Users Council Annual Meeting – May 11, 2007

Welcome – Introduction of new members; role of Users Council members – Ellen Meltzer

There are 3 new members this year: Mitchell Brown (UCI), Leah Prescott, (Getty), and Kris Veldheer (GTU).

I want to thank you for acting as the communication channel from CDL to your campuses. Thank you to the CDL support staff who helped arrange the logistics, especially Nadine Graham, and to Jayne Dickson who is recording this meeting.

In your packets, you’ll see you have an agenda, a list of attendees, some of the PowerPoint presentations (but not all). All the PowerPoint presentations will be available on the web site after this meeting.

Lena Zentall has just arrived with a number of the Calisphere posters. Please take one if you’d like. Also just arrived is Sherry Willhite, our deep knowledge expert in a number of fields.

New Directions for CDL – Laine Farley

I’m Laine Farley, interim executive director at CDL. I’m very glad to be here today, many new faces. I have two stories to tell today. The first story is about how CDL has reorganized in the last year. The second story is how we’re refocusing our vision and direction.

See Laine’s PowerPoint presentation.

Digital Special Collections, including Calisphere – Lena Zentall

Good morning. I’m Lena Zentall from Digital Special Collections and I’m here to talk about Digital Special Collections, with a focus on Calisphere, CDL’s K-12 website.

See Lena’s PowerPoint presentation.

Questions

When you talked about zooming are you talking about Zoomify?

We are investigating Luratech, which uses jpeg 2000s.

What are you adding to Calisphere and how quickly?

We’re getting them from dozens of different contributors. Some of it is opportunistic; those that get a grant contribute new content to Calisphere. In addition, we are analyzing gaps in our content in terms of the K-12 California content standards, and will directly pursue content development in these critical areas.

Other teaching developments? What’s new in Calisphere?

We just integrated JARDA into Calisphere and created a theme collection for it. This is our latest one. We’re also expanding the existing California Cultures in the same style as our themed collections. CalCultures comprises 4 different ethnic groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans. Finally, we’re adding the ability to view QTVR objects (QuickTime) in Calisphere. (UC Merced contributed several hundred items in this format.)

Are you looking at any ways to create Finding Aids for the undergrad audience?

The way we found undergrads were using Calisphere was from our teaching libraries. We haven’t directly marketed to this that audience; we’ve been leaving this up to the teaching libraries. In talking with K-12 teachers we discovered high school students like that university students are using it. We may discover opportunities to bring more awareness to this audience and would even modify our website provided it doesn’t compromise the user experience for our primary audience, K-12.

Changing guidelines for OAC? The guidelines are a little cumbersome…are you looking to change any of these?

Robin Chandler will be here later this afternoon and this is a good question for her.

Digital Preservation – Trisha Cruse

Trisha is the Director of Digital Preservation Services. I think I know most of you although some faces are unfamiliar. I just want to give you some basic background on the Digital Preservation Program and then want to talk about a new service, a web archiving service.

See Trishas PowerPoint Presentation.

Questions

I have a question about the DPR…do you have the expectation that this is the full repository for your constituents, including digital archives, etc? Is this the whole solution for any of the UC campuses, including email archives?

Yes, this is part of our plan but also we might look to Amazon S3 and put things on top of it to make it more reliable and cheaper. Yes, the DPR is the failsafe place to preserve content.

And do you have plans or thoughts about taking submissions from electronic management records?

That’s what the Java toolkit is all about. The campuses have administrative records…how can they transport these directly into the DPR. We’re also working on a cost model to maintain this service.

What about data in different types of format (e.g., nine inch tapes)?

We’re not there yet. We’re currently talking to UCSB; they have recordings on wax cylinders and we haven’t come to a solution yet. If a department on campus thought they could handle the transfer? We’d be willing to talk to them.

With the web archive service…it will be rolled out to only one or two people?

One or more people at each UC campus and then we’ll roll this out to the larger community. If you have 3 people at each UC campuses crawling and then transferring to the DPR, we want to make sure that the service works correctly before rolling this out to a wider group.

Does that data belong to each campus separately or is it part of a huge collective?

That’s a good question. Right now, we’re talking about a huge collective. Down the line, and we’ve already had requests, for this…Can you crawl this faculty’s web space? And that won’t necessarily be made available to open access.

