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California Digital Library
Report to the Digital Library Federation
October, 2004
I. Collections, services, and
systems
A. Collections
Shared Collections
With collaborative leadership and core support provided by the
California Digital Library (CDL), the UC libraries’ shared
digital collections have grown to provide faculty, students, and
staff from all UC campuses with access to about 10,000 journal
titles, 250 reference databases, 240,000 images, and more than
7,000 finding aids. These shared digital collections not only
provide the UC community with access to a wealth of materials
that individual campuses might not have been able to afford
independently, but they also make information equally accessible
to all UC students and faculty at any time, regardless of
location. Through shared licensing and cataloging, the campus
libraries avoid costs of roughly $34 million per year.
The new UC Libraries Shared Print Program has been made possible in part by
services such as the Melvyl Catalog, Request, and desktop delivery, which
are all hosted by the CDL. The program is working to define and develop
user access mechanisms that will integrate broadly with CDL services,
ensuring that the development of digital and paper repositories are
complementary, and that digital access mechanisms are available to
support efficient access to shared print materials. To date, the
Shared Print Program has developed "dim archives" of online content
from Elsevier's Science Direct and ACM. Currently, we are receiving
print archival copies from several other online publishers, and are
working with JSTOR to develop a dim repository of JSTOR digitized journals.
Counting California
Counting California provides users with a single interface for
accessing a variety of data and statistics about California from
local, state, and federal government agencies. New content has
recently been added to the web site covering topics such as
population, business, crime, education, and the economy. In
addition, an improved search page allows users to select from a
list of topics or agencies and search by keyword, table title,
subject, agency, and publication title.
http://countingcalifornia.cdlib.org/
Image Collections
The CDL’s Image Services project provides access to
more than 240,000 digital images from licensed and
freely-available collections, including Museums and the Online
Archive of California, Art Museum Image Consortium, Saskia Art
& Architecture, the David Rumsey Map Collection, and others.
A library of UC images from the visual resource collections on UC
campuses is being added. Through the use of Insight software from
Luna Imaging, users can zoom in on image details, create groups
and presentations, and view descriptive data for each image.
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/image/
B. Services
Layered Service Model
In order to more effectively manage and deliver essential
ongoing library services, the CDL and UC libraries are developing
more ways to leverage their collective resources. Through the use
of a shared infrastructure of building block collections and
services, the campus libraries will be able to create enriched
sets of collections and services customized to local needs. The
following tools are components of this shared
infrastructure.
eXtensible Text Framework (XTF)
The eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) is a flexible indexing and
query tool that supports searching across collections of
heterogeneous data and presents results in a highly configurable
manner. The CDL will use XTF as a building block for new services
such as the digital preservation repository, and to replace a
number of aging systems.
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/xtf/
Interface Customization Tools
The CDL is developing a digital
object repository to support the collections it manages, which
currently contain more than 150,000 images, texts, and other
materials encoded in the Metadata and Encoding Transmission
Standard (METS). The interface customization tools developed by
the CDL allow institutions who contribute digital objects to
access their collections through a customized interface.
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/diglib/repository/customize/
Metasearch Infrastructure
The metasearch infrastructure project provides tools and
software that UC campus libraries will be able to use to craft
search portals tailored to specific audiences and needs. In
addition, services will be built to harvest metadata from remote
repositories and crawl selected web sites. The resulting indexes
will enrich the resources available for searching within specific
disciplines. As part of this project, the CDL is collaborating
with the Interactive University at UC Berkeley. Their
Scholar’s Box concept will guide the addition of tools that
scholars can use with UC portals to gather raw materials for
personal collections of resources for research and teaching.
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/
II. Projects and programs
A. Projects
New Project Announcements
The Web at Risk: A Distributed Approach to
Preserving our Political Cultural Heritage
Through a grant awarded by the National Digital Information
and Infrastructure Preservation Program at the Library of
Congress, the CDL is partnering with New York University and the University of North
Texas to develop web archiving tools that will be used by
libraries to capture, curate, and preserve collections of
web-based government and political information. Although it is anticipated that
the technology will be useful in the general capture and
persistent management of web-based information, work will
initially focus on the web-based information produced by U.S.
state and federal
governments and by local political activities, such as the California gubernatorial recall election
of 2003. Other partners include the UC libraries, San Diego
Supercomputer Center, Stanford University Computer Science
Department, and Sun Microsystems Inc., among
others.
