| 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. |
