Users Council Annual Meeting Agenda
Friday, April 28, 2006
Nile Hall, Preservation Park, Oakland
http://www.preservationpark.com/maps/index.html

Attending:  Ivy Anderson (CDL), Ira Bray (CSL), Carrie Burroughs (CAS), Barbara Butler (CSUC -- Sonoma State), Robin Chandler (CDL), Penny Coppernoll-Blach (UCSD), Jayne Dickson (CDL), Dennis Elchesen (LLNL), Susan Flanagan (Getty), Frank Gravier (UCSC), Gabriella Gray (UCLA), Daniel Greenstein (CDL), Bob Heyer-Gray (UCD), Michelle Jacobs (UCM), Charleen Kubota (UCB), Rosalie Lack (CDL), Lizbeth Langston (UCR), Lorna Lueck (UCSB), Patti Martin (CDL), Ellen Meltzer (CDL), Joan Starr (CDL), Josephine Tan (UCSF), Roy Tennant (CDL), Margery Tibbetts (CDL), Jane Tierney (LBNL), Heather Tunender (UCI), Linda Weir (Hastings), Sherry Willhite (CDL), and ShinJoung Yeo (Stanford).

9:00-9:45 AM 			Continental breakfast

9:45-10:05			Welcome - New Directions for CDL – Daniel Greenstein

See “The California Digital Library – Supporting Scholarship, Building Collections & Services, Fostering Innovation & Collaboration” handout (in packet).

What’s new at the CDL?  There’s a lot going on.  Our core activity is that we support the libraries and their collections and the library users.  When CDL started out in 1996, its primary function was licensed content.  Now, our scope includes many new aspects, such as shared print, digital reformatting, collections of materials that need to be preserved, etc.

Questions on our scope are always arising.  For example, regarding shared print…Should we take the IEEE content and build a facility to maintain this content and should we digitize this?

How do we work with you and your collection development officers to build the collections that your users need? 

In the collection pipeline, Tier 2 is becoming an important issue.  Recently, questions about how Tier 2 resources are managed have arisen from the work of the East Asian Bib Group. 

Other projects we’re dealing with - Metasearch, VDX, Melvyl, etc.

If you look across this range of activities, we find that our users’ needs are changing constantly and are doing so very quickly and we can barely keep pace.

Some of our other projects include publishing support services (eScholarship).  We support monograph distribution for UC Press, we help faculty publish, and there is so much more to do.  And how do we do this?

UC Press – currently, we work with them to distribute their monographs.  Soon, we’ll be distributing 60 years of agricultural journals as well.

Another area, Preservation…after 3 years and 432 million dollars, we have a way to do this.  We’ve preserved some large datasets for campuses.  We’re in the process of capturing web-based materials (California recall election, Katrina web sites, etc)…we need to think about how to make this pay for itself.  

Digital special collections.  “Skunks-worthy” projects, such as the Online Archive of California, JARDA, Counting California, public web site.

How do you actually move these digital special collections into production?  Of course, libraries build special collections and we, CDL, build digital special collections.  Having embraced this concept, how to we make these pay for themselves?

How do you proliferate niche-special collections without re-inventing the wheel?  

Metadata harvesting, metadata enriching, skin-and-slice…hey, these tools are cool.  Maybe we should provide these tools to our libraries?  It may be that we will continue to build these special collections, American West, Calisphere…

Finally, Ivy Anderson has come to handle our licensed content.  Ivy is currently making campus visits.  

Couple new things…Joan Starr is here to help us manage all our projects.  Our scope is pretty wide and we need focus for our projects. 

Ellen Meltzer is now supervising our new unit, Information Services – campus support services.  Jayne Dickson, Sherry Willhite are part of this unit and we’ll put this on steroids and bump up the 
volume to support our new services and collections.

Ours is a message of consolidation, integration, outreach and communication and these messages are so timely now.

Questions?  No questions.

10:05-10:10	Introduction of new members; role of Users Council members – Ellen Meltzer

See “Recap of Activities May 2005 – April 2006” handout (in packet) for new and re-appointed members, in addition to a list of the activities during this time on which Users Council was consulted.

Packets – right hand side – you’ll find the agenda and a recap of Users Council activity since last year.  On the left side, you’ll find handouts describing several of our projects and services, both those currently in production and those in the works.

As always, your role as Users Council liaisons is so important to us for getting information out to your communities.  Thank you for your participation.

Note:  In addition to the other new members, Ellen neglected to mention that Charleen Kubota (UCB) is also new to Users Council as of this meeting.

10:10-10:45	Open Content Alliance – Robin Chandler 

See “The University of California Libraries Open Content Alliance” handout (in packet).  Also, see Robin’s PowerPoint presentation for more information on the OCA.  

