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January 2001 Release of the CDL

January 19, 2001 Author: CDLCategories:

The January 2001 release, marking the beginning of the CDL’s third year of operation, includes new content and enhancements of existing services.

The release is possible through the efforts of CDL and campus staff.  We are very grateful to our “co-library” partners, including the members of the many working groups and project teams, who have advised and helped to create these improvements.  Special recognition goes to the Counting California, and eScholarship Project Teams and the JARDA collaborators and Project Team.

Counting California

Counting California is a new initiative committed to enhancing California citizens’ access to the growing range of social science and economic data produced by government agencies.  In a departure from more static formats, Counting California’s single interface enables users to access to raw data compiled by federal, state, and local agencies, and also allows users to collate and integrate data by topic, geography, title, and provider.  Counting California also addresses the serious preservation dilemma posed by ever-changing technology and data formats, insuring easy and continuous access to historical and current information. Counting California is a collaborative project funded by the California Digital Library and the California State Library.

Because creating a robust data access tool demands the development and refinement of any number of processes, Counting California will be tested in an extended prototype phase from January to June 2001.  We will incorporate what we learn into further development of features and interface improvements and are aiming for July 2001 general release.  Some things to keep in mind during the prototype phase are:

  • It may not be available 7 days, 24 hours a day.  We hope to make it available as much as possible, but since it is not yet a production service, a certain amount of down time during regular hours is unavoidable.
  • For the time being, Counting California has only a limited set of features.  Others will be added as we learn more about what users want, which will allow us to prioritize development activities.
  • Access to Counting California will be limited.  It will not be available off of the public CDL pages, but library staff can access it from the CDL Release page.

eScholarship

The eScholarship program , a scholar-led communication initiative, offers the following new services or enhancements:

  • ePrint Repositories – eScholarship is establishing several prototype eprint repositories for selected scholarly communities.
  • Web Site Enhancements – The eScholarship web site is being enhanced and expanded with more scholarly communities, publishing, models, scholarly content, and links to related materials.  Appropriate interface changes are being introduced to enhance access to the new content and services.
  • First XML-based Monograph Published – In the first of what will likely be a steady stream of monographs published using the Extensible Markup Language (XML), UC Press and eScholarship will make available the digital version of “Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles” (http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ucpress/tobacco-war.xml), by Stanton A. Glantz and Edith D. Balbach.

Online Archive of California (OAC)

The OAC provides enhanced access to digitized photos, diaries, manuscripts and other primary source materials, new online publications drawn from these materials, and online guides or “finding aids” to archival collections held throughout California.  The following new services and content are now available:

  • Virtual Archives View available in OAC Dynaweb – A Virtual Archive is an electronic grouping of OAC finding aids that brings together and highlights collections sharing a common theme but that are physically dispersed among multiple OAC repositories.  For example, the California Heritage Collection unifies pictorial-finding aids, which have digitized content from The Bancroft Library and Phoebe Hearst Museum.
  • Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA) – JARDA is a digital “thematic collection” within the OAC documenting the experience of Japanese Americans in World War II internment camps.  JARDA serves as a gateway to a collection of finding aids, digital images, and electronic texts from the holdings of a number of California repositories.  It includes photographs, documents, manuscripts, paintings, drawings, letters, and oral histories; over 10,000 digital images have been created along with 20,000 pages of electronic transcriptions of document and oral histories.