Library Staff News

a. Alvin Pollock Joins the CDL

The Online Archive of California (OAC) is pleased to announce that Alvin Pollock is officially devoting 50% of his programming time to OAC projects.  Alvin worked closely with Daniel Pitti on the development of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard at UC Berkeley when it was known as the Berkeley Finding Aid Project (BFAP).

Alvin’s knowledge, skills and abilities were instrumental in the success of the UC EAD Project, precursor to the CDL OAC program.  The UC EAD Project applied the EAD standard to UC Special Collections and University Archives finding aids.  During the UC EAD project, Alvin led us through the difficult terrain of ingesting and publishing over 4,000 finding aids using the Dynaweb software.

Most recently, Alvin’s skills have been applied to the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA) and the Museum Online Archive of California (MOAC). Currently, Alvin has completed work on the first phase of the OAC Ingest Tool release that has automated the process of uploading finding aids into the OAC.  The Ingest Tool is available from the CDL Libstaff site: http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/oac/ .  Periodically, OAC participants ftp finding aids to the CDL servers where they are automatically parsed and checked for compliance with EAD encoding standards and with the OAC Best Practice Guidelines for Encoding New Finding Aids (OAC BPG).  A log is generated indicating errors and needed corrections.  In phase two of the OAC Ingest Tool release, the generated error messages will link directly to relevant sections of the OAC BPG.

Alvin has also recently completed some revisions to the OAC Dynaweb User Interface. During the Fall 2001, Rosalie Lack completed a series of OAC user evaluation studies with archivists and graduate students.  These studies resulted in the OAC Usability Report that is available at http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/oac/.  Based on these results, Alvin enhanced the interface of the OAC in the hope of improving navigation and retrieval on the website.

We are very thrilled to have Berkeley’s support of this co-library project and to have Alvin’s continued expertise in support of the OAC