California Digital Library revamps escholarship

On his LJ Digital Libraries blog, Roy Tennant delves into some of the details concerning the California Digital Library's (CDL) redesign of its eScholarship Repository. He spoke with Catherine Mitchell, CDL Publishing Group director, and asked about the motivations for the overhaul. “There were three things we wanted to accomplish,” she said. “1) Reposition [eScholarship] as a publishing platform, not as a repository, 2) provide a richer user experience that enables a variety of ways to use the content other than simply downloading a PDF, and 3) imbue the content with the authority of its source (the University of California, the campus, the sponsoring research unit, etc.), while also highlighting other, related work at the university.”

Tennant concludes, “[a]lthough the main story is the repositioning of eScholarship from being a repository with publishing services tacked on to the exact opposite, the technical infrastructure is nothing short of astonishing.” For more of his analysis, see the Digital Libraries blog at bit.ly/TennantER.