Library Technology Guides

California Universities and Oxford University Press sign landmark open access agreement. The 10-campus University of California system, 20 of 23 California State University campuses, and 30 private academic and research institutions represented by the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium have reached a comprehensive four-year transformative open access agreement with Oxford University Press. The agreement begins this month and will provide affiliated researchers with access to OUP's world-leading journals and support for publishing their work open access. [Full Announcement].

WEST's new pilot with member libraries and the Internet Archive aims to maximize deselections, expand access, and enhance preservation. WEST is launching a pilot to amplify and support library collaborative strategies for print collection management and preservation. Specifically, the pilot will involve coordinating the donation of duplicate copies of WEST archived titles to the Internet Archive to expand digitization and access via RapidILL for print serials. [Full Announcement].

UC Libraries endorse Joint Statement on the Metadata Rights of Libraries. On behalf of the UC Libraries, the Council of University Librarians has unanimously approved endorsement of the Joint Statement on the Metadata Rights of Libraries. Released in March 2023 by the International Coalition of Library Consortia and the ALA Core Metadata & Collections Section, the statement reads: “The endorsers listed below urge all organizations, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, to uphold libraries' rights and interests to use, re-use, adapt, aggregate, and share metadata that describes library collections to serve the public interest, without restriction or limitation.” [Full Announcement].

Investigating a better UC ebook reading experience: Phase 1 report. The UC Palace Project Team completed their phase 1 investigation of the Palace ebook reading platform in summer 2023 and submitted a report to the Direction and Oversight Committee (DOC) in fall 2023. DOC endorsed the report recommendations at their December 5, 2023 meeting. [Full Announcement].

Good news in Shared Collections: Lisa Moske. After a recent recruitment, Lisa Moske has been hired as the successful candidate for the Shared Collections Service Manager position. As the Shared Collections Service Manager, Lisa will be working in a similar position though one with more responsibility. She has been, and will continue, in a key role on the Licensed Content Team. In the expanded position, Lisa's role includes provides direct support to UC campus library leadership, librarians, and staff to determine areas of UC systemwide interest, establishing priorities for digital content acquisition, and resolving problems. [Full Announcement].

University of California to research expanded access to digitized books. University of California libraries — which comprise the largest university research library in the world — are launching a landmark research project to investigate the potential for expanded lawful use of digitized books held by academic and research libraries. The Mellon Foundation is providing $1.1 million support for Project LEND (Library Expansion of Networked Delivery), a two-year project that the UC Davis Library will lead on behalf of the 10-campus UC system. [Full Announcement].

Welcome Miranda Bennett, CDL's new Director of Shared Collections. California Digital Library announced that Miranda Bennett has been appointed as its new Director of Shared Collections, with a start date of October 3rd 2022. In collaboration with the ten University of California campuses, this program licenses shared digital materials, negotiates open access publisher agreements, acquires and catalogs scholarly content, and supports shared print library collections. As Director of Shared Collections, Miranda will provide leadership for the open access transformation of scholarly communications, the continuing integration of shared print into the lifecycle of library collections, and the evolution of long-standing systemwide collections services, including all aspects of licensing and access to digital resources. [Full Announcement].

New pilot open access agreement between the University of California and Wiley. The University of California announced that as of March 15, corresponding authors at all ten UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who publish open access articles in Wiley journals will receive a 15 percent discount on the open access fee as part of a new pilot agreement UC has negotiated with the publisher. [Full Announcement].

UC Davis Library and California Digital Library launch project to explore expanded lending of digitized books. Digitized books have become increasingly popular in recent years, and for university libraries and scholars, the first 18 months of the pandemic threw their value into sharp relief. As campuses across the country closed, many libraries began offering expanded access to digital versions of the print books in their collections as an emergency measure, driving ebook use to new heights and unexpectedly launching a large-scale experiment in online scholarship. [Full Announcement].

Next Generation Library Publishing Project announces partnership with Janeway. Janeway will join the California Digital Library and Longleaf to pilot three different service models for the software components developed through the Next Generation Library Publishing project. [Full Announcement].

EarthArXiv announces new partnership with California Digital Library to host earth sciences preprint service. The Advisory Council of the EarthArXiv preprint service for earth sciences announced a partnership with the California Digital Library that will support EarthArXiv's mission, future growth, and long-term sustainability. Core to this partnership will be the transition of EarthArXiv's preprints server – including public display and submission management – from the Center for Open Science to the eScholarship Publishing program at the CDL. CDL will host EarthArXiv using Janeway, an open source publishing platform developed by the Centre for Technology and Publishing and the Open Library of Humanities at Birkbeck University of London. EarthArXiv's Advisory Council will maintain ownership and control over the preprint server, while the eScholarship Publishing team will contribute to the development, support, and maintenance of the Janeway platform. [Full Announcement].

