The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...

in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management and improved support for teaching and research. In collaboration with the ten

University of California Libraries The University of California operates the largest academic library system in the world. It manages more than 40.8 million print volumes in 100 libraries on ten campuses. The purpose of these libraries is to assist research and instruction on the ...

and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog (UC's union catalog), CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

libraries A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

museums A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...

, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as

digital curation Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished ...

, scholarly publishing,

archiving An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...

and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.

History

The California Digital Library (CDL) is the eleventh library for the University of California (UC). A collaborative effort of the ten campuses, organizationally housed at the University of California Office of the President, it is responsible for the design, creation, and implementation of systems that support the shared collections of the University of California. Several CDL projects focus on collaboration with other California Universities and organizations to create and extend access to digital material to UC partners and to the public at large. The CDL was created as the result of a three-year planning process, beginning with the Digital Library Executive Working Group commissioned by Library Council and culminating with the Library Planning and Action Initiative commissioned by the Provost, which involved UC faculty, librarians, and administrators. On February 7, 2012, CDL partnered with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), joining several other institutions including Stanford University School of Education and the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. As one of PKP's first official development partners, CDL undertook a review of PKP's Open Journal System, analyzing journal setup, article submission and review, account set up, and publication processes.

Access & Publishing Services

The Access & Publishing Group, comprising the Publishing and Digital Special Collections (DSC) teams, develops and maintains production services that enable robust access to the unique digital assets of the University of California and beyond. The Publishing team provides the University of California scholarly community with innovative digital publication and distribution opportunities through the development of advanced technologies and creative partnerships. The DSC team supports collaboration between libraries, archives, and museums throughout the State of California to provide access to a world class digital collection that serves an array of end users, from researchers and scholars to students and the general public.

eScholarship

eScholarship is a suite of

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

scholarly publishing services and research tools that enable UC departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of their scholarship. The eScholarship program provides e-print repositories where submissions can be made using a standard web browser. Tools are available to help submit, review, find, and use scholarly information. The program also opens the door for new monographs and journals to be created using existing articles within the repository. Currently, the repository houses over 200,000 scholarly works from 10 major disciplines: Social and Behavioral Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Engineering, Medicine and Health Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Education, Law, Business, and Architecture.

Online Archive of California (OAC)

The Online Archive of California (OAC), a

finding aid A finding aid, in the context of archival science, is an organization tool, a document containing detailed, indexed, and processed metadata and other information about a specific collection of records within an archive. Finding aids often consist o ...

s database for archival institutions, provides free public access to primary sources, including manuscripts, photographs, artwork, scientific data, through more than 38,000 collection guides and 200,000 digitized images and documents.

Calisphere

Calisphere is a free website that offers educators, students, and the public access to more than one million

primary source In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under ...

s such as photographs, documents, newspapers,

political cartoons A political cartoon, a form of editorial cartoon, is a cartoon graphic with caricatures of public figures, expressing the artist's opinion. An artist who writes and draws such images is known as an editorial cartoonist. They typically combine ...

, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, and other

cultural artifacts A cultural artifact, or cultural artefact (see American and British English spelling differences), is a term used in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ethnology and sociology for anything created by humans which gives information ...

. These materials reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history. CDL digital collections, plus the collections of over 100 libraries and institutions, can be accessed through this site with the primary purpose of providing free access to historically significant and unique items.

Collection Development and Management

The Collection Development and Management Program oversees and coordinates shared library collections on behalf of the ten University of California campuses. The program acquires scholarly content, manages UC's mass

digitization DigitizationTech Target. (2011, April). Definition: digitization. ''WhatIs.com''. Retrieved December 15, 2021, from https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/digitization is the process of converting information into a Digital data, digital (i ...

efforts, organizes and supports shared physical library collections, and is responsible for the system-wide negotiation and licensing of shared digital materials for the UC libraries.

Licensed Resources

These are the electronic journals, databases, ebooks and other e-resources licensed by CDL on behalf of and in coordination with the ten UC campuses.

Shared Print

The University of California Libraries' shared print collections consist of information resources jointly purchased or electively contributed by the libraries. Such resources are collectively governed and managed by the University Librarians.

Mass Digitization

The UC Libraries are digitizing millions of books from their collections through participation in mass digitization projects with

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

, the Internet Archive, and the

HathiTrust HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally ...

Digital Library. These projects expand the UC Libraries’ ability to give faculty, students and the public access to information and support our exploration of new service models.

Shared Cataloging

The Shared Cataloging Program (SCP) provides catalog records for the University of California campus libraries. Established in January 2000, the program is based at

UC San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

Discovery & Delivery

The focus of the CDL's Discovery and Delivery team is the integration of library services and resources in order to remove barriers between users and content. The goal is to connect faculty, students, and staff with access to the University of California libraries’ extensive research collections and beyond to the world's libraries.

AGUA

AGUA provides key collection data to the Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) and UC Libraries Shared Print Initiative.

Resource Sharing

Resource Sharing facilitates consortial borrowing and interlibrary loan from beyond the UC system for UC faculty, students, and staff.

UC Library Search

UC Library Search is the primary discovery service for the collections of the UC Libraries.

Zephir

Zephir ingests, stores, and manages bibliographic metadata for HathiTrust.

UC Curation Center (UC3)

UC3 helps researchers and the UC libraries manage, preserve, and provide access to their important digital assets.

Merritt Repository Service

Merritt is a repository service from the University of California Curation Center (UC3) that lets the UC community manage, archive, and share its digital content.

EZID

EZID (easy-eye-dee) creates and manages unique, persistent identifiers for UC researchers. The service currently uses

digital object identifiers A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; they ...

(DOIs) and Archival Resource Keys (ARKs), which can be provided prior to publication and aid in linking related datasets and articles.

DMPTool

DMPTool helps researchers create and manage

data management plan A data management plan or DMP is a formal document that outlines how data are to be handled both during a research project, and after the project is completed. The goal of a data management plan is to consider the many aspects of data management, me ...

s. It provides templates that researchers can customize based on their funding source and partner institutions. It has been noted that the DMPTool is of more use when planning funding applications than in stewarding the data through its lifecycle.

References

External links

* {{Authority control Libraries in California Photo archives in the United States University of California Library publishing Academic journal online publishing platforms American digital libraries