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.	CNI FALL 1998 TASK FORCE MEETING HANDOUT	.
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The California Digital Library Inaugural Year Highlights

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INAUGURAL  YEAR  HIGHLIGHTS

Background

Founded in October 1997 by President Richard C. Atkinson, and led by University Librarian Richard E. Lucier, the California Digital Library (CDL) has established itself as the ”co-library” of the University of California Organizationally housed at the UC Office of the President, the CDL operates in close collaboration with all UC campuses and some of its management and operations staff are campus-located. Several advisory and consultative groups, including the Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee, the Shared Collections Steering Committee, and the Technology Architecture and Standards Working Group have been established.

An informational Web site is currently available at www.cdlib.org; beginning November 6, a CDL beta test site is available at: <www2.cdlib.org>; a fully integrated site, including services and collections of the CDL, will open in January 1999 at <www.cdlib.org>.

Building Shared Collections and Services (One University, One Library)

• A framework for making selection decisions for digital collections has been established that covers all types of information in all disciplines; a successful polling of UC Faculty has resulted in digital collection priorities for the Science, Technology, and Industry Collection, the CDL’s charter collection; the approach is being replicated for other disciplines.

• The full content of thousands of scholarly journals is now available through systemwide licenses negotiated by the CDL. Licenses include extremely favorable discounts and provisions for perpetual access to content. Electronic access enhances the availability of materials otherwise bound by the limits of location and open hours of print-based library collections. In the first year alone, we have made access available which would have cost the University more than $2 million in additional funds if the campuses had tried to provide the same level of access separately.

• Thousands of journals represented in licensed databases of abstracts and indexes of scholarly publications available for searching through the CDL. Any CDL user can quickly access available full text through clicking on a citation.

• The Melvyl^® Union Catalog has grown to represent over 9.5 million unique titles representing the print holdings of UC libraries as well as those of the California State Library in Sacramento, the California Academy of Sciences and the California Historical Society, the Center for Research Libraries, and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Through a special agreement with the California State University, the holdings of its 23 libraries will also become available through special catalog linkages.

• With funding from the California State Library, a Statewide Serials Database was created containing 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 over 555 locations, including 111 academic libraries, 256 public libraries, 99 legal libraries, 181 medical libraries, and 83 other special or corporate libraries.

• Special collections and archives of the UC campuses and their California-based partners, including California State University campuses, museums such as the Getty, and private schools such as the University of the pacific, are being made available through the Online Archive of California. Access to full metadata describing these collections and their millions of items is now available; plans are being developed to digitize many of the materials themselves.
• Automatic patron-initiated requests for materials located on other campuses, is being established to support the efficient sharing of print collections across all of the UC campuses. Any faculty member will be able, beginning in January 1999, to request a book directly from any UC campus through a simple click. A commercial delivery system will speed the item to the requestor’s campus library, thus reducing the time and effort necessary to move materials from one campus to another.

Strategic Partnerships

• Several major licenses for the full content of core scholarly journals, including those with the American Chemical Society and with JSTOR, include the flexibility to experiment with extending access to the California State University, Community College campuses, and public and school libraries.

• A successful grant from the California State Library has resulted in the California Digital Library/Library of California Environmental Information Resources project. The project models collaboration across academic segments and with public and school libraries, as well as providing broad-based access to licensed content from Cambridge Scientific Abstracts and to newly-digitized environmental information from UC holdings. 33 public and school libraries from across the state are participating with the CDL, and have gained access to many new materials. We are identifying and evaluating issues which will permit us to eventually provide access to the CDL to all the citizens of California.

• The CDL is a participant in several research grant proposals submitted to the second phase of the National Science Foundation’s Digital Library Initiative. Our partners include the Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Stanford University.

• The CDL is a member of the Digital Library Federation, a collaborative of 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 an active participant in the International Consortium of Library Consortia (ICOLC). This is a group of nearly 100 library consortia. The focus is on the development of license agreements which 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.

Alternative Forms of Scholarly Communication

• The CDL is a founding member of the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) whose ultimate goal is the transformation of scholarly publishing through the creation of better and more economically sustainable systems for distributing new knowledge. Initial partnerships with the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry are helping to create digital alternatives to expensive commercial publications in chemistry.

• The CDL and UCLA Libraries have created a database of UC editors of what are considered to be the top 2,000 journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. This database is serving as the basis for organizing multiple focus groups among UC editors to discuss copyright and the potential exploitation of digital technologies in creating, disseminating, and managing scholarly information.

• Under direction from the President, the CDL is actively planning its role in digital publishing. For example, we are exploring potential collaboration with other major universities in creating alternative forms of scholarly communication. With the advice of Academic Council and others, we have selected and organized a select group of institutions. The Council on Library and Information Resources is convening this group to investigate the development of a possible plan of action for digital publishing by this federation of institutions. The active involvement and participation by faculty across all these institutions will be critical for any such plan to be successful, and we are now discussing how to institute such involvement.

December  1998                        

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