Redesigned eScholarship site launches. The Publishing group at the California Digital Library announced the launch of a major redesign of the eScholarship repository and publishing platform. eScholarship serves as the Open Access repository for the University of California system, offering tools and services to help UC scholars and researchers openly share the full range of their scholarly work. eScholarship also provides a comprehensive Open Access publishing program, currently publishing over 70 academic journals across academic disciplines. [Full Announcement].

Announcing Zephir, HathiTrust's new bibliographic metadata management system. HathiTrust announced the release of a new, state-of-the-art bibliographic management system for its 11-million volume digital repository. The new system, called Zephir, is developed and managed by the California Digital Library, and represents the first distributed development of a major repository component outside the University of Michigan. [Full Announcement].

California Digital Library and Partners Launch DataUp. The University of California’s Digital Library and its partnerslaunched DataUp, a free data management tool. Researchers struggling to meet new data management requirements from funders, journals and their own institutions now can use the DataUp Web application and a Microsoft Excel add-in to document and archive their tabular data. [Full Announcement].

California Digital Library joins PKP as major development partner in open access scholarly publishing. The California Digital Library, on behalf of the University of California system, will supporting open source publishing infrastructure through a major development partnership with the Public Knowledge Project. As a result of this agreement, the CDL will assist with PKP's ongoing development and support of its open source software suite - Open Journal Systems, Open Conference Systems, and Open Harvester System, with Open Monograph Press due for release in the coming year. [Full Announcement].

Moving Forward with Next Generation Melvyl. With the endorsement of the University Librarians, UCLA will procure WorldCat Local as the infrastructure for Next Generation Melvyl; once finished, Melvyl @ University of California will become UC’s official Melvyl discovery and access service. The decision was made after an initial pilot launch in April 2008 and an extensive evaluation phase beginning in August of 2009 that included input from UC students, faculty, staff, librarians, and from those outside the UC system. Timelines will be developed for a plan for discontinuing the current Melvyl catalog, after a short overlap period that will extend for two weeks past the end of finals on all campuses. Using WorldCat Local moves discovery beyond the local level to the network level. While limiting the scope of discovery to local catalogs made sense in the analog library in order to meet timely delivery expectations, this technique makes less sense in the digital library environment, where the delivery of information to users depends less on a user’s location than on her credentials. [Full Announcement].

California Digital Library announces release of XTF Version 3.0. The California Digital Library announced the release of version 3.0 of XTF, an open source, highly flexible software application that supports the search, browse and display of heterogeneous digital content. XTF provides efficient and practical methods for creating customized end-user interfaces for distinct digital content collections and is used by institutions worldwide. [Full Announcement].

Mellon Grant Awarded to University of California Libraries to Implement the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST). The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of California Libraries a three-year grant to support implementation of the Western Regional Storage Trust, a distributed shared print repository program for retrospective journal archives. Twenty libraries and library consortia participated in the planning phase, including libraries from the University of California system, Stanford University, Arizona State University, the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, other members of the Orbis Cascade Alliance, the Greater Western Library Alliance, and the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium. More than 60 additional academic libraries have expressed an intention to join the project as it moves into implementation. [Full Announcement].

eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) Website launched -- robust open-source application makes managing access to digital content simple. The Publishing Group of the California Digital Library (CDL) announces the launch of the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) website (http://xtf.cdlib.org/), supporting a robust open-source application for providing access to digital content. Developed and maintained by the CDL, XTF functions as the primary access technology for the CDL’s digital collections and similar projects worldwide. XTF excels in supporting rapid, customized application development and deployment. Its high degree of extensibility and performance (even for large documents and large collections) frees implementers to focus on building sophisticated presentations for their digital object collections. [Full Announcement].

Web archiving service preserves data for the future. Researchers and scholars now will be able to delve into archived Web sites captured by the California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service (WAS). This new tool enables faculty, researchers and librarians to capture, curate and preserve Web sites, thus creating permanent archives available to researchers everywhere. The social history of our times is now being preserved in archives as rich and varied as the contentious 2003 California recall election, hundreds of California state Web archives, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp Web archive and the Middle East Political Sites archive. [Full Announcement].