CDLINFO Newsletter, October 13, 2005, Vol. 8, No. 19
CONTENTS
- CDL Receives Grant for Melvyl Catalog Recommender Project
- UC Libraries Partner With Technology Companies and Non-Profits to Provide Free Public Access to Digital Books
- New CDL Resource Liaisons
- Updated versions of OAC and eScholarship Editions
- For More Information
- News and Publications
- Contacts for Questions or Problems
- About CDLINFO
1. CDL Receives Grant for Melvyl Catalog Recommender Project
What if your library catalog was smart enough to offer good recommendations? The Melvyl Catalog Recommender Project is an experimental research and prototyping project that is investigating a number of technical strategies for making online public access catalogs easier to use. Using records from the Melvyl Catalog as a test bed, the project will determine the feasibility of implementing a variety of user-friendly features in future catalogs.
Funding for the project has been provided by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The UCLA and UC Berkeley libraries, the Research Libraries Group, and the Online Computer Library Center have supplied additional data. Learn more about the project on the Inside CDL web site at <http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/melvyl_recommender/index.html>.
2. UC Libraries Partner With Technology Companies and Non-Profits to Provide Free Public Access to Digital Books
The University of California libraries are participating in a new partnership to build a freely accessible digital library with materials drawn from across the world.
The UC libraries will contribute books and resources in order to build a collection of out-of-copyright American literature. With the support of Yahoo! Inc., UC library books will be digitized by the Internet Archive using a new technology that scans books at the cost of 10 cents per page.
The materials will be available from <http://opencontentalliance.org/>, the website of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a global consortium that will build and openly distribute a comprehensive set of digitized print and multimedia content.
The OCA's founding contributors also include the University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives (UK), O'Reilly Media, Inc., Adobe, and Hewlett Packard Labs.
3. New CDL Resource Liaisons
The CDL is pleased to announce the appointment of the following CDL Resource Liaisons:
ArtBibliographies Modern (Tier 2) -- Krista Ivy, UC Riverside
Bibliography of the History of Art -- Susan Jurist, UC San Diego
Contemporary Women's Issues -- Sherri Barnes, UC Santa Barbara
18th Century Online (ECCO) -- Michaelyn Burnette, UC Berkeley
Film Index International -- Lisa Kernan, UCLA
Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Database -- Gary Colmenar, UC Santa Barbara
GenderWatch -- Dan Tsang, UC Irvine
Gerritsen Collection: Women's History Online -- Sylvia Hu, UC Riverside
Index to 19th Century American Art Periodicals -- Susan Jurist, UC San Diego
International Film Archive (FIAF) -- Gary Handman, UC Berkeley
International Index to Music Periodicals -- Liza Vick, UC Irvine
Music Index (Tier 2) -- Paul Machlis, UC Santa Cruz
PAIS International -- Marcia Meister, UC Davis
SCIPIO: Art and Rare Book Sales Catalogs -- Susan Jurist, UC San Diego
Women & Social Movements - Jane Faulkner, UC Santa Barbara
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts -- Roberta Medford, UCLA
Each Resource Liaison serves as UC's "resident expert" on one or more of our systemwide licensed resources, providing information on vendor performance and resource content to the CDL. The Resource Liaison is also responsible for sharing information and soliciting opinions from colleagues regarding their assigned resource.
A full list of CDL Resource Liaisons can be found at <http://www.cdlib.org/inside/groups/rl/roster.html>
4. Updated versions of OAC and eScholarship Editions
Last week the CDL released updated versions of the Online Archive of California (OAC) <http://www.oac.cdlib.org/> and eScholarship Editions <http://content.cdlib.org/escholarship/>.
The eScholarship Editions home page provides more visible access to various browse options. Most of the other noticeable interface changes were implemented to improve consistency across the services.
The scope of the migration primarily affected the software that powers the web sites; image search results and object views now use CDL's eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) platform <http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/xtf/>. All dynamic pages on both sites are now served up via XTF. Other back-end improvements include refactoring the presentation layer to be able to better support interface customization and adding the ability to emulate the legacy search syntax.
Congratulations and thanks to all staff who made this transition successful.
5. 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.
Eligible subscribers: UC library employees
To subscribe for email distribution: Send an email to listserv@listserv.ucop.edu with the following line as the body of the message, where FirstName LastName is your name: SUBSCRIBE CDLINFO-L FirstName LastName
Frequency of publication: Biweekly, or as new information warrants. CDLINFO is also published on the Inside CDL news and events page.
Submissions: For information about submitting to CDLINFO, see the submission deadlines. Email articles to Robin.Davis-White@ucop.edu.
Communicating with the listserv: While the CDL listserv does not accept emails, subscribers are encouraged to send suggestions, thoughts, and comments to the CDL at cdl@www.cdlib.org.