If you do have questions, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with people.

Verde – Heather Christenson

I’m CDL’s Project Manager for the ERMS project. In the brief time I have, I’m going to give you a high level overview of the ERMS project.

See Heather’s PowerPoint presentation.

Questions

Do you know if venders are starting to package their materials for use with ERMS systems?

I know EBSCO is starting to do this; some of the aggregators are starting to think about this.

Bibliographic Services – Patricia Martin

Hello, everybody. Ellen asked me to talk about Bibliographic Services. In my area, we have Melvyl, UC-eLinks, Request, MetaLib and the new UC/OCLC project.

See Patti’s PowerPoint presentation.

Questions

Irvine just rolled out the Zportal? Is it possible to use the facelift on the Zportal?

We are looking at making enhancements to the screen design. We are working on scheduling some user studies in late 2007 to see what we can do. CDL developed code that handles the IP recognition for the Request “facelift” which allows us to provide a form with campus specific options. This code is not part of the VDX/Zportal software. We would need to investigate the feasibility of trying to make the forms default to a specific look based on IP.

Some of the language on the Zportal form can be confusing, like library barcode? There are also prompts for passwords from some campuses and not all?

In addition to the layout changes for the Zportal screen, the language will be revised to be parallel to the language used in the Request form, e.g., instead of User ID and Password, we will use the more familiar terms such as, Library Card/Account Number and PIN. Based on the language used in the campus enduser literature for Zportal we are also “renaming” the service from “Request status” to “My ILL Requests”.

Users are authenticated against their campus circulation or LDAP servers. The password prompts are based on the campus requirements for user authentication.

With the forms being campus specific now, can we change the language in the forms?

The language in the Request forms will not be changed to campus specific text. The error messages, however, are specific to the user’s designated home campus.

There’s the chat reference where people from every campus are responding…what are the implications of IP address?

When we bring up the Request form, we check the end user’s IP address to place the user in the form used for the campus that matches the IP. However, if the user is coming in from a UC IP that is not on their home campus or a non-UC IP address, they can use the home campus menu on the Request screen to switch to the appropriate campus form.

Missing items…work is being done on this?

For monographs, Request checks the holdings and the circulation status. The campus circulation status is the key to determining availability. Most campuses supply a circulation status that clearly indicates the item is unavailable to users. Unfortunately, Voyager cannot provide this information.

For serials holdings, the Request processing software (PIR) looks at the beginning date and the end date or an “open” designation and then assumes that everything in between is available. It does not recognize gaps, missing issues, etc.

CDL is in the process of adding a new function to Request that could allow the enduser to override the decision that PIR has made about availability. The decision to use this new feature will be made campus by campus. If the campus decides not to use the “enduser override” (i.e., the campus opts out), nothing changes, everything functions as it does now. If the campus chooses to use the enduser override (i.e., opts in), then an item held by the home campus that comes up in Request as being available on the home campus (even if it is not really available), the user will be given the option to request the item instead of using DDS or skipping the item. There is also a second decision point in the process; ILL staff can decide to let these requests go through automatically, or they can choose to manually inspect these Requests. This should be available for campus testing in late June.

Have you looked at the relationship of the costs of using OCLC or Melvyl?

Laine: We’re waiting for OCLC to finalize the cost models but they’ve given us some estimates and they compare favorable at the moment.

Digital Publishing – Catherine Candee

See Catherine’s PowerPoint presentation.

Questions

The biggest question I get from faculty…the UC Press books, they are still vetted, reviewed…I guess they are nervous that these are being made available electronically? Which publisher do they go to in order to be properly received?

The restrictions of what you can do with your own manuscript. All publishers are struggling with this.

The problem of the book appearing to be denigrated just because they are electronic. This is starting to fall. National Academy Press has about 2,500 books now and still makes a profit. The tenure review needs to follow suit. UC Press says that we can’t afford to publish these scholarly books that only 25 people buy. They can digitally, however, and then publish in print if the demand is there.

The press is aware of real limits on their bandwidth. There are so many faculty that are experts in their fields that can … I think there is no other way to go if this is to be sustainable.

With the completion of the report at the end of summer, will the report have an abbreviated version for our faculty?

