Progress Report 1999—Spring 2000

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 nearly 5,000 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.

Digital Content: Recent acquisitions of complete digital content include Digital Dissertations, Contemporary Women's Issues, the Grove Dictionary of Art, the Associated Press Photo Archive, and electronic journals from publishers such as Kluwer, Plenum Press, Human Sciences Press, Wiley InterScience, and the Institute of Physics.

Databases: Recent acquisitions of journal citation and abstracting services include IEEE Xplore, the Bibliography of the History of Art, Index to 19th Century American Art Periodicals, ABC/CLIO's America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts, Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO), Ethnic NewsWatch (ENW), ITER: Gateway to the Renaissance, and the 19 million citations in Chemical Abstracts and CAS REACT via SciFinder Scholar.

UC-eLinks: Most of the CDL electronic journals are now linked to CDL-hosted abstract and index databases via UC-eLinks. For example, when a user searches Medline and retrieves a citation to a journal for which the CDL has access, the user is able to retrieve the full content of the journal immediately.

Melvyl® Catalog: The Melvyl catalog has grown to more than 9.5 million unique titles representing the print holdings of the University of California libraries and the California State Library in Sacramento, the California Academy of Sciences, the California Historical Society, the Center for Research Libraries, and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

California Periodicals Database: With funding from the California State Library, the database contains 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): The OAC provides access to the special collections and archives of the UC campuses and their California-based partners. Access to full metadata describing these collections and their tens of millions of items is now available; many of the items themselves are currently being digitized, with support from UC and external grant funding. The CDL has recently been awarded $1.5 million in federal funds to digitize items related to ethnic communities in California (with a focus on Japanese American relocation materials) and to extend the OAC to several museums in California.

Request: Automatic user-initiated requests for materials located on other campuses has been established to support the efficient sharing of print collections across all of the UC campuses. Faculty, staff, and graduate students are able to request a book or article directly from any UC campus through a simple click of a Request button while viewing search results in CDL-hosted databases.

UC Press digital books: The CDL began linking digital versions of many UC Press books to the Melvyl Catalog in January 2000. When users retrieve the book titles, they can then access the full content of the books.

SearchLight: This search tools allows users to search multiple databases at the same time. A special version of SearchLight is customized for public use, and focuses on important digital content available to the public.

Shared Cataloging Agency: Traditionally, all UC campuses have catalogued library materials separately. Digital materials will be catalogued only once by this agency, and the cataloging records will be distributed to all campuses, thus saving significant duplication of effort.

California Data Profile: Development has begun for a database that will provide "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 easily find, combine, and use data about population, health, crime, income, education, and other topics.

Strategic Partnerships

California State Library: A successful experiment supported by the California State Library resulted in the CDL/Library of California Environmental Information Resources project, which built and licensed information resources for use across several sectors. Based upon that success, the CDL has become a formal, ongoing partner with the California State Library to contribute to the multi-sector Library of California effort.

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 product of this partnership is UC-wide access to UC Santa Barbara's Alexandria Digital Library of geospatial 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 the environment for education and research through the proper management and dissemination of digital information. The CDL is providing leadership to develop new practices for the effective authentication and authorization for anytime, anywhere use of distributed information resources.

International Consortium of Library Consortia (ICOLC): The CDL is an active participant in ICOLC, a group of nearly 100 library consortia. The focus is on the development of license agreements that 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.

Digital Publishing

To contribute to innovation in scholarly communication, the CDL has initiated electronic scholarship ("eScholarship") activities.

University ePub

The first eScholarship initiative is University ePub, a program that focuses on using digital technologies to create UC-supported electronic publications and support services. The three-year development plan for University ePub will result in an electronic print (eprint) server and tools for submission, access, certification, and other scholarly activities.

The University ePub initiative 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.

Initial steps for University ePub include:

• Replicating and experimenting with the Los Alamos Laboratory's arXiv eprint server, and extending similar eprint services to several disciplinary communities, including international and area studies, and dermatology.
• Migrating the Dermatology Online Journal to the CDL.
• Identifying innovative publication and dissemination methods within other communities, such as archaeology, tobacco control, and behavioral medicine.