CDLINFO Newsletter, March 11, 2004 Vol. 7, No. 5
CONTENTS
- Counting California Wins the 2004 Documents to the People Award
- New Resource Available
- CrossFire
- Kluwer Online Journals: Feature Changes and Enhancements
- Reed-Elsevier: Title Lists Available
- ILL Requests for Electronic Resources Now Available Through UC-eLinks
- UC's eScholarship Repository Adds Peer-Reviewed Publications
- Metasearch Infrastructure: User Needs Assessment Activities
- ProQuest User Interface Trial
- For More Information
- News and Publications
- Contacts for Questions or Problems
- About CDLINFO
1. Counting California Wins the 2004 Documents to the People Award
The American Library Association (ALA) Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) awarded Counting California the 2004 Documents to the People Award. Counting California can be accessed at: http://countingcalifornia.cdlib.org
The award recognizes individuals and institutions who have encouraged the use of government documents in library service. Susan Tulis, chair of the GODORT awards committee, called Counting California "a significant, innovative, and usable database" that "serves an important role by preserving statistical data in electronic format."
Congratulations to all those involved in the development of Counting California: Patricia Cruse (CDL), Ilona Einowski (UC Berkeley), Fred Gey (UC Berkeley), Juri Stratford (UC Davis), Margaret Low (CDL), Michael A. Russell (CDL), Claudia Woo (CDL), and Marcia Fanshier (formerly of CDL).
The award will be presented at the ALA Annual Conference in Orlando on June 28.
2. New Resource Available
a. CrossFire
By Chuck Huber (UC Santa Barbara), Resource LiaisonStarting in February, the UC has had systemwide access to CrossFire, a chemistry database system from MDL, Inc., a division of Reed-Elsevier. Previously, several UC campuses had subscribed to part or all of the CrossFire databases through the Minerva consortium based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Now, all UC campuses have access through a new academic server based at MDL, Inc.
CrossFire permits quick and powerful searching by text terms, numeric data, and chemical structures of two of the world's largest databases of chemical information, the Beilstein database and the Gmelin database.
The Beilstein database of organic chemistry includes records from the mid-1800's to the present, for more than 8.8 million substances, 9 million reactions, and titles and abstracts for about 2 million documents (since 1980) in organic chemistry.
The Gmelin database of inorganic and organometallic chemistry includes 1.6 million compounds and 1.3 million reactions from 1772 to the present, and 900,000 citations, including titles and abstracts from 1995 to the present.
CrossFire is a client-server system. UC users may download the client software and find installation instructions for each campus at: http://software.chem.ucla.edu/crossfire/
Questions about CrossFire should be directed to the campus contacts, listed at: http://software.chem.ucla.edu/crossfire/uccontacts.html
Kluwer Online Journals: Feature Changes and Enhancements
By Julia Gelfand (UC Irvine), Resource LiaisonKluwer has just finished rolling out feature changes and enhancements to the Kluwer Online Journals platform at http://journals.kluweronline.com/.
Some additional features added to the journals site include:
- Outbound reference linking via CrossRef for new articles
- Downloadable citations in both text and RIS formats
- Enhanced search capabilities
- New, more intuitive navigation
- Cleaner and clearer graphic interface
- Immediate display of journal access via your account
These changes should not affect any of your subscriptions. Kluwer has done testing to ensure that our access will not be interrupted while they make these enhancements to our collection of more than 750 current and archived journals. However, if you experience continual or repeated access problems, please contact me, Julia Gelfand, at jgelfand@uci.edu or (949) 824-4971.
4. Reed-Elsevier: Title Lists Available
Effective January 1, 2004, the UC community has had access to a selected list of approximately 1,200 of Reed-Elsevier's scholarly journals, including titles produced by Harcourt Health Sciences, Academic Press, and Cell Press.
The Reed-Elsevier titles and their status in the 2004 contract are now publicly available at: http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/elsevier_journals.html
The title lists show current titles with the UC subscriptions status for 2004, the titles available in UC's 2004 contract, and the titles absent in UC's 2004 contract.
5. ILL Requests for Electronic Resources Now Available Through UC-eLinks
The Systemwide Operations and Planning Advisory Group (SOPAG) has approved a recommendation from the Resource Sharing Committee (RSC) that interlibrary loan (ILL) requests for items with electronic copy no longer be blocked. The CDL implemented this recommendation on Monday, March 8.
The primary modification was to remove the block in UC-eLinks. This means that a UC-eLinks user will, when appropriate, see a screen that has both a link to electronic text as well as a link to Request. The link to electronic text will appear first in the list, and the link to Request will be the second or third link on the screen. This change will prevent the situation in which a user clicking on an electronic copy link receives a response that the item is not available but is given no option for initiating an ILL request.
The RSC recommended this change because it is now impossible for the CDL to detect how complete the electronic copy is -- it may just be an extract rather than the whole document. There is frequently "missing content" as well. This causes confusion to the user and means that many valid requests are blocked. Statistics for UC-eLinks indicate that users overwhelmingly choose full text links when they are present, so there is unlikely to be a large increase in ILL requests as a result of this change.