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/preservation/
Update on Existing Projects
Bibliographic Services Infrastructure
The CDL is identifying and building components of a new
bibliographic services infrastructure. Current sub-projects
include researching options for an electronic resources
management system and decision support tools for collaborative
collection development. The goal is to create efficiencies in the
creation and management of bibliographic data and the services
that rely upon it. The project draws upon extensive experience
with the various projects and programs hosted by the CDL,
including shared cataloging, link resolution systems, persistent
IDs, and the Melvyl Catalog (which was
successfully migrated to a new platform in 2003).
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/
Documenting the American West
With the support of a three-year William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation grant, the CDL is assembling a virtual collection of
the American West that draws from the resources of major research
institutions. A range of tools will support extensive
re-configuration, integration with online learning environments,
and continued growth through the addition of relevant research
and teaching materials produced in the course of its use. Based
upon needs discovered during user assessment workshops in July,
the CDL will develop tools to configure and integrate these
virtual collections with local, personalized content.
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/amwest/
B. Programs
eScholarship
The eScholarship program facilitates innovation and supports
experimentation in the production and dissemination of
scholarship. Through its partnerships across the university
community and the use of innovative technology, the program is
working to improve all aspects of scholarly communication,
including its creation, peer review, management, dissemination,
and preservation.
http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/responses/escholarship.html
eScholarship Repository
The eScholarship Repository offers UC faculty a central,
online location for depositing working papers, technical reports,
research results, and conference proceedings from a wide range of
disciplines. Two new features have recently expanded the
eScholarship Repository’s capabilities. Peer-review tools
support the publication of articles, journals, monographs, and
edited volumes, providing UC faculty with an alternative to
publishing their research in for-profit journals. Another new
feature is the seminar series service, which UC faculty can use
to give their seminars, lecture series, and colloquia a lasting
and highly visible presence on the Internet.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/
UC Office of Scholarly Communication
In response to the continuing economic crises in scholarly
communication and the broadening concern within UC about the
impacts those crises are having on academic practices,
the CDL has established an Office of Scholarly Communication for
the university. The new program will seize opportunities to
leverage technology and assist scholars in the use of new and
sustainable means of scholarly communication.
http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/
III. Specific Digital Library
Challenges
Utilizing Shared Infrastructure
The UC libraries have a history of successfully building
shared resources and services. Looking ahead, new practices will
be needed to adequately deal with library services that are
collaborative and multi-institutional, and that provide access to
a host of materials in a variety of formats, much of which are
not acquired or owned by any single library. A new plan for
systemwide strategic directions for libraries and scholarly
information at UC addresses these key issues: http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/planning/
The advances in technology that have rapidly expanded the
world of information available to library users have also made it
possible to design new ways to manage and provide access to those
resources. "Layered" service designs offer the potential for each
UC library to develop innovative and customized services without
sacrificing the economies that are traditionally associated with
centralized and commercial services. In a layered model, a
library can develop services that use core shared infrastructure,
which can include (but is not limited to) collection development
tools for shared collection decisions, digital object repository
services, preservation utilities, bibliographic and metadata
management utilities, access customization tools, digital rights
and other policy frameworks, and publishing utilities.
With leadership provided by the CDL, and through consultation
with systemwide groups, the UC libraries are addressing the
challenges posed by the pursuit of building and sharing a core
infrastructure. Examples of these challenges include:
- Developing principles and guidelines for the identification,
evaluation, selection, and implementation of online tools and
services for sharing, accessing, and integrating scholarly
content in all forms.
- Developing guidelines for the type and frequency of the
evaluation of tools and services, both before and after they are
implemented.
- Identifying and developing the resources, expertise, and
staffing required for the local adoption, extension, and
integration of the core infrastructure.
- Identifying the potential impacts of and contributions to
national developments in digital library standards vis a vis CDL
layered services.
- Creating sustainability and co-investment strategies,
including grants and other funding opportunities.
http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/about/success_stories.html
IV. Digital library
publications, policies, working papers, and other documents
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