Math books?  Are they going to be there as a separate collection?  

At this point, the best way to find them is by doing a search for “mathematics” in the search box.  The UC Libraries collection is separate, but that doesn’t help you locate specific genres.  The OCA has recently mentioned that they would like a specific “math” portal set up.

What do you mean by building collections and allowing others to build on top of this?  

There are a number of possible ways for this to happen.  It could be as simple as a web page with active links.  It could be linking from a catalog, a Melvyl retrieval.  Since the text can be downloaded and is freely available, you can create your own portals and make these resources available directly from them.  If you look at the HTTP, you can see all the content files and metadata and grab these for your own uses.

How do you print an entire book or in pieces?  

The Internet Archive has bookmobiles that go around…they let children find a book they want and then they download the file and bind it and give it to them.  These are PDF files and you can do what you want with these.

What kind of usage reports will be made available?  

At this point, the Internet Archives is not providing specific reports.  If you look in the upper right corner, there is a batting average that gives information on how much an item is used.  

[According to Bob Heyer-Gray, the batting average reflects how often a book as looked at and then downloaded.]

What about orphaned works?

 As you are aware, there is a lot of interest in this now.  We’ve yet to hear from congress on their ruling on this.  The Internet Archive is keeping some data on if a book is in the gray area of orphan works.  

10:45-11:10	Calisphere – Rosalie Lack 

See “Calisphere – a world of primary sources” handout (in packet).  Also, see Rosalie’s PowerPoint presentation on Calisphere for additional information.

Calisphere is a new web site we’re creating here at CDL.  It is primary-source material and more.  We’re hoping to go live with this in June 2006.

OAC is the Online Archive of California.  It is a Finding Aid site and the audience is archivists, librarians, etc.

Teachers come from another direction.  We wanted to serve this audience.  We took the digital objects that are in the OAC (160,000 digital images, texts, histories, etc.) and reworked the presentation to create this site for the K-12 community.  We hired a consultant to interview teachers, we worked with Interactive University at Berkeley and we did testing with teachers for user needs.

What we learned is that teachers do need resources, but not just any resources.  K- 12 teachers trust the UC name and feel confident using UC content.

Who wrote the content?  

We hired a writer who worked for the LC and had also done some work writing for children.  Additionally, we had another writer from the Oakland Museum consult on the project.

At UCM, we’ve been providing the high school teachers with sessions on using library facilities.  Would you be willing to come make a presentation?  

Yes.  Rosalie plans to schedule this for July 2006.

Is this so California-centric that this will not be of use to others?  

Although we’ve been focusing on California teachers, this information is useful to everyone. 

Are the visual themes cataloged in Melvyl?  

No, they’re not, but that is a good idea.  CDL will follow-up on this.

On JARDA, are you aware of the Japanese American newspapers?  

JARDA was a project from 5 years ago and the currency of this project is …

We’ve been working on the American West and we’re now starting to consider how to keep these projects current.  

Is there a URL?  

We have a URL but there isn’t anything there right now.  But good news is that Calisphere is a made-up word so you’ll find us if you Google us.  

11:10-11:55	Metasearch Infrastructure Project – Roy Tennant 

See “Metasearch Infrastructure Project” handout (in packet).  Also, see Roy’s PowerPoint presentation for more information.

I want to define some terms…Metasearch:  simultaneous searches of remote resources that you do not control.  

Federated searching is where you bring stuff into your control and you search it locally.  Example, OAIster, which aggregates metadata for digital objects from all over the world.

Infrastructure:  A tool for the campuses to create their own portals. 

API:  Application Program Interface – allows software to talk to software.

Service-oriented architecture (aka, common framework): software components that speak to each other through a common protocol.
 
When will you be on track to line up early adopters?  

I don’t know.  We currently have the UCLA team and we need to get them up and running.  We might be able to track on some more early adopters by mid-summer.

The UCLA team for European studies is creating a portal.  We’ve done some needs assessment work here, the UCLA team has contacted faculty re: what their needs are.  

MetaLib speed is a real issue.  Now that you’re adding layers to MetaLib, how will your speed be affected?  

We don’t know just yet.  We’re working to mitigate (via AJAX technology) some of the known speed issues.  We’re trying to see what other kinds of improvements we can make to the speed problems.  

Load, as we go forward (more portals), hardware, RAM, we’ll monitor these issues and consider the possibilities of how to speed things up.  But this is a slow process and you can only do so much when searching multiple sources.

