CONTENTS
- New Resources Available via the CDL Directory
- Academic Universe Changes (Linda Kennedy, Resource Liaison for Academic Universe)
- BIOSIS Regeneration is Complete
- Online Archive of California -- New Support via Grants from LSTA, IMLS
- Licensing Tool Kit Available
- JSC Expanded Meeting
- Campus-based Entryways into the CDL Directory
- For More Information
1. New Resources Available via the CDL Directory
a. Contemporary Women's Issues (CWI)
[http://www.cwidb.com/cgi-bin/login.exe?login=&password=&product=4]This English-language resource, produced by Responsive Database Services, Inc., provides full-text access to global information on women. Journals, newsletters, and research reports from non-profit groups, government, and international agencies are easily accessed through CWI. Information on women in over 190 countries is compiled in a single collection of disciplines such as sociology, psychology, health, education, business administration, and political science.
Contemporary Women's Issues focuses on timely and relevant topics and issues such as Development, Human Rights, The Workplace, Violence & Exploitation, Education, Politics, Family Life, Pay equity, Legal Status, Lesbian Concerns, Health, Gender equity, and Reproductive Rights.
b. Poole's Plus: The Digital Index of the Nineteenth Century
[http://www.poolesplus.net/index2.html]Poole's Plus is the enhanced Web edition of William Frederick Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, which indexes books, newspapers, periodicals, and government documents on the 19th Century. Eventually, the scope of the coverage will include data from the early 17th through early 20th Century.
This resource contains, for the most part, subject indices. However, Paratext is adding important bibliographic data (e.g., the inclusion of date and full title information), as well as "converting" the index data into MARC-like form. Poole's Plus uses a relevancy-ranking search engine to retrieve and display the results of search requests. There are five databases within Poole's Plus:
Series I: Multi-Title Periodical Indices: Poole's Index to Periodical Literature (1802-1906) includes
- Index to Periodicals (1890-1902)(Ed.William T. Stead)
- Cumulative Index to a Selected List of Periodicals.(1896-1903)
- Nineteenth Century Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature (1890-1899)
- Index Medicus (1879-1927)
- Galloupe's General Index to Engineering Periodicals (1888-1893)
Series II: Books: 19th-Century Books File includes
- ALA Index to General Literature, Second Edition (1905)
- ALA Index to General Literature Supplement (1900-1910)
- ALA Portrait Index (1906)
- Cotgreave's A content-subject index to general and periodical literature (1900)
- An Index to Current Literature containing a reference to author and subject of every book in the English language and to articles in literature, science and art in serial publications (1859, 1860, 1861)
Series III: Newspapers includes
- New York Times Index (1851-1912)
- Palmer's Index to the Times of London (1790-1900)
- New York Herald Tribune Index (1835-1918)
- Daily tribune index (1875-1906)
- Maryland Gazette (1727-1839)
Series IV: Individual Title Periodical Indices includes
- Nature (1865-1880)
- Library Journal (1876-1897)
- Journal of the Franklin Institute (1826-1925)
- Harper's Magazine (1850-1892)
- Westminster Review (1824-1836; 1835-1840)
Series V: Government Documents includes
- Comprehensive index to the publications of the U.S. government (1881-1893)
- Descriptive catalogue of the government publications of the U. S. (1774-1881)
- Tables of and annotated index to the Congressional Series of US documents
- Subject matter index of patents for inventions issued by the U.S. Patent Office (1790-1873)
2. Academic Universe Changes (Linda Kennedy, Resource Liaison for Academic Universe)
On August 20, Academic Universe presented its new user interface. Although a few problems have been identified (some have been resolved by the vendor, and some require further work), the new interface significantly improves usability of the Academic Universe databases.Academic Universe is located at http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe. Six UC campuses subscribe: Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Barbara. Academic Universe is one of a suite of "Universe Services" operated by the Lexis-Nexis subsidiary Congressional Information Service (CIS). In the redesigned interface, the user can move, using frames, from one Universe product to the other. (Only the products to which the campus subscribes display.)
