Inaugural Year Progress Report 1997—1998

See sections below:

• Building Shared Collections and Services
• Strategic Partnerships
• Alternative Forms of Scholarly Communication

Building Shared Collections and Services

Selection decisions: A framework for making selection decisions for digital collections has been established that covers all types of information in all disciplines. The California Digital Library's charter collection, decided with input from University of California faculty, will focus on the Science, Technology, and Industry collection. This approach is being replicated for other disciplines.

Systemwide licensing: Systemwide licenses negotiated by the CDL have created access to the full content of thousands of scholarly journals. Licenses include extremely favorable discounts and provisions for the perpetual availability of content. Electronic access enhances the availability of materials otherwise bound by the limits of location and hours of operation for print-based library collections. In the first year alone, the CDL has provided access which would have cost the University more than $2 million in additional funds if the campuses had provided the same level of access separately.

Digital content: Thousands of journals represented in licensed databases of abstracts and indexes of scholarly publications are available for searching through the CDL. All CDL users can quickly access the available full text of an item by clicking on a citation.

Melvyl® Catalog: The Melvyl Catalog has grown to more than 9.5 million unique titles representing the print holdings of the UC libraries, and the California State Library, the California Academy of Sciences, the California Historical Society, the Center for Research Libraries, and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Through an agreement with the California State University, the holdings of its 23 libraries will also become available through special catalog links.

California Periodicals Database: With funding from the California State Library, a Statewide Serials Database was created containing citations for periodicals, newspapers, annuals, and other ongoing publications owned by most California libraries. Merging several different previous databases into one searchable resource with 863,000 unique titles, it represents holdings from more than 555 locations, including 111 academic libraries, 256 public libraries, 99 legal libraries, 181 medical libraries, and 83 other special or corporate libraries.

Online Archive of California (OAC): Special collections and archives of the UC campuses and their California-based partners, including California State University campuses, museums such as the Getty, and private schools such as the University of the Pacific, are being made available through the OAC. Access to the full metadata describing these collections and their millions of items is now available; plans are being developed to digitize many of the materials themselves.

Request: Automatic patron-initiated requests for materials located on other campuses is being established to support the efficient sharing of print collections across all of the UC campuses. All UC faculty members will be able, beginning in January 1999, to request a book directly from any UC campus through a simple click. A commercial delivery system will speed the item to the requestor's campus library, thus reducing the time and effort necessary to move materials from one campus to another.

Strategic Partnerships

Publishers: Several major licenses for the full content of core scholarly journals, including those with the American Chemical Society and JSTOR, include the flexibility to experiment with extending access to California State University, community college campuses, and public and school libraries.

California State Library: A successful grant, coordinated with the California State Library, has resulted in the CDL/Library of California Environmental Information Resources project. The project provides broad-based access to licensed content from Cambridge Scientific Abstracts and to newly digitized environmental information from UC holdings. Thirty-three libraries from across the state are participating with the CDL, and have gained access to many new materials.

Digital Library Initiative: The CDL is a participant in several grant proposals submitted to the second phase of the National Science Foundation's Digital Library Initiative. Partners include computer science researchers at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Stanford University.

Digital Library Federation: As a member of the Digital Library Federation, a collaboration of prestigious research libraries and archives, the CDL is working to enrich the environment for education and research through the proper management and dissemination of digital information.

International Consortium of Library Consortia (ICOLC): The CDL is an active participant in ICOLC, a group of nearly 100 library consortia that focuses on the development of license agreements which are advantageous, fair, and affordable to the library and user communities. ICOLC has had a significant impact on vendor practices and prices over the past year.

Alternative Forms of Scholarly Communication

Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC): The CDL is a founding member SPARC, whose ultimate goal is to transform scholarly publishing through the creation of economically sustainable systems for distributing new knowledge. Initial partnerships with the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry are helping to create digital alternatives to expensive commercial publications in chemistry.

UC Editors Database: The CDL and UCLA libraries have created a database of UC editors for the top 2,000 journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. This database is serving as the basis for organizing multiple focus groups among UC editors to discuss copyright issues and the potential exploitation of digital technologies in creating, disseminating, and managing scholarly information.

Scholarly Communication: The CDL is exploring potential collaboration with other major universities in creating alternative forms of scholarly communication. With the advice of Academic Council and others, the CDL has organized a select group of institutions, including Columbia University, Cornell University, Cal Tech, MIT, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and Yale University. With funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources, the CDL is developing a possible plan of action for digital publishing by this federation of institutions.