FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2003
Suzanne Samuel (510) 587-6132
suzanne.samuel_at_ucop.edu
FIVE HUNDRED UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS eSCHOLARSHIP EDITIONS NOW
AVAILABLE ON THE WEB
More than 500 University of California Press books are available online
free of charge through an ongoing partnership between UC Press and the
California Digital Library. The University of California Press
eScholarship Editions can be searched and browsed at
http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ucpress/ .
Over 300 of the University of California Press eScholarship Editions
are available to the public. The other titles are currently only
available to UC faculty, students and staff. Readers outside the UC
system may view citations, abstracts and tables of contents, but not
the full texts.
Titles available to all readers include Technopolis: High-Technology
Industry and Regional Development in Southern California; Understanding
Heart Disease; AIDS: The Burdens of History; Before Taliban:
Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad; and A History of Wine in America.
By fall 2003, 1,500 UC Press eScholarship Editions will be available.
More than 400 titles will be available to the public; owing to
licensing restrictions, the rest will be limited to the UC community.
The full collection will represent about a third of the UC Press books
in print, plus over 300 out-of-print titles. The books cover a wide
range of topics of interest to the general public as well as to
scholars, including art, science, history, music, religion, natural
history, and fiction. Many titles are currently used in courses, and
University of California students are particularly excited about their
free, online availability.
"This is a major effort to make a significant portion of our collection
available to the UC community free of charge and to experiment with
free online access to the public at large," said UC Press Director
Lynne E. Withey. "It will be the largest collection of university press
books available to date in electronic form. Although other university
presses have talked about undertaking similar projects, UC Press is on
the forefront."
UC Press and the California Digital Library (CDL) will monitor usage of
the online books and sales of the print editions to determine if it is
feasible to eventually make the entire collection available at no
charge to users.
"Publishers always worry that making books freely available online will
diminish print sales," Withey said. "Our experience, with a small group
of about 60 titles, indicates that online availability has negligible
impact, either positive or negative. This project will allow us to test
the relationship between print and electronic more systematically."
The CDL's eScholarship program, which supports experiments in scholarly
communications, converted the books into XML (Extensible Markup
Language) to support an interactive user interface. An unlimited number
of readers may access a single title at one time, so books do not have
to be "checked out" to a single user, as is the case with some other
online library collections.
"This project is a fantastic example of a dynamic collaboration between
the CDL and UC Press -- one that we expect will produce many more
projects in the months to come," said CDL Director and University
Librarian Daniel Greenstein. "The CDL has developed services that make
scholarly knowledge more accessible across geographic, socioeconomic
and institutional lines.
"UC Press provides an imprimatur that is highly regarded by scholars
around the world. It lends credibility and encourages use of these new
modes of scholarly publishing that are enabled by the CDL's services."
Other features of the online collection include fully linked footnote
and index references; the ability to search and browse by title, author
or subject; detailed bibliographic data for each book, including a
one-paragraph summary and many subject terms describing the book's
content; and the ability to buy a hard copy of the book right from the
Web site. Sophisticated navigation tools make it easy to maneuver
through each chapter or from book to book, enabling readers to quickly
and easily find exactly what they are seeking. While the Web site is
the best place to find an up-to-the-minute list of titles available,
the books are also cataloged in Melvyl, the catalog of the University
of California libraries.
The UC Press eScholarship Editions is a project of the California
Digital Library's eScholarship program
(
http://escholarship.cdlib.org/), which was launched to facilitate
innovations and support experiments in the production and dissemination
of scholarship.
The California Digital Library (
http://www.cdlib.org/), which partners
with the 10 UC campuses in a continuing commitment to apply innovative
technology to managing scholarly information, opened to the public in
January 1999. Organizationally housed at the UC Office of the President
in Oakland, Calif., the CDL provides a centralized framework to
efficiently share materials held by UC, to provide greater and easier
access to digital content, and to join with researchers in developing
new tools and innovations for scholarly communication.
Founded in 1893, the University of California Press
(
http://www.ucpress.edu/) publishes scholarly books, journals and
academic series. Its award-winning publications have distinguished it
as one of the leading university publishers worldwide.
# # #
Editors: For additional information, please contact Suzanne Samuel at
the CDL, (510) 587-6132, or suzanne.samuel_at_ucop.edu. Additional
information about the California Digital Library and eScholarship may
be found at
http://www.cdlib.org and
http://escholarship.cdlib.org/
Received on Sat Jan 11 2003 - 00:20:34 GMT