Speed
Lexis-Nexis improved search speed by removing a new searching option, the resource-intensive "More Like This" search. I would appreciate hearing (at lmkennedy@ucdavis.edu) if you have frequent problems with slowness (also notify Lexis-Nexis with specific examples).
Summary of Interface Changes
The previous twenty-plus Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe databases have been gathered under five main headings: News, Business, Legal Research, Medical, and Reference. You must search by specific database and subcategory, and cross-database searching is not available.
Source List
The Source link on each Academic Universe page takes you to a list of more than 5,000 titles. You can browse the list alphabetically, or search for a specific title. When you select a title, you can display date coverage or data format (full-text, selected full-text, or abstracts) and other information. You can also select "Search this Title," to determine where a specific title is located in Academic Universe. One of the most serious errors in the source list is the filing of titles by initial article (the T's are a very long list!). Lexis-Nexis has promised to remedy this problem.
Search Options
In addition to the "Basic Search," which searches headlines, titles, and authors, depending on the database, there is a sophisticated "More
Options" search, which allows you to search full-text and to limit a search to a specific title. The ability to FOCUS a search by adding additional search terms is retained in the new interface.
Search This Title
Searching for a specific article in a specific title has been simplified. You can search on the Source List for a specific title, and then click "search this title," which brings up the "More Options" search screen with the "Search this Publication Title" box already filled in. The "More Options" search screen has a "limit by title" box in most categories.
Display Options
Display your search results in one of four displays:
- a Document List of all citations;
- an Expanded List that shows the citation plus key words in brief context (3-5 words);
- a KWIC display that shows the key words title by title with 15-25 words of context; and
- a Full display that shows each document in full text, item by item.
Users may find the Expanded List the most useful display, because it provides enough information in a concise format to identify relevant citations.
Sorting
In the news and journal databases, the default sort is by reverse chronological order. In other databases, the default sort may be some other criterion. The results screen indicates "Sorted by Default" without a definition of the sort criterion. There is an option to "Sort by Relevance" in addition to "Sorted by Default."
Marking
The Document List and Expanded List displays allow you to mark boxes to select specific citations. You may then select the marked citations (citations only) for printing or e-mailing.
Print, Save, and E-mail Options
The new Print/Save and E-mail options are very user-friendly. Look for the Print/Save and E-mail tabs at the top of results display screens. You MAY print directly using the browser print button; but since the new interface contains a dark-colored left margin, you will save toner and print in fewer pages by using the Print/Save option for these functions.
Printing and mailing options for full text is a controversial issue on which I would appreciate feedback. While you can mark citations in the Document List and Expanded List displays to create a selected list of citations for printing, mailing, or downloading, you may only print, mail, or download full text items one by one. There is no way to send the full text of all of the items in a list in one operation. Academic Universe has received a great deal of comment via its listserver on the printing issue. Some believe users should be able to mail full text of all of the items in a list; others express concern that users will not realize how many pages they are printing, thus overusing limited printing resources and getting reams of material they don't need. A reasonable compromise is to allow libraries to configure the interface for their own institution -- to allow or not allow printing of full-text of complete lists, or to limit the number of pages that can be printed. Lexis-Nexis has not indicated whether the customizing option is feasible.
Help
Lexis-Nexis offers general help screens, but not context-specific help. New to this interface are a few examples of citing resources in MLA and APA citation styles (accessed through the Help button). Additional information on using Academic Universe may be found in the Factbook (see below). Lexis-Nexis Knowledge base is another informational site for Universe products at [http://support.lexis-nexis.com/] Subscribers may call a special customer assistance number: 1-800- 897-3419. This service is for library staff only, and you will need to know your campus account number.
Instructional assistance: The CIS web site at [http://www.cispubs.com] has links to various sources of information on Universe products. A revised Academic Universe Fact Book (a user guide and FAQ) can be viewed and downloaded from [http://www.lexis-nexis.com/cispubs/Catalog/Universe/Academic%20Universe/acadufactbk.pdf]
There is also a quick reference "Smart Card" [http://www.lexis-nexis.com/cispubs/Catalog/Universe/Academic%20Universe/smartcvard.pdf]
On-site training for library staff is available for UC library staff. To request campus training sessions contact dexter.evans@lexis-nexis.com.
