Roy Tennant to Participate in the eScholarship Initiative

Pat Maughan in Print!

Ethnic Studies Library Chinese-American Archives Control and Access Project Grant Award

My Day with the Information Design Guru – Jim Ronningen

Reference in the New Millennium – A Brief Report on the VRD 1999 Annual Digital Reference Conference, Harvard Graduate School of Education, October 14-15, 1999

California Digital Library Enhancements: January 2000 Release Features New Content and Services, Experimental Resources, and More

Librarian Positions Open at UCB

LA III Position Open in Law Library

Staff Recruitment Report

Roy Tennant to Participate in the eScholarship Initiative

I am pleased to announce that as of January 3, 2000, Roy Tennant has begun a temporary part-time assignment in the California Digital Library, where he will be the Web and Service Designer for the eScholarship initiative. The goal of eScholarship is to create an infrastructure available to scholars to support immediate dissemination and access to scholarship and for the development of innovations in scholarly communication. More information on eScholarship is available at http://www.cdlib.org/eschol/.

The assignment will be reviewed at the end of every quarter, with a first quarter commitment of 70% time, and an expected second quarter commitment of 50% time. Roy will be spending Thursdays at CDL, as well as other days as required. His number at CDL is 987-0476.

Bernie Hurley
Director for Library Technologies

Pat Maughan in Print!

"Library Resources and Services: a Cross-Disciplinary Survey of Faculty and Graduate Student Use and Satisfaction" by Pat Davitt Maughan appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship, volume 25, Number 5, September 1999, pp. 354-366.

This lead article in the September issue of the The Journal of Academic Librarianship describes the results of a UC Berkeley Library survey of campus faculty and graduate students in Ancient History & Mediterranean Archaeology, Business, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Classics, Latin American Studies, and Political Science. The survey, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources and conducted by the Teaching Library's Pat Maughan in the Fall of 1997, measures current activities and outcomes of library use by faculty and graduate students, analyzes onsite v. remote use of library resources, explores user preferences for print v. electronic materials, and examines user satisfaction with library-provided collections and services.

The survey revealed that all respondents, regardless of academic discipline, consult a narrower range of materials than had been expected and regularly consult older published materials. Not surprisingly, faculty and graduate students consistently expressed a desire for simpler and more integrated search systems.

Congratulations, Pat!

Ellen Meltzer Head, Teaching Library

Ethnic Studies Library Chinese-American Archives Control and Access Project Grant Award

The Ethnic Studies Library, in collaboration with The Bancroft Library, has received a California State Library LSTA grant to fully process, rehouse, and catalog the Chinese American collections of the Asian American Studies Archives. Library Assistant Janice Otani, serves as Project Archivist to complete this momentous project, assisted by Jianxin "James" Liu, and student assistants, Yau Chau "Ringo" Chan and Waisum Poon. Mary Morganti, Supervising Archivist at The Bancroft Library, is training project staff and overseeing archival processing, description, and cataloging. After the project is completed, the Ethnic Studies Library will continue to arrange and describe all their other archival collections, including Native American and Chicano materials. During the project, which runs from October 1999 through September 2000, access to these collections will be extremely limited. For further information, please contact the Curator, Wei Chi Poon.

Lilly Castillo-Speed
Head, Ethnic Studies Library
Wei Chi Poon
Curator for Asian American Studies Collection
Ethnic Studies Library
Theresa Salazar
Curator of the Bancroft Collection of Western Americana
The Bancroft Library

My Day with the Information Design Guru

The Staff Development Committee funded my attendance at "Presenting Data and Information," a one-day course given by Edward Tufte in San Francisco on December 9. Tufte is listed in the Yale directory as "Prof. Emeritus Political Science and Sr. Critic Graphic Design." It's the latter role for which he has become well-known, but the narrow connotation of 'graphic design' doesn't convey the depth and widespread applicability of his teachings about the effective display of information. Through his books and lectures, he describes approaches for analyzing the nature of the content to be presented, then choosing the formats and visual elements that are most appropriate for getting it across.

The morning was spent going over general principles of good information design, which are independent of any particular medium. To illustrate his premise that "good design is like clear thinking made visible," he discussed several case studies. Two memorable examples of what worked and what didn't: a chart detailing the crimes committed by witnesses for the prosecution against John Gotti, which the jurors felt thoroughly discredited them and led to Gotti's acquittal, and the fumbled case made by Morton Thiokol engineers to NASA officials about the probability of the space shuttle Challenger's booster rocket o-ring failure in cold weather. Tufte's frustration was obvious as he argued that a clear, hard-hitting presentation of the statistical evidence could have delayed the flight and saved the lives of the crew and elementary school teacher on board.