11:55-12:45	Lunch 

12:45- 2:15 PM		Bibliographic Services – Patricia Martin

See “Melvyl Catalog”, “UC-eLinks”, and “Melvyl Recommender Project” handouts (in packet).
Also, see Patti’s PowerPoint presentation for more information.

•	Melvyl
Currently loading about 200,000 Pinyin records (UCB project).  

Reminder:  CDL needs campus input and assistance for Melvyl v.16.02 QA testing.  With any luck, we should be able to move this into production in December 2006.  Patti knocks on wood.  

Is there any new documentation on new features, functionality, etc.?  

We’ll provide this information as we get closer to December.

•	UC-eLinks
No UC-eLinks questions were asked.

•	ERMS (Verde)

Who is in the group of early adopters?  

Ex Libris currently doesn’t have anyone signed up as an early adopter, with a firm timeline.

Will you be able to get usage statistics for your resources?  

Yes.  Currently, Verde is COUNTER-compliant and they will support SUSHI two versions out (v. 3.0).

•	BSTF

About the single catalog interface for the UCs…do you think that will be Melvyl?  And should we stop putting work into our own catalog?  

It’s too early to say what the catalog will be and it will take quite a while before the plan is completed and even longer to get steps in place.  Keep working on your own catalog.

At our campus (UCSB), we spent a lot of time talking about the report…we decided that you should always get an answer when using the catalog.

That was one of the design principles that we used to guide the system.  

So why not partner with Google and let them do it?

We actually thought about that.  It was one of the recommendations of the task force as was letting OCLC or RLG handle this.

One of the reasons for not going with Google is that it is not their core business.  There isn’t a lot of security working with them.  You can’t tell where their priorities will be in 5 or 10 years.

What about partnering with WorldCat?  

OCLC isn’t in this business either but they are looking at it.  There are some definite limitations with what OCLC can do (getting down to the minutia of our records), based on our requirements.

2:15 – 2:45		Update on Licensed Content and Request – Sherry Willhite 

See “UC Libraries Shared Cataloging Program” and “Request – Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery” handouts (in packet).  Also, see Sherry’s PowerPoint presentation for more information.

On the Citation Linker form (book form), if you put in the following information: 

Author: Rao
Title: Vibration
Date: 2004

The form returns a Journal by the name “Vibration”.  Why is this and can we fix it?

The reason this happens is that the SFX software supports only Book, Book Chapter and Journal.
We simply put another ‘name’ on the Book form (e.g., Government Document).  The issue is how many of these special forms can we continue to support.

For the example given above, the system is going to the KnowledgeBase and it tries to get the end-user their information.  Since some campuses catalog this title as a Journal, it locates the title in the KB and attempts to fill the Request (even when the wrong item is located).

Another issue: CSA – because they have a competing product to EndNote, they don’t do Direct Export to the other major products.

This is first up on my list for vendor-butt to kick.  We are working on this.  This is inexcusable and is not giving our users what they need.

Do you prefer we call or email? 

If a resource is unavailable, please call.  The sooner you call, the sooner we can fix it.  If it is anything other than a resource being unavailable, please feel free to send email if that is more convenient for you.

I’m the e-journal troubleshooter, our end-users are our QA.  Is there any way we can do something proactive?  

Do you have any suggestions about how to address this in context?  Send Sherry email about journal content problems and how long you’ve been experiencing problems with them.

Jayne: Send information about pre-1997 missing content issues to Users Council.  Done.

2:45 – 2:50			New Information Services Unit – Ellen Meltzer			

Units that report to Laine Farley have been re-organized.  In the CDL Services section, there is now a 
•	Service Design unit that includes Roy Tennant (Manager) and Heather Christenson
•	Assessment unit that includes Felicia Poe (Assessment Coordinator) and Jane Lee
•	Web Development Services unit that includes Steve Toub (Manager), Lena Zentall, Eric Satzman, Pam Daniels, and Robin Davis-White
•	Public Content Development unit that includes Rosalie Lack (Manager)
•	Bibliographic Services unit that includes Patti Martin (Manager), Rebecca Doherty, and Virginia Sinclair
•	Information Services unit that includes Ellen Meltzer (Manager), Sherry Willhite and Jayne Dickson

One of our goals in expanding the Information Services section is to continue to support CDL’s new products like MetaLib and Calisphere.  We will deal with instructional outreach, triage, response to feedbacks, etc.  You’ll be hearing more about this exciting new group as time goes on.

UC-eLinks feature…copy & paste citation?  When you copy the URL into Word, there is a limitation to the number of characters a URL can be.  This invariably lops off the end of the URL?

This is a Word issue.  We’ll see what we can find out about this for you.

2:50 – 3:00 	General questions– All

No more questions.  Meeting ended on time.