The informative monthly product newsletters have been combined into a single publication. To subscribe, see the information at the end of this communication. The archive for the newsletters is located at [http://www.lexis-nexis.com/cispubs/Catalog/cis_universe_toc.htm].
To subscribe to the Combined newsletter for Academic, Congressional and Statistical Universes, send the following information to beth.bigman@lexis-nexis.com
Message Subject Line = Subscribe What's New Newsletter
Information to include:
Name
Title
Institution
Mailing Address
Phone
As the UC Resource Liaison for Academic Universe, I would appreciate receiving feedback on Academic Universe issues at lmkennedy@ucdavis.edu. Campus problems with slow response time, and opinions on the printing issues mentioned below are of special interest. Although Academic Universe content is not addressed in this update, I can relay comments about content to Academic Universe.
3. BIOSIS Regeneration is Complete
The regeneration of BIOSIS Previews for 1993 to the present inaugurates a very different database from the one with which users are familiar. In both Telnet and Web interfaces, there are new indexes and publication types, and some of the old indexes have been discontinued.New indexes include:
- Geographic index
- Geologic time index
- Mesh terms
- CAS registry numbers
In addition, a Taxonomic Group index gathers genus species, biosystematic names and supertaxa information into a single index.
Concept codes are not included in the new BIOSIS format and searching on Biosystematic codes has been discontinued.
Because of the differences between the current BIOSIS file (1993-present) and the backfile (1985-1992), users may have to adjust their searches when moving from one database to the other.
For complete information, click on HELP from within the BIOSIS database.
4. Online Archive of California -- New Support via Grants from LSTA, IMLS
A $360,000 grant from the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), administered by the California State Library, will enable the creation of the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive (JARDA). A cooperative project involving nine OAC participants -- UC Berkeley, UCLA, the Japanese American National Museum, California State Universities at Fullerton and Sonoma, the University of the Pacific, University of Southern California, the California Historical Society, and the California State Archive -- plans include the digitization of textual and visual material, plus audio content drawn from oral histories, and for OAC finding aids to serve as the means of navigating this material.Two Berkeley projects that will produce OAC material were also funded in separate LSTA awards: the Cased Photographs Digital Archive project and the Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library Chinese American Archives project. With a $490,000 "National Leadership" grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the CDL and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley will lead a group of eight museums in evaluating the capabilities of the digital finding aid technology, known as Encoded Archival Description (EAD), to integrate their collection descriptions into the OAC collections.
5. Licensing Tool Kit Available
The Joint Steering Committee on Shared Collections has assembled a licensing tool kit that is now available from the CDL Shared Collections Web site [http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/]. Select "CDL Licensing Tool Kit".The CDL tool kit includes information on licensing guidelines, selection criteria, information for vendors of electronic resources (such as campus FTE statistics and IP addresses), and contact information (for campus bibliographers, JSC members, CDL licensing staff, and CDL acquisitions contacts on the campuses). Most importantly, the licensing guidelines include points to be addressed in a license agreement, as well as principles and preferred practices for selecting and licensing information in digital formats established by the University of California Collection Development Committee (CDC) and the International Consortium of Library Consortia (ICOLC). There are also guidelines for technical requirements and measuring statistics to share with vendors with whom you are negotiating.
You may also examine existing CDL license agreements in redacted form. For further information contact Mary Engle at the CDL (mary.engle@ucop.edu).
6. JSC Expanded Meeting
The CDL Joint Steering Committee on Shared Collections (JSC) will be holding an all-day meeting on November 9 at UC Irvine to share information, procedures, and advice on negotiating multi-campus licenses for digital resources in the Humanities and Social Sciences.The purpose of the meeting is to increase the selector's knowledge in such areas as negotiating licenses, applying cost-sharing models, and taking advantage of campus and CDL resources. Because the CDL is able to commit funding and resources to only a fraction of the commercial products that campuses are interested in acquiring, the JSC believes it is important to increase the skills and knowledge of librarians who are likely to be negotiating and co-investing in multi-campus subscriptions.