6. UC's eScholarship Repository Adds Peer-Reviewed Publications
University of California faculty can now use the eScholarship Repository to provide free, open access to peer-reviewed series and journals online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/peer_review_list.html.
The eScholarship Repository's new peer-review capability provides UC faculty with several benefits. By publishing a journal or peer-reviewed series in the eScholarship Repository, faculty can automate and speed up the review and publication process, and publish associated content alongside articles. In addition, the Repository provides faculty with an alternative to publishing their research in for-profit journals.
The first peer-reviewed journal in the eScholarship Repository is San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, published by the John Muir Institute of the Environment at UC Davis. It joins other peer-reviewed materials in the eScholarship Repository, including papers and edited volumes from the UC International and Area Studies Digital Collection.
The CDL expects the number of peer-reviewed papers and journals to grow substantially in coming months, with the addition of scientific monographs and other content from the University of California Press, as well as new journals sponsored by departments at several UC campuses, including InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. Additionally, Comitatus, a 34-year-old journal sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, will be migrating to the eScholarship Repository this spring.
For information about how UC departments, centers, and research units can join the eScholarship Repository, go to: http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/join.html
See the press release announcement at: http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/eScholarship_peer_review_journals_3-9-04.pdf
7. Metasearch Infrastructure: User Needs Assessment Activities
This spring, the CDL will conduct a user needs assessment of three projects that will make use of the Metasearch Infrastructure -- the Core Collection, Documenting the American West, and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) projects.
The needs assessment has been designed to help the project designers understand current usage patterns and user needs, discover similarities and differences across a variety of audiences, find out which features users find most valuable, and identify any unmet user needs and/or opportunities for improvement in the current environment.
The Core Collection is a tool that will help undergraduates and those outside their area of expertise search across a few core databases in order to see a broad overview of a topic. The needs assessment will focus primarily on undergraduates. Interviews will be conducted at UC Berkeley.
Documenting the American West is a two-year project funded by the Hewlett Foundation to create, design, assemble, and evaluate the use of a large virtual collection of digital materials bearing on the social and ecological diversity of the American West. The partners on this project are the Library of Congress, Harvard University libraries, Indiana University library, University of Michigan libraries, University of Virginia library, Interactive University, UC Berkeley, UCLA Consortium on Instructional Technology, the University of Washington libraries, and the Colorado Digitalization Project.
The primary audiences for this grant are university faculty and researchers, community college faculty, academic librarians, public librarians, and the K-12 community. The CDL is responsible for interviews with UC faculty and graduate students, community college faculty, and academic librarians. The needs assessment will focus on the areas of the humanities and social sciences, but there will also be some science participants. The Colorado Digital Project (http://www.cdpheritage.org/) will be responsible for the needs assessment for public librarians and the K-12 community.
The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project is funded by a two-year National Science Foundation grant to build on and enhance the NSDL (www.nsdl.org). The project has two strands: a market research component and the construction of a science portal prototype. The target audiences are science librarians (at the UC, California State University, community colleges and private universities/colleges), and teachers and librarians for grades 9-12. Focus group sessions will be conducted in both the north and south.
A consultant has been hired with grant funds to conduct all participant sessions, analyze the results, and create summary reports. CDL staff are responsible for all participant recruitments, and we would appreciate any help in finding participants. If you are interested in participating or have recruitment ideas, please contact Rosalie Lack at rosalie.lack@ucop.edu.
For background information on the Metasearch Infrastructure project, see the project site at: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/; also see the CDLINFO article from the November 13, 2003 Vol.6 No. 19 issue at: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/news/cdlinfo/cdlinfo111303.html#2
8. ProQuest User Interface Trial
The UC was one of only a handful of institutions selected to evaluate a new interface and search features being developed by ProQuest. UC librarians voiced their opinions via an online survey and several conference calls. On the UC Irvine campus, students were able to use the trial on public terminals and provide feedback via the online survey. Thanks to UC's active participation, the interface and features have evolved as the trial has gone on, with positive results. ProQuest plans to roll out the new version sometime in mid-July.
Many thanks to Steve MacLeod at UC Irvine, who coordinated efforts on the campus, and to the Resource Liaisons and librarians who were active participants: Judy Ruttenberg, Pauline Manaka, Harold Gee, and Joan Ariel.
9. For More Information
a. News and Publications
News and events, press releases, reports and guidelines, and articles published by CDL staff are posted on the CDL web site. Please share news of this resource with your colleagues!
In addition, status information about CDL resources, reports, and working documents of particular interest to library staff are available on the Inside CDL web site.
b. Contacts for Questions or Problems
If you have problems accessing CDL resources or have questions, including questions about the status of electronic journal collections and Internet resources, contact the CDL:- 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.
- Or, send an email to cdl@www.cdlib.org.
For information about whether your UC campus has access to a particular electronic journal or Internet resource, contact your local collection development officer.
c. About CDLINFO
CDLINFO informs UC librarians and the UC community about the progress of the CDL, policy issues under discussion, and newly available electronic resources. Please share selected information from this newsletter with faculty, staff, and students on the campuses.
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