California Digital Library and UC Press Collaborate to Deliver Scholarly Books Online
Date: 2001-07-31
Contact: John Ober
Phone: (510) 987-0425
Email: john.ober@ucop.edu
Through an innovative collaboration between the California Digital Library and the University of California Press, more than 60 UC Press books are now freely available on the web at escholarship.cdlib.org.

The 60 titles are concentrated in international studies, European history and literature. The collection includes such diverse works as Steven Heydemann's edited volume of essays titled War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East, Thomas J. Saunders' Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany and Christopher Craft's Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920.

The 60 works join 12 digital monographs from UC's International and Area Studies department, and the UC Press book, Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles by UC San Francisco researcher Stanton A. Glantz and Edith D. Balbach, all produced digitally in collaboration with eScholarship.

The unique partnership between the University of California's digital library (CDL) and its academic press is a core component of the CDL's eScholarship program, 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.

eScholarship is also home to new tools for the creation of collections of research results 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 highly successful Los Alamos National Laboratory's "arXiv" eprint 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 collaboration with the UC Press has evolved from the publication of digital monographs and now extends across all eScholarship digital publishing models. The partnership is re-thinking and re-engineering editorial and production processes while exploiting the latest technologies for rapid publication.

The additional monographs build upon the success of the digital version of Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles at . As with that publication, new books rely on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard for creating highly structured and flexible publications.

Another advantage of XML technology is flexibility in how books are presented onscreen, offering, for example, large print displays of all titles on-demand. The XML standard also greatly simplifies the process of keeping the material synchronized with changes in computer technology -- in direct support of eScholarship's commitment to provide persistent access to hosted content.

The eScholarship-UC Press collaboration is also at the center of the California International and Areas Studies (CIAS) Electronic Publications Program. The CIAS publications program is a UC 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. IAS scholars 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, ultimately will 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 upon materials from JARDA.

Editors: For additional information on the California Digital Library, please call John Ober, CDL director for education and strategic innovation, (510) 987-0425; or contact him at john.ober@ucop.edu

For information about other UC technology innovations, contact Phillip G. Torrez, senior public information representative, in the UC Office of the President, at (510) 987-9205; or contact him at phillip.torrez@ucop.edu.