CDLINFO Newsletter, August 26, 2004 Vol. 7, No. 15
CONTENTS
- Assessment Reports Now Available
- New Resources Available
- Vanderbilt Television News Archives
- Proquest American Drama and 20th Century Drama
- Current Contents to be Cancelled
- For More Information
- News and Publications
- Contacts for Questions or Problems
- About CDLINFO
1. Assessment Reports Now Available
How do our users conduct their research? What tools do they currently use and what are they lacking? What tools do librarians and teachers find their users want?
Interviews were conducted with a variety of groups to answer these questions for three metasearch infrastructure projects: Documenting the American West, the Core Collection, and the National Science Digital Library.
Those queried in structured interviews or focus groups included: UC undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and librarians; California public school librarians and teachers; private, community, and state college librarians; and public librarians and teachers in Colorado. For more information on the metasearch needs assessment project, see the March 11, 2004 CDLINFO: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/news/cdlinfo/cdlinfo031104.html#7
The summary reports are available on the metasearch infrastructure project page under "Needs Assessment Activities" at: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/
These reports may be of special interest to public services librarians and staff, and those involved in the creation of tools to support user needs in the digital library world.
2. New Resources Available
a. Vanderbilt Television News Archives
By Gary Handman (UC Berkeley), Resource LiaisonOver the course of the last half century, television has become thoroughly integrated into the cultural and political life of the global village. Yet despite the increasing significance of television as a form of 21st century history and primary "text," resources for researching and obtaining access to broadcast news programming have been scarce.
With the recent addition of the Vanderbilt Television News Archives to the roster of CDL resources, UC library users consequently have great reason to rejoice. Five campuses are participating in the subscription: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, and UC San Diego.
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive (http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu) is the world's most extensive archive of network television news, containing more than 30,000 individual broadcasts from ABC, CBS, and NBC, captured and preserved since 1968, and selected CNN news from 1995. The archive also contains more than 9,000 hours of news-related special programming covering presidential press conferences and political campaigns, and momentous national and international events, such as 9/11.
Material in the archive can be identified by searching Vanderbilt's TV-News Search Database, which currently comprises 725,000 story-level records. Records for regular news stories include abstracts, anchor name, and story running time. Records for special news programs provide catalog-level description only. Materials in the Vanderbilt collection may borrowed for a fee (individual news selections or compilations of selections are duplicated and loaned on demand). Selected broadcasts from CNN are also available as streamed video (for RealPlayer).
b. Proquest American Drama and 20th Century Drama
By Rob Melton (UC San Diego), Resource LiaisonThe CDL has been working to provide access to high-quality digital content in the humanities disciplines. Just within the last 18 months, a dramatic increase in the amount of drama full text has become available due to successful CDL negotiations.
Earlier this summer, the CDL announced that it had successfully negotiated a contract with ProQuest for perpetual rights to two of its new full-text collections (both of them part of the broader database Literature Online). These are American Drama 1714-1915 and 20th Century Drama.
American Drama (http://uclibs.org/PID/11558) includes 1,100 texts either first published or performed from 1714 to the early 20th century, offering coverage of American dramatic writing in all its diversity, from 18th century dialogues and rhetorical exercises on moral or political themes, to plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, naturalist and realist plays, frontier plays, and temperance dialogues.
Frequently-studied plays by major dramatists are placed in the context provided by the dramatic writings of lesser known contemporaries and canonical authors not primarily remembered for their dramatic works, such as Louisa May Alcott and Emma Lazarus. The database can be searched by date of publication, date of first performance, place of performance, sub-genre (e.g., pantomime or temperance play), publisher, and the gender, ethnicity, and national origin of the playwrights. In addition, texts are fully keyword-searchable.
Similarly, 20th Century Drama (http://collections.chadwyck.com/html/20drama/about.htm) will contain, when complete, 2,500 published plays from throughout the English-speaking world, covering the history of modern drama from the 1890s to the present day. Currently, 238 plays by 25 authors from Britain, Ireland, and Australia are available, chiefly from the period of 1890 to 1920.
The full range of dramatic styles, genres and traditions will be represented, from widely studied and frequently performed plays to important examples of radical theater, regional theater, postcolonial theater, women's theater, and popular forms such as farce and thriller that are often under-represented in surveys of the period.
The majority of these plays are still under copyright, and are available online in this collection for the first time. Each text is reproduced in full, including any accompanying text by the author, plus relevant supplementary matter such as dramatis personae and any illustrations that are integral to the text. Because of the licensing agreements, there are some restrictions on printing and downloading texts.
All campuses will have access to the new drama collections.
3. Current Contents to be Cancelled
This is a reminder that Current Contents via Ovid will be cancelled as of January 1, 2005.
The CDL will send a series of three reminders to UC patrons who currently have CC Alerts on October, November, and December 1. We will also send the campus list to the campus Users Council members so that campus library representatives can contact their CC Alerts holders, if desired.
From this point forward, it's highly desirable to steer users to create new Alerts in Web of Science, while discouraging them from creating Alerts in Ovid's Current Contents database.
Some campuses, such as UCLA, have already begun posting notices that Current Contents via Ovid will be cancelled. From http://eresources.library.ucla.edu/ select "Search article database titles" for "Current Contents" and hit "Enter" or "Go". You will see a notice that says, "To be cancelled January, 2005. Read why."
There is also information on an interim page for users entering Current Contents via the CDL Directory: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/collect/deselection_faq.html#cancellation
Information on setting up Alerts in Web of Science: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/instruct/WoKAlerts1.doc
More information on the Ovid Current Contents cancellation: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/collect/deselection_faq.html#cancellation
4. 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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