Bibliographic Services Program

Director: Patricia Martin
Technical Lead: Lynne Cameron

The California Digital Library pursues technological innovations that provide solutions to the University of California libraries for the discovery, integration, manipulation, and sharing of scholarly content in all forms. The CDL provides some direct online services and makes tools available to the UC libraries and others for the customization of local services.

Bibliographic Services provides UC faculty, students, and staff with instant access to the rich collections of content housed in the libraries of the 10 UC campuses.

Bibliographic Services manages these important academic tools:

• Melvyl® Catalog: Melvyl® is a searchable catalog of library materials from the 10 UC campuses, the California State Library, the California Academy of Sciences, the California Historical Society, the Center for Research Libraries, the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics Library, the Graduate Theological Union, the Hastings College of the Law Library, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Library.
• Request: This service allows UC faculty, students, and staff to create interlibrary loan or campus document delivery service requests from the Melvyl® Catalog, or article databases, or via Citation Linker. Items not available at a user's home campus are processed via interlibrary loan. Items are delivered via the web (when possible) or the actual item or a photocopy is supplied.
• UC-eLinks: This link resolver service (exposed in the Melvyl® Catalog, Google Scholar, Microsoft Live, and hundreds of article databases) simplifies access to electronic content in a journal or database. It provides a way for users to easily move from an article or book citation to the full text of the digital item; or to obtain the physical item from the library shelf or via Request.
• Electronic Resource Management System (ERMS): The program is currently investigating options for an ERMS solution.
• Pilot Projects: The program is involved in evaluating pilot projects for the next generation of digital library services. One example is an investigation into partnership with OCLC exploring OCLC WorldCat Local as a replacement for the Melvy® Catalog. A second example, being conducted in conjunction with UCLA, is the evaluation of federated searching — a way for researchers to retrieve results from multiple databases with a single search request.