CDLINFO Newsletter, October 12, 2006, Vol. 9, No. 17
CONTENTS
- UC Campuses Awarded IMLS Grants
- Librarian Toolkits for Scholarly Communication
- Release 1 of the Web Archiving Service
- National Science Foundation Grant Final Report
- Library Staff News
- Welcome Library Data Analyst Chan Li
1. UC Campuses Awarded IMLS Grants
UC Berkeley and UC Irvine were recently awarded leadership grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to build digital resources and conduct research projects. Read about their grant projects at: http://www.imls.gov/news/2006/092606_list.shtm#CA
2. Librarian Toolkits for Scholarly Communication
This summer the Scholarly Communications Officers completed work on three toolkits to help librarians when discussing scholarly communication issues with faculty and each other. One toolkit deals with the economic issues surrounding scholarly communication, a second deals with the role of scholarly societies in helping to improve scholarly communication, and the third deals with copyright issues associated with research publications. Each includes talking points for faculty discussion and ways that faculty can take action. Pointers to resources and reusable handouts are also included. Links to the tool kits can be found at: http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/scholarly/
The SCO group is hoping these will be helpful to the entire UC library community as we discuss these complex topics with our faculty. So please take a look and let your SCO representative (see below) know if there is content missing, other toolkits you would like to see, or other ways in which the SCO group can assist librarians in understanding these issues. SCO meets quarterly and is constantly monitoring and discussing ways to improve communication about these and related issues.
UC Berkeley - Margaret Phillips
UC Davis - Gail Yokote
UC Irvine - Lorelei Tanji
UC Los Angeles - Cindy Shelton
UC Merced - Donald Barclay
UC Riverside - Emily Stambaugh
UC San Diego - Susan Starr
UC San Francisco - Gail Persily
UC Santa Barbara - Brad Eden
UC Santa Cruz - Beth Remak-Honnef
CDL - Catherine Candee
CDL - John Ober
LAUC Representative - Janet Carter
3. Release 1 of the Web Archiving Service
The Web-at-Risk, a CDL Digital Preservation Group project, achieved a major milestone with Release 1 of the Web Archiving Service (WAS) to a pilot group of project curators. Development of the WAS marks a crucial step in enabling the libraries to extend their historic collection building role in a web-published world. The Web-at-Risk is three-year effort led by the CDL with the goal of building tools that will enable librarians and archivists to capture, curate and preserve web-based government and political information. The primary collection building focus is federal, state, and local government information, but may include web documents from non-profit and international government sources and also policy documents, campaign literature, and information surrounding local political movements.
The “at-risk” designation refers both to the ephemeral nature of web resources in general and to the particularly unstable nature of government and political resources. Critical publications that libraries once collected in print are now often only available on the web and are vulnerable to disappearing as sites are updated, as government agencies themselves are reorganized or as older file formats become unusable. As the scale of this problem expands with the growth of the web, librarians need a new suite of tools to fulfill their historic mission to preserve our cultural and political heritage.
Currently the UC libraries are unable to continue their historic mission of collection building since many important items are fleetingly available only on the web. The Web Archiving Service will fill that gap and allow libraries to continue to collect, manage, and preserve content that is crucial to the research, learning, and teaching at UC. Users of the Web Archiving Service will identify a URL that they are interested in collecting, crawl the content, and put it in the Digital Preservation Repository for safe keeping.
The Web Archiving Service will be released to the pilot group of curators in several stages between July 2006 and December 2007. Each phase integrates a new area of functionality; this approach allows developers to divide an ambitious project into smaller, feasible segments. The service will be operational in December 2007.
This project is one of eight grants awarded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP). This work is undertaken by the CDL and its partners, New York University and the University of North Texas, with additional support from Stanford University, the San Diego Supercomputing Center, the Arizona State Library and the Library of Congress. The UC libraries are also involved in the project, with staff contributing expertise from UC campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz.
For more information about the project see:
The Web-at-Risk Wiki: http://wiki.cdlib.org/WebAtRisk/tiki-index.php
California Digital Library Digital Preservation Program: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/preservation/
4. National Science Foundation Grant Final Report
The California Digital Library was awarded a National Science Foundation grant in 2003 to build on and enhance the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). The work has been completed, and the final report is available at: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/nsdl/
Heather Christenson managed the project, which involved a number of CDL staff.
5. Library Staff News
a. Welcome Library Data Analyst Chan Li
Chan Li has accepted the position of Library Data Analyst in the CDL Collections Licensed Content Group beginning Monday, October 9. Ms. Li has a Masters Degree in Library and Information Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Bachelor of Arts in French from Beijing Foreign Studies University. She has completed internships at the Norris Medical Library, University of Southern California, the Rosenfeld Management Library and the Louise Darling Biomedical Library, UCLA, the Editorial Library at the Los Angeles Times, and the National Library of China. Chan comes to us with excellent preparation in both bibliographic and data analysis. During her internship at the Norris Medical Library, Chan created web tutorials on ISI Impact Factors and the Medline Citation Matcher. While at the Los Angeles Times Chan used MySQL to sample and perform data analysis on more than 1,100 JPEGs as part of a 285,000 object migration of the newspaper’s historic photojournalism collection.
At CDL, Chan will be working on vendor usage statistics compilation and other data analysis and research projects supporting licensed digital collections, shared print collections, scholarly communications, and related activities. Please join the CDL in welcoming Chan Li to the University of California Libraries.
Subscription information for the CDLINFO newsletter is available at: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/news/cdlinfo/