browsers to download it when they try to view results.
4.NSF Funds CDL to Coordinate Planning Effort In Digital Library "Actors"
The National Science Foundation approved a research planning grant for the CDL to coordinate a working group that will set an agenda for future research in the emerging area of digital library "actors". These actors are persons, organizations, and instruments that play roles in the production, dissemination, and use of digital information. Digital library "actors", and the roles they play, are not yet well understood as general concepts, but are increasingly important in challenges such as the management of digital certificates, content licenses, intellectual property, as well as the development of adaptive search and retrieval systems. More traditional challenges include applications of name authority control and user profiling.The CDL's coordinating role for the planning project was
discussed and endorsed by the CDL's Strategic Technology
Architecture and Standards working group (http://www.cdlib.org/inside/groups/stas/).
Setting a common framework for actors should lead to benefits
for CDL and other library initiatives that describe authors,
derivation sources, target audiences, support contacts,
etc. The outcome should provide standard ways to interoperably
describe actors and various key relationships they may have
to information objects. This NSF award is complemented by
a similar award from the European DELOS Network of Excellence
for Digital Libraries. The two funded groups will jointly
draft a whitepaper that is to be the tangible deliverable
of this effort. The American coordinator is John Kunze (CDL
and UCSF) and the European coordinator is Jose' Borbinha
(National Library of Portugal).
5. Request Update
UC's long awaited Consortial Borrowing System (CBS), which uses Virtual Document Exchange (VDX) software from Fretwell-Downing, to combine workflows for filling interlibrary loan requests, provide patrons with new features such as the ability to check the status of requests, and facilitate desktop delivery of non-returnable items, is coming to your campus this year.In anticipation of the CBS and its important contributions to resource sharing, the Request project team has been expanded and additional liaisons have been named at each campus to support implementation and ongoing communication. In the last two months the Request Team has met several times with Fretwell-Downing to plan the installation, setup, and training for the VDX application. The team members have been collecting massive amounts of data to use in the initial setup of the system. This application, to be implemented on a central computer at the CDL with participation by all campus ILL units, has been installed and is expected to be available for use by UCLA and UCSD in the next several weeks.
The CBS is to be implemented in three stages. In the first stage the CBS will be implemented at UCSD and UCLA. In the second stage, UCB and all of the campuses with Innovative Interfaces systems will be implemented. The third stage will extend the CBS use to UCSB and UCD. Beginning dates for stages two and three are not yet firm. Training for ILL staff at UCSD and UCLA has begun. The two training sessions (one in the north and one in the south) for group two campuses (UCB, UCI, UCR, UCSC, and USCF) will be scheduled soon.
Claire Bellanti (Chair of the Desktop Delivery Subcommittee) reports that both Minolta and RLG are working on programming to make Ariel version 3.01 communicate with the scanners that campuses have purchased. It is expected that these upgrades will be available to us in March. RSC-IAG has prepared policy and procedural recommendations for RSC discussion. These recommendations will help campuses provide consistent Desktop Delivery Service when the software is ready.
For information and updates on CBS implementation, liaisons,
and time lines, please make occasional visits to the Request
web site (http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/pir/).
A VDX questions and answers document can be found at this
site.
6. Instruction Workshops Report
About 160 UC librarians brainstormed, reflected, and learned to insert active learning into library classes over four days in January and February. The instructional workshops were led by Debra Gilchrist, Director, Pierce College, in the Seattle-Tacoma area of Washington State and Susan Barnes Whyte, Director of Linfield College Library, outside of Portland, Oregon. Both workshop leaders are also faculty at the annual ACRL Institute for Information Literacy Immersion Program, which several UC librarians have attended. The workshops were held on January 31 and February 1 at Preservation Park in Oakland, and February 4 and 5 at UC Irvine.Attendees departed the workshop having had active learning techniques modeled throughout the day, and as reflected in their evaluations, many apparently left determined to change the way they teach. But the workshops were not all serious business-the instructors, following the model of the design company, IDEO, which they visited last summer, brought toys to play with during a brainstorming session (or rapid prototyping, in IDEO lingo) to help release participants' brains to generate more creative ideas.
A website has been created that has additional materials
to those in the packets distributed at the workshop, and
where information generated by the workshop participants
will be added shortly.
http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/education/instructionworkshop.html
7. New Status of Services Page
CDL has recently implemented a set of "status of services" pages that informs library staff of downtime, outages and related information for both CDL systems and for vendor systems of CDL-licensed resources. The URL is http://www.cdlib.org/status/ (and is also linked to from http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/).The highlight of this set of pages is a browseable, searchable
archive of CDLALERT-L. This archive contains all postings
since early November 2001. You may choose to continue to
receive CDLALERT-L via email or, alternatively, choose to
browse this online archive.
8. Library Staff News
a. Jon Solomon Joins Melvyl-T Team
Jon Solomon is the newest addition to the Melvyl-T User Interface team. Jon, head of technical processing at the UCB Business Library, will contribute three days each week (Tuesday - Thursday) for the next 2-3 months on the Melvyl transition team. Jon will work as an html programmer on the myriad interface screens that are being created for the Melvyl-T Catalog.
9. 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
To subscribe for email distribution: Please send the following line to listserv@listserv.ucop.edu: SUBSCRIBE CDLINFO-L (your name)
CDLINFO is also published on the web at http://www.cdlib.org/news/cdlinfo/
Frequency of publication: Biweekly, or as new information warrants.
Communicating with the Listserv: While the CDL Listserv does not accept submissions, subscribers are encouraged to send suggestions, thoughts, and comments on material in the Listserv or on related issues to the CDL at cdl@www.cdlib.org.