Yes, there will be an executive summary. UC will formally be supporting publishing in several ways.

As a new campus that is primarily digital online, what works with our faculty is a reception where you would be willing to really sell this?

Yes, as a matter of fact, Catherine will be coming to UC Merced in a few weeks.

In terms of indexing, are the things getting picked up?

Some things are and some are not.

Is there a relationship with the preservation effort?

Yes, we work really closely with the preservation repository. Hopefully, next Wednesday, we are meeting with the graduate deans and we are hoping that they will …

Indexing is really the greatest area of vulnerability. EBSCO won’t point to our web sites but will …

Mass Digitization Projects – Robin Chandler

See Robin’s PowerPoint presentation.

Questions

What does rejected mean?

It means they have literally decided not to scan it. The book might be damaged, or it might have foldouts, etc. We’ve tried to explain to the scanning sources that they are losing out by not selecting some books that have foldouts. In Microsoft’s case, they aren’t currently scanned, but they are flagged and will go back into the queue once we figure out how best to do this. In Google’s case, they simply don’t scan any of the foldout pages.

How much overlap is there between the Google project and the Internet Archive?

The bulk of the scanning is being drawn upon the RLFs. There’s about an 8% overlap; we can live with this.

What kind of return are Google & Microsoft expecting from the data that is in there?

I can’t answer that question.

What I’m saying, if you search on Google or Microsoft, the relevancy ranking is influenced by the provider? Are they adding value by influencing ranking?

I can’t answer that, but it is a really good question.

What I’ll do is I’ll look into this. One thing, a concrete sort of fact, Michigan is well ahead of the game because they’ve been doing Google scanning for over a year…recently I was at a meeting where they were comparing on a quarterly basis, we’re actually pretty competitive with Michigan now as far as the number of books scanned.

Felicia: One of the things were going to find as more and more things become digital, as you use Google more, if you are searching the full text of a million books, is it really helping you discover what you want to discover.

Another example, the office of scientific and technical information (Open Access repository for scientific materials)…they are partnering now with Google. When you search Google, you get the commercial version of the article, not the open access version.

The Cornyn – Lieberman bill, every dollar of government funding must be available open access. This is the way to get this stuff out there and undermine the commercial interests. And help with discovery. That’s the difference.

There is also the fact, within the Google Book search environment, there are publishers participating in this environment; are the books being weighted towards those that can be purchased?

Assessment activities – Felicia Poe; Jane Lee

Felicia Poe discussed recent assessment activities and provided a handout for discussion.

Reflections, especially from the campuses?

Frank Gravier: I think this sounds exactly what the people on the campuses need. I do think there are ways for people working on CDL projects for the word to get out. The communication can improve.

Bob Heyer-Grey: Good luck. People on the campuses need to cooperate and often that is the difficult part.

Felicia: I want you to take this handout back and give this to somebody and say please read this. Pass this on.

* * * * *

Jane Lee discussed the outcome of a recent assessment activity reviewing the upcoming changes to the UC-eLinks menu screen.

See Jane’s PowerPoint presentation.

Questions

Did you use a variety of different journals?

Yes, although most of the full text came from SpringerLink, etc.

I think this is great, and the one thing we have power over is to warn users that it might not end in full text after all.

Were these mostly undergraduates?

They were upper division undergraduates.

One suggestion I made, change the Citation Management name to “Add this to your bibliography”.

Lizbeth Langston: I vaguely remember the preliminary results of this…HOPS asked for your input and HOPS wanted to have ownership of this issue. Then HOPS looked at the results, one of the recommendations was not to have the “More options”…the labels is much friendlier. HOPS has made final comments and then this will go out to the campuses for a final round of recommendations. This will go out this summer so you have a chance to update any handouts for fall.

Jane: One of the other things that came out of this…Wikipedia gets mentioned more and more. Many students are using Wikipedia as the starting point of their research.

General questions; wrap up – All

Questions

On Irvine’s campus, faculty interested in e-Science projects, for us, what is our role…regarding huge datasets, how does this integrate with CDL?

Ellen: Talk to Catherine and Trisha Cruse.

A lot of what came up in the presentations, open source products starting to have library components built into them…is this something the Users Group would look into and make recommendations?

That’s not exactly our mission, more like through the Heads of Public Services…