Progress Report 2000—Spring 2001

See sections below:

• Selected Shared Digital Collections and Services
• Strategic Partnerships
• Digital Publishing

Selected Shared Digital Collections and Services

Systemwide licensing: The full content of more than 5,500 scholarly journals is now available through systemwide licenses negotiated by the California Digital Library, in cooperation with the campuses. Licenses include extremely favorable discounts and provisions for perpetual access to content. In the first two years, the CDL has provided access to content that would have cost the University more than $4 million in additional funds if the campuses had tried to provide the same level of access separately.

Databases: Nearly 200 citation and abstract databases, and 36 online reference texts and datasets are available to the entire University of California community, including the Human Relations Area File, Royal Society of Chemistry journals, Alexander Street Press, JSTOR's Ecology & Botany Collection, Mary Ann Liebert journals, and MIT CogNet: The Cognitive and Brain Sciences Community Online.

UC-eLinks: This service links most of the CDL electronic journals with CDL-hosted abstract and index databases, making it easy for users to go directly from a citation to the full content of the article. Agreements with vendors of commercially supplied databases also allow additional links into CDL databases for the easy discovery of the locations of print materials.

Melvyl® Catalog: The Melvyl Catalog has grown to more than 10 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. In keeping with the goal of realizing effective technologies for access to shared resources, a process for evaluating and choosing state-of-the-art technology for the Melvyl Catalog is nearly complete. The transition to this new technology is expected to take two years.

California Periodicals Database: Merging several different databases into one searchable resource with 863,000 unique titles, the California Periodicals database 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. It was created with funding from the California State Library.

Online Archive of California (OAC): The OAC was developed to provide access to the special collections and archives of the UC campuses and approximately 40 California-based partners. Access to full metadata describing these collections and their tens of millions of items is now available; many of the items are currently being digitized with UC and external grant funding. In January, the CDL released the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive (JARDA), an addition to the OAC. A "California Cultures" extension to the OAC has been planned and work continues on Museum contributions as well. Federal grant funds of $1.5 million support these OAC enhancements.

Request: Automatic user-initiated requests for materials located on other campuses has been established to support the efficient sharing of print collections across all UC campuses.

UC Press digital books: Digital versions of UC Press books are now linked to the Melvyl Catalog. When a user retrieves the title of the book, they then can access the full content of the book.

SearchLight: This new tool allows users to search several databases at the same time. A special version of SearchLight is customized for use by the general public, and is focused on important digital content to which non-UC users have access.

Shared Cataloging Agency: Traditionally, all UC campuses have catalogued library materials separately. Digital materials are catalogued once and the records are distributed by this agency for all UC campuses, thus saving significant duplication of effort. The Shared Cataloging Agency is planning to catalog California state agency web sites and publications. These records will be available to the public through the Melvyl Catalog.

Counting California prototype: Released in January 2001, this prototype provides "one stop shopping" for a wide variety of data about California. The goal is to provide a single, easy-to-use, web-based interface through which users can find, combine, and use data about population, health, crime, income, education, and other topics. Counting California will be available to the public in production form in July 2001.

Sampler of CDL resources: In response to the Regents' interest, the CDL is investigating development of a sampler of CDL resources for California state legislators. This digital library sampler, which includes relevant commercial content made available through special arrangements with private-sector vendors, is designed to give the legislators direct experience with the benefits of UC investments in digital library resources.

Strategic Partnerships

California State Library: The CDL has become a formal, ongoing partner with the California State Library to contribute to the multi-sector Library of California effort. Collaborative work includes production of the California Periodicals database and development of publicly accessible government information via Counting California.

UC's strategic collaborations: The CDL has worked closely on UC's strategic collaborations with partners such as Mexico and the Jackson State University. Mechanisms are being developed for sharing expertise on the licensing of commercial content and the development of digital library tools and services.

InterLib: The CDL is a participant in a suite of research grant proposals funded by the second phase of the National Science Foundation's Digital Library Initiative. The overall theme for these proposals is the creation of InterLib, an internet-based library. Partners include computer science researchers at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford University, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The first products of this partnership are UC-wide access to UC Santa Barbara's Alexandria Digital Library of geospatial information, and to UC Berkeley's CalFlora database of botanical information.

Digital Library Federation: The CDL is a member of the Digital Library Federation, a collaboration of 23 prestigious research libraries and archives working to enrich education and research through the proper management and dissemination of digital information. The CDL has provided special leadership to develop new practices for the effective authentication and authorization for anytime, anywhere use of distributed information resources.

The 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. ICOLC has had a significant impact on vendor practices and prices over the past year.

Digital Publishing

To contribute to innovation in scholarly communication, the CDL has initiated electronic scholarship ("eScholarship") activities, which are based upon scholar-led experiments in scholarly communication. A web site which integrates these various efforts (www.escholarship.cdlib.org) was established in July 2000.

Other progress in scholarly communication includes:

• Eprint services: Eprint services, based on the Los Alamos Laboratory's arXiv eprint server for physics, math, and computer science, were released in January 2001 for several disciplinary communities, including international and area studies, tobacco control, and dermatology.
• Journals and monographs: The Dermatology Online Journal is now hosted by the CDL, and 11 books of international and area studies scholarship have been converted to digital form. In partnership with the UC Press, in January 2001 the CDL released a digital version of "Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles", by Stanton A. Glantz and Edith D. Balbach. The digital book has the added value of links to the original materials upon which the book is based. The CDL is partnering with the UCLA Institute of the Environment to establish eNvironment, a new UC-based electronic journal in environmental studies.
• Datasets and databases: The CDL will provide persistent access to innovative publications drawn from the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), an acclaimed international effort led by UC Berkeley Professor Lewis Lancaster to produce standards-based humanities and social science datasets.
• Grant support: eScholarship has received support from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources coalition (SPARC). The $167,836 grant is one of three awarded in SPARC's competitive Scientific Communities Initiative, designed to spur digital science publishing ventures based in academe.