CDLINFO LISTSERV, April 26, 2001, Vol.4, No.7
CONTENTS
- Melvyl® Union Catalog and Database Transitions
- Melvyl® Catalog Libstaff Web Site
- MEDLINE Timeline (Alison Bunting, UCLA)
- CDL-Hosted Databases Test Accounts Reminder
- New Resource Available
- The Ethnic NewsWatch: A History
- IEEE Journal-level Links (Camille Wanat, UCB)
- eBook Task Force Final Report Complete
- Library Staff News
- California Cultures Project Manager
- For More Information
- CDL News
- Contacts for Questions or Problems
- Information about CDLINFO
1. Melvyl® Union Catalog and Database Transitions
a. Melvyl® Catalog Libstaff Web Site
A Melvyl Catalog Transition web site containing information of interest to library staff is now available [http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/catalog/]. Regular updates on the implementation process and progress will be available from this site.b. MEDLINE Timeline (Alison Bunting, UCLA)
The conversion of MEDLINE/HealthSTAR to PubMed is on a different timeline than that of the other CDL-hosted Databases:
- July 2001: A test version of PubMed (with enhancements for University of California users) is scheduled to be available
- Fall 2001: Version ready for promotion to UC users
- December 2001: Discontinue MEDLINE/HealthSTAR in favor of PubMed
The UC enhancements will include:
- Links to UC library holdings
- Links via PubMed's LinkOut service to full-text content licensed by UC campuses
- A link to Request that allows UC faculty, staff, and students to request copies of articles not available at their home campus
Standard PubMed is currently available for searching from the National Library of Medicine [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/].
MEDLINE/PubMed Background
UC health sciences librarians were aware that many UC faculty and graduate students were using the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) PubMed system. PubMed offers a number of special features that are not available in MEDLINE/Health STAR (e.g., links to databases of proteins, genomes, structures, and nucleotides; access to the most recent citations (PREMEDLINE); the ability to find "related articles" with a click of a button). PubMed also remains freely available to students once they graduate.
The UC health sciences librarians felt that these factors were sufficient to demand a more thorough study of the feasibility/desirability of migrating from the CDL-hosted MEDLINE/HealthSTAR to PubMed. In addition, extensive changes by NLM to the MEDLINE format meant that CDL would have to completely rewrite all programs to be able to continue to load the database. The results of their analysis confirmed the desirability of moving to PubMed.
A task force, chaired by Resource Liaison Janice Contini (UCLA), was appointed to work with CDL, NLM, and the campuses to provide enhancements to UC users. For more information on this aspect, see http://www.cdlib.org/inside/instruct/medlinechanges.rtf.
c. CDL-Hosted Databases Test Accounts Reminder
Test accounts for potential vendor replacements for the CDL-hosted Databases are now available [http://www.cdlib.org/about/test-accounts.html].We would appreciate if you could take the time to review the databases in your area of interest and give us feedback through the online survey that we have created.
We also do encourage library staff to get feedback from faculty and students through targeted efforts. NOTE: The test accounts can be complex so faculty and students might need to be walked through the process, especially in the cases where there are complex URLs and passwords
Comments received by May 4, 2001 will be the most useful; the A&I Transition Steering Committee (TSC) will be meeting May 7 to begin to formulate their recommendations based on a variety of input, including the survey results.
Some tests will go beyond the May 4 deadline, for a list of expiration dates, see [http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/protected/accounts.html]
2. New Resource Available
a. The Ethnic NewsWatch: A History
The Ethnic NewsWatch: A History, licensed in fall 2000 (see CDLINFO Vol.3, No.12 http://www.cdlib.org/news/cdlinfo/cdlinfo090600.html#1) is now offering its first release of content, covering the years 1975-1989. The Ethnic NewsWatch: A History will eventually extend its coverage back to 1969 and is scheduled to be completed in winter 2003.This full-text historical file will eventually include coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and protests, campus unrest and radical politics, the assassinations of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Roe v. Wade, Johnson's Great Society, the impact of Reaganomics on ethnic and minority communities, growth and power of corporations and the seeds of globalization, immigration issues, and more.
As with all Ethnic NewsWatch material, every title is fully indexed and includes the full-text of newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press.
NOTE: To access the historical file, go to the Ethnic NewsWatch search page and select "History" before entering your search terms.
The Resource Liaison for Ethnic NewsWatch is Dan Tsang, UC Irvine.
3. IEEE Journal-level Links (Camille Wanat, UCB)
If you've searched for IEEE journals or magazines lately in either the CDL Directory or any of the CDL-hosted databases, you will have noticed a recent and positive change--direct journal-level links for these titles have been added.In the CDL Directory, a search for any IEEE journal or magazine now leads to a direct link on the IEEE Xplore system from which the user can choose the appropriate year, volume, and issue of the journal. This employs the persistent identifiers supplied by CDL's Shared Cataloging Program. [Previously, the user was instructed to follow a more convoluted route of searching INSPEC for the desired article or journal title in order to find article level links. This was the best we could do at the time, but neither direct nor necessarily what the user wanted.] Journal level links also provide access to recent issues of journal titles before article level links to that issue appear in INSPEC.
In a similar vein, these persistent identifiers have been used to create journal-level links in all of the CDL-hosted databases that include IEEE journals and magazines, such as INSPEC, Current Contents, MAGS, COMP, and ABI Inform. Previously, the only links were the article-level links within INSPEC, since unfortunately, IEEE has not been able to provide us with the information to provide article-level links for their publications except via the INSPEC records. Using the persistent identifiers to provide journal-level links has extended connections to full-text for these journals to all the other CDL-hosted databases in which they appear.
4. eBook Task Force Final Report Complete
CDL Joint Steering Committee on Shared Collections (JSC) eBook Task Force's final report on the emerging eBook market and its implications has been completed. The Task Force members included Lucia Snowhill (JSC, Chair), Karen Coyle (CDL), Mary Engle (CDL), Anna Gold (SD), Rosalie Lack (CDL), and Milt Ternberg (UCB).The report is available at http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/jsc/ebook/.
5. Library Staff News
a. California Cultures Project Manager
Genie Guerard of the UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library has agreed to serve as overall Project Manager for the Online Archive of California (OAC) virtual archives project California Cultures.California Cultures will draw on the extraordinarily rich resources across the libraries and museums of the University of California to create a "virtual" digital collection at CDL's Online Archive of California (OAC) http://www.oac.cdlib.org . This project will build an online research collection of primary resources comprised of approximately 18,000 digital images and 13,000 pages of electronic text available to students, teachers, scholars and the general public to serve as the basis for historical studies, analysis, interpretation and application to current events. Additionally, these resources will enhance the growing collections in the Library of Congress American Memory Project.
Genie Guerard is the Digital Manuscripts Librarian for the UCLA Department of Special Collections. Previously she coordinated the UCLA Libraries encoded archival description (EAD) finding aid program that formed a major component of the UC-EAD Project, the founding effort of the OAC database. Genie holds a graduate degree in Library and Information Science from UCLA--where she participated in a research project analyzing the functionality of Getty's online searchable databases--and an undergraduate degree in fine arts.
6. 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.
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