The JSC has invited subject specialists who are members of a system-wide subject group that is likely to be involved in multi-campus license agreements over the upcoming year, weighed toward the South to minimize travel costs.
7. Campus-based Entryways into the CDL Directory
The CDL Directory was designed to provide library web managers with the ability to create unique "entryways" into the DirectoryËs content. In this way, the campus libraries are able to maintain more control over the content that can be delivered through their web sites and better reflect their libraries' presentation. A number of UC libraries have developed their own entryways into the CDL Directory. The scheme for creating links into the Directory is very versatile, and provides library web managers the flexibility to create the kinds of entryways they want. We felt it was time to highlight some their very innovative efforts.The UC Berkeley Engineering Library electronic journals page [http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ENGI/ejrnls.html], for example, decided to include a search form that limits searches to electronic journals available to UC Berkeley users. This page also includes three links to Directory browse pages, again limited to UC Berkeley electronic journals. The UC Santa Barbara Library electronics journal page [http://www.library.ucsb.edu/ejournals/] includes links to many CDL Directory browse pages by topic. The UC Davis Library electronic journals page [http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/cdlejrnl.html] includes a search form that limits searches to UC Davis, but it also offers a pull-down menu that takes UC Davis users to various Directory browse pages by topic.
Some campus libraries decided to use a frame-based approach so they could maintain more control over what their users see once they leave the campus sites and access the CDL Directory. For example, the UCLA "Electronic Resources in the Sciences" ejournals page [http://www.library.ucla.edu/etext/sciences/ejournals/] includes a number of links that take users to various CDL Directory browse pages. However, once one of these links is selected, the top part of the resulting page is a thin frame that includes a UCLA-developed pull-down menu to other topic lists.
The UCSF Library has done something similar on its GALEN II electronic journal page [http://www.library.ucsf.edu/journals/]. All links from this page (including results from the search form) are placed in frames. The top frame includes links back to various GALEN II pages, while the bottom frame contains the CDL Directory page. What is interesting here is that all of these frame pages are dynamically built using a CGI script. According to Julia Kochi, the Manager of Digital Library Operations at the UCSF Library, this greatly simplified the process of building UCSF's Directory entryway since it was not necessary to create a new HTML page for each frame-based page.
Since the CDL Directory does not yet include all resources that the campuses have licensed for their users, many libraries understandably continue to maintain their own master alphabetical lists of electronic journals and resources. The CDL Directory Management Interface should be completed within the next few months. At that time, campus libraries will be able to add these resources to the CDL Directory themselves. Once this is possible, campuses will have the option to use the Directory in creative ways rather than maintain long master lists. The recently completed CDL Directory Submission Pilot (see CDLINFO, August 18, 1999, Vol.2.No.12), where a number of campus libraries submitted small sets of resources for eventual inclusion in the Directory, will be instrumental in refining the DirectoryËs Management Interface.
For documentation on creating links from your library into the CDL Directory, along with links to the campus entryways the CDL currently knows about, visit http://www.cdlib.org/hlp/directory/linking.html. And please let the CDL know if your campus library has created its own entryway into the CDL Directory so we can add it to the list. Contact Brian Warling (brian.warling@ucop.edu).
8. For More Information
a. CDL News
Several items of interest, including "Milestones," "Highlights 1997-1998," "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.
Eligible subscribers: UC library employees
To subscribe for email distribution: Please send the following line to listserv@listserv.ucop.edu: SUBSCRIBE CDLINFO-L (your name)
CDLINFO is also published on the web at http://www.cdlib.org/news/cdlinfo/
Frequency of publication: Biweekly, or as new information warrants.
Communicating with the Listserv: While the CDL Listserv does not accept submissions, subscribers are encouraged to send suggestions, thoughts, and comments on material in the Listserv or on related issues to the CDL at cdl@www.cdlib.org.