• Daniel Greenstein to Head California Digital Library
• Melvyl® Catalog and Journal Database Transitions Taking Place
• CDL Launches eScholarship Repository

Daniel Greenstein has accepted the position of University Librarian and Executive Director of the California Digital Library (CDL), and will assume his new position in May 2002.

Greenstein is currently Director of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), based in Washington, D.C., a position he has held since 1999. The DLF consists of 28 leading research libraries (including Berkeley and the CDL) that are pioneering the use of electronic information technologies to extend their collections and services. Through its members, the DLF has provided leadership to libraries throughout the nation by identifying standards and "best practices" for digital collections and services, coordinating leading-edge research and development, and collaborating to create digital collections and services that libraries cannot develop individually.

After receiving the Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Greenstein was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Oxford University in 1989. His career has included appointments in Modern History at Glasgow University, director of the Glasgow University Arts Faculty Computing Facility, and founding director of the Arts and Humanities Data Service of the United Kingdom, where he led the strategic and operational development of a digital information service to support arts and humanities research and teaching at UK's 440 universities and colleges. Building on this success, he was named founding co-director of the UK Resource Discovery Network in 1998, a network of Internet portals with selected high-quality web-based information.

In his new position Greenstein will assume responsibilities for providing leadership to the CDL and for systemwide library planning, in consultation with the University Librarians and the Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee (SLASIAC). Beverlee French, CDL's Director for Shared Content who has been Interim University Librarian since February 2001, will resume her previous responsibilities for the development of the University's shared digital collections upon Greenstein's arrival.

Melvyl® Catalog and Journal Database Transitions Taking Place

Two transitions are taking place that will have an impact on how library users access the Melvyl catalog and some of the journal article databases that the California Digital Library (CDL) has "hosted." The Melvyl catalog is a union, i.e., combined catalog, of the book (and including other materials such as maps, videos, sound recordings, and more), and periodicals records of all ten campuses of the University of California, and then some. The search and display interface used for Melvyl has also been used for over 25 journal article databases hosted by the CDL (and by the Division of Library Automation - DLA - before the CDL's founding in 1998). Both Melvyl and the hosted databases are transitioning to new technologies.

These changes are taking place because of the Melvyl Catalog's aging underlying technology, enhancements in web-based service delivery, and changes in the vendor marketplace. Given the new environment, the CDL took the opportunity to investigate better integration and service levels for the Melvyl Catalog and abstracting and indexing (A&I) journal and periodical article databases.

Melvyl Transition
A prototype of the Melvyl transition catalog, Melvyl-T, will be available for testing in Spring 2002. The new catalog is based on Ex Libris' Aleph software. Input on the new catalog will be sought via usability testing, surveys, and group and one-on-one meetings with faculty. The current and new Melvyl catalogs will run in parallel through the academic year 2002/2003.

With the prototype release, librarians and users will test new features, such as:

• Books and periodicals (CAT & PE) combined in one database: currently, users must search for books in the CAT database separately from periodical titles in the PE database.
• Call number searching: a call number search will return an ordered display of call numbers and titles across campuses, as if library materials from all ten campuses appeared all together on one long shelf, in all their richness and complexity.
• Multilingual character set support: the ability to sort and display using characters from languages (e.g., Chinese) used in UC catalogs. Later enhancements will add a search capability on the vernacular fields.

Journal Database Transition
Each of the transitioning journal article databases will be made available directly through a new vendor, and these have now been selected. All vendors and their interfaces have already been in use by the UC community except for one, Ovid. (The databases BIOSIS, Current Contents, Ei Compendex Plus, Inspec, and MLA Bibliography will be available through the Ovid interface.) A list of the transitioning databases, their vendors, and information about services is available at www.cdlib.org/news/databasestatus.html .

Campus library staff have already begun to teach new versions of the databases, and by next fall, they will be the primary databases that students will learn. The CDL-hosted databases will be completely retired by January 2003.

One of the most exciting outcomes of the transitions is that CDL has begun using a new service called UC-eLinks ( www.cdlib.org/guides/ucelinks/ ). UC-eLinks provides a way to easily move from an article or book citation to the full electronic content of the item, or, in the case of print materials, to automatically look for a UC library location of the item, or even to immediately request online that the item be loaned to you. UC-eLinks, based on the "OpenURL" linking technology being widely adopted in the library community, will eventually be available from the majority of the CDL's journal article databases. UC-eLinks is an example of the kind of global solution (rather than vendor or database-specific solutions) that the CDL is pursuing to provide better integration across resources. CDL and the campus libraries continue to explore other solutions to make important functions such as emailing or downloading citations into bibliographic citation software easier and better integrated.

Stay tuned for more information about the transitions, and try out the new versions of the catalog and journal databases as they are released.

CDL Launches eScholarship Repository

The eScholarship Repository ( http://repositories.cdlib.org/ ) stores and distributes academic research results and working papers authored or sponsored by faculty from the University of California. Searching and viewing the content is open to everyone. The initial focus is on the humanities and social sciences.

The repository opened in April, 2002 with content from early-adopter social science research units at UC Berkeley and UCLA. The eScholarship program is working with UC libraries and a 10-campus scholarly communication advisory body to schedule a phased expansion to other campuses and disciplines.

The eScholarship Repository was built under a co-development partnership with the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress). The submission, processing, and dissemination of papers are managed through the bepress EdiKit system, a simple web interface that greatly streamlines the publishing process for participating scholars, departments, and research institutes. Readers can discover and view relevant research by topic, author, or sponsoring research department. The system also allows users to sign up for a service alerting them to new content in their specific areas of interest.

Read more about the eScholarship initiative ( PDF document )