Since reading his book Visual Explanations several years ago, I'd wondered what he might have to say about web site design. I wasn't disappointed, because the afternoon was spent on specific topics including computer interface issues. His guidelines focused on efficient use of the small space available, minimizing scrolling and drilling down through layers of pages, with reminders about the low resolution and other limitations of the computer screen. The three other library staff members who attended the course also found this section particularly useful, since we are increasingly confronted with the problem of informing our patrons (and each other) online.

I'll be happy to discuss this course and the related materials with anybody who wants to contact me. My thanks go to the Staff Development Committee for paying my way. I encourage more of you to take advantage of this benefit of working in our library system!

Jim Ronningen
GSSI & Earth Sciences libraries

Reference in the New Millennium - A Brief Report on the VRD 1999 Annual Digital Reference Conference, Harvard Graduate School of Education, October 14-15, 1999

How is digital reference moving beyond the simple e-mail link or form? Does the adoption of other technologies for the delivery of reference make sense given our circumstances at UCB? These are the questions we took with us to the VRD conference last October on behalf of the Public Services Council. The combination of theoretical discussion and demos of fledgling services certainly gave us a better sense of new directions and possibilities, although from among these which alternate paths to take (if any) and how to effectively bring new tools into play locally remain open questions.

R. David Lankes, Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on IT, delivered the keynote address, followed by presentations from Joseph Janes, LIS faculty at the U of Washington and Steve Coffman, Director of FYI, LA Public Library. In laying out the future of digital reference, common threads tying together each of the talks were an emphasis on the role collaboration between institutions would play, the heterogeneity of technical tools and economic models to be employed in its implementation, as well as the usual anxious subtext on the necessity for innovation within libraries.

Janes, the founder of The Internet Public Library, argued in particular for the collaborative leveraging of resources – unique information, expert personnel and adaptive uses of technology – that others in the information delivery game may be weak in or lacking. He cited ILL, OCLC and email discussion lists as examples of the larger library community's penchant for getting things done cooperatively.

Coffman focused more narrowly on the call center model for networked reference. He argued that the efficient distribution of web-based and phone reference queries outward from a central hub via the network to those best qualified and available to respond would achieve both better service and lowered costs. Again, collaboration would be the key, although such services could also be supported through barter and subscription. Coffman is currently helping oversee the development of just such a reference delivery system for LAPL using Webline software.

There were three breakout sessions, of which we chose to attend the one entitled "Building Digital Reference Services and Networks." Diane Kresh, Director for Public Service Collections, Library of Congress, began by giving a presentation on LC's Collaborative Digital Reference Service initiative. The goal of this program is to create a digital reference service consisting of an international collaborative network of national, academic, public, and special libraries. As of October 14 the following institutions had expressed an interest in joining this service: Library of Congress, Cornell University, National Agricultural Library, National Library of Canada, National Library of Australia, University of Texas and University of Washington. The goal is to have the first phase of the pilot project ready by February 1, 2000.

The rest of the day's program was devoted to spotlighting technology through demonstrations of current real time digital reference services and other pieces of software that have been developed or adapted for this purpose. Susan McGlamery and Steve Coffman spoke in more detail about the LAPL initiative that features Webline: obtaining the server, scalability issues, the cost of participation for other institutions through agent licenses. There was no live demonstration of the software.

Among the rest of the presentations, demonstrations from Temple University Libraries, the University of Calgary Library and the Remedy Corporation stood out. Temple has integrated real-time interaction with traditional reference services through a pilot project called TalkBack. The service features a simple web based form on the front end that works in tandem with chat/pager technology. Programming and scripting are not necessary, and the software costs are negligible, although functionality is limited. Temple is currently working with TalkBack's developer to produce a more sophisticated version of the software for Linux called TalkNow that will feature file and application sharing, as well as video and audio. For more information please refer to http://www.library.temple.edu/ref/ask_us.htm.

The University of Calgary Library demonstrated its Wizard Online Electronic Reference (not currently available), another pilot project of real-time electronic reference service which uses a commercial helpdesk software from Net Effect ( http://www.neteffect.com/), recently purchased by AskJeeves. The Net Effect software is similar in its features to Webline, allowing for co-browsing, the ability to "push" information to a patron's browser and the archiving of reference interactions.

The Remedy Corporation, which is working with the Virtual Reference Desk Project, demo'd the software that will allow the VRD to consolidate access to disparate AskA reference services into a single front end. The software allows for the "triage" of questions before distribution, as well as the archiving of all interactions. Participation is free for any institution wishing to establish an AskA service.

Oliver Heyer
Teaching Library
Nensi Brailo
Reference and Information Services