Information Today
Volume 18, Issue 8 — September 2001
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CDL, UC Press Collaborate to Offer Books on the Web

The California Digital Library (CDL; http://www.cdlib.org) and the University of California Press (UC Press; http://www.ucpress.edu) have announced that more than 60 UC Press books are now available for free on the Web at http://www.escholarship.cdlib.org. The 60 titles are concentrated in international studies, European history, and literature. These titles are in addition to 12 digital monographs digitally published by the CDL's eScholarship program for students in California International and Area Studies (an eScholarship community) and the UC Press book Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles by Stanton A. Glantz and Edith D. Balbach.

The partnership between the CDL and UC Press is a core component of the CDL's eScholarship program, which is designed to support innovation in scholarly communication. Digital publication of traditional formats, such as the scholarly monograph, as well as of new formats, is a key theme of eScholarship's commitment to supporting experiments in the dissemination of research and scholarship.

The partnership is rethinking and re-engineering editorial and production processes while exploiting the latest technologies for rapid publication. The new monographs are translated on the fly from XML to HTML using the Cocoon Publishing Framework. This allows maximum flexibility in how they are presented (offering, for example, large print displays of all titles), while maintaining flexibility for re-purposing of the files for future platforms—a central concern for eScholarship, which strives to provide persistent access to the content it hosts.

eScholarship is also home to new tools for the creation of research results collections and working papers. These e-print repositories are hosted by the CDL, but managed by disciplinary communities of scholars. The repositories and the experiments in the dissemination of scholarship that they allow emulate the Los Alamos National Laboratory's successful "arXiv" e-print service for physics, math, and computer science. Repositories and author services for dermatology, international and area studies, and tobacco control are the first to be supported by the eScholarship program.

The eScholarship/UC Press collaboration is also at the center of the California International and Area Studies (CIAS) Electronic Publications Program. The CIAS program is a systemwide initiative designed to accelerate and expand the dissemination of information, ideas, and analyses generated by the dozens of international and area studies conferences, workshops, seminars, and lecture series sponsored each year by the University of California. CIAS plans to publish books in the monographic series directly from the content submitted to the CIAS e-print repository.

The Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive (JARDA) publishing project is also supported by the eScholarship/UC Press collaboration. JARDA's collections, part of the CDL's Online Archive of California, will ultimately include more than 20,000 images and electronic texts documenting the World War II-era internment of Japanese-Americans. Materials are being drawn from the archival and special collections of more than 27 institutions throughout California. The eScholarship/UC Press publishing project will foster publication of original research based on materials from JARDA.
 

Source: California Digital Library, San Francisco, 510/987-0425; http://www.cdlib.org.

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