Current CDL Initiatives
In its efforts to build a core team, expand electronic collections, and facilitate access to resources for the UC community, the CDL is engaged in the following activities:
a. Recruiting and hiring staff to complete the core team
As the announcement above indicates, John Ober has accepted a position with the CDL as Assistant Director, Education and Communications. The CDL is recruiting for the positions of Assistant Director, Business Development; Technical Director; Web Design Coordinator; and Special Assistant to the University Librarian.
b. Seeking additions to the STIC collection
To develop its charter collection, the Science, Technology and Industry Collection, the CDL hopes to license or acquire access to over 1,000 science journals in electronic format by the end of 1999. Science librarians on all campuses have given numerous presentations to UC faculty and are asking faculty for recommendations for journal titles for the STIC collection via a web form on the former LPAI site till April 1. The CDL is also discussing acquisition of journal titles with several publishers of electronic content. For more information on targeted publishers, consult your local STIC contact:
Charlene Baldwin, UCR (charlene.baldwin@ucr.edu) Jo Anne Boorkman, UCD (jaboorkman@ucdavis.edu) Alison Bunting, UCLA (abunting@library.ucla.edu) Katie Frohmberg, UCB (katie@library.berkeley.edu) Julia Gelfand, UCI (jgelfand@uci.edu) Christy Hightower, UCSD (chightow@ucsd.edu) Chuck Huber, UCSB (huber@library.ucsb.edu) Catherine Soehner, UCSC (soehner@cats.ucsc.edu) Brian Warling, UCSF (warling@library.ucsf.edu)
c. Planning a pilot project for patron-initiated borrowing to facilitate resource sharing
Mary Heath (Library Computing Manager, General Library, UC Davis, and a member of OPAG) and Tammy Dearie (Director, Access and Delivery Services, UC San Diego) are working with the CDL to develop a project plan for a pilot system that would permit UC faculty and students to identify and enter requests for materials at another UC campus from desktop computers; the system would automatically route requests to the appropriate library. The goal is to implement a pilot project using this request service during the 1998-99 fiscal year. For more information on the Patron Initiated Request (PIR) service under development, see [http://www.lpai.ucop.edu/outcomes/cdl/]
d. Planning for access to UC technical reports in computer science
The Science, Technology and Industry Collection is designed to serve as a laboratory for CDL collection development. Thus far, efforts have concentrated on obtaining access to published electronic content. However, the STIC Task Force also recommended the addition of UC-produced content to the CDL for STIC. As a first effort in this direction, the CDL has begun considering how to facilitate electronic access to UC technical reports in computer science. Ann Jensen, from the UC Berkeley Engineering Library, is working with the staff of the CDL to develop a project plan.
e. California Digital Library: Library of California Access to Environmental Information Project
One of the goals of the CDL is to facilitate the delivery of electronic content to all residents of the state. The Library of California (LOC) represents a complementary initiative, also designed to strengthen and extend access to information throughout the state by enabling resource sharing, cooperation, and collaboration among all types of libraries statewide.
The California Digital Library: Library of California Environmental Information Project is the first attempt to bring these initiatives together in order to provide the residents of California enhanced library service through digital resources. The goals of this project, funded by an LSTA (Library Services and Technology) grant, are to (1) demonstrate the economic and intellectual benefits that can accrue through collaboration between the LOC and the CDL, and (2) explore the technological, organizational, and financial infrastructure issues involved in delivering electronic content through the CDL to participants in the LOC.
Focusing on the environment, information of widespread interest to both CDL and LOC participants, this project will establish a “front-end” Web site to make available, statewide, previously difficult to find electronic environmental resources, including selective digitized materials from the University of California collection. In addition, 31 library jurisdictions from LOC Regions II, III, and V will be selected as licensed demonstration sites for an electronic commercial information product.
Funding for the environmental project was received in February, and content is expected to become available to participating libraries this summer. Barbara Schader (UCLA) will serve as the environmental librarian for this project. An advisory board of public, school, and special librarians will assist her in project development.
f. Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO)
Twenty-three of North America’s largest art museums have founded the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) to make multimedia documentation of their collections available for educational use. AMICO is a not-for-profit consortium open to institutions with collections of art. The AMICO digital library will initially be distributed in the academic year 1998/1999 in a university testbed project. The CDL plans to enter into a Distributor Developer’s agreement with AMICO to provide access to this testbed of 20,000 licensed art images. Under this agreement, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, working with the CDL and UC art librarians and slide curators will distribute images in selected test projects to faculty and students within the University and possibly to users of public libraries. More information on AMICO can be found at http://www.amn.org/AMICO/.
g. Online Archive of California (OAC) Project (formerly known as the UC-EAD Project)
The UC campuses are developing a UC-wide prototype union database of encoded archival finding aids using Encoded Archival Description (EAD), an emerging standard supported by the Library of Congress and the Society of American Archivists. Archival and manuscript repositories develop finding aids such as guides, indexes, inventories, and registers to provide detailed descriptions of the content and organization of specific collections. A platform-independent electronic format using SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), EAD facilitates access to these finding aids.
The Library at UC Berkeley has been a leader in the development of the EAD standard for archival finding aids and is currently hosting the database. For more information about the project, see http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/FindingAids/uc-ead/. Users can search or browse the finding aids from the Berkeley site. Collection level records are also being added to catalog records. In the Melvyl Catalog on the web, search “california heritage” as a corporate author to see examples with links to the corresponding finding aids.