Who Are We?

The California Digital Library is the University of California's 11th University library. It was established in 1997 by University of California President Emeritus Richard Atkinson to build the University's digital library, assist campus libraries with sharing their resources and holdings more effectively, and provide leadership in applying technology to the development of library collections and services.

Organizationally housed at the UC Office of the President, the CDL operates in close collaboration with all UC campuses and their libraries.

The CDL mission is to harness technology and innovation, and leverage the intellectual and cultural resources of the UC; the CDL supports the assembly and creative use of the world's scholarship and knowledge for the UC libraries and the communities they serve.

The UC Berkeley Interactive University Project began in 1996 when a dozen campus units initiated a collaboration with the Oakland and San Francisco Unified School Districts. The core of the IU model has been to involve and support a broad range of campus units using technology in partnership with K-12 teachers, schools, and community organizations.

The IU is developing the Scholar's Box — an easy to use, interactive tool that will permit scholars, teachers and students to collect resources and save and manipulate them over the Internet. When fully implemented, Scholar's Box will enable faculty, teachers, students, and the public to gather, create, and share — core activities in both scholarship and teaching — personal collections of digital materials made available from multiple sources and repositories.

The Scholar’s Box will allow teachers and researchers to work the way they always have as they gather, organize and share materials and resources; and it adds many new options for the manipulation, creation and sharing of information currently available in the environment of desk-top and Internet computing.

The IU is a unit of the campus’ Information Systems and Technology Division. Berkeley's Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, Paul Gray serves as the project’s Principal Investigator.

What Is It?

A partnership between the CDL and the IU to explore approaches for opening the resources of the CDL to current and new audiences via second generation web technologies, especially through the IU’s developing Scholar's Box.

What Do We Propose?

Working together, the CDL and the IU will explore current and emerging educational technologies that mediate between and connect the CDL with its end-users. The project aims to serve current scholarly audiences, public audiences (K-12 teachers and students, specifically) and, ultimately, a broad end-user community, maximizing third party use of CDL services while minimizing costs to the CDL.

This project will leverage the work of other collaborations in which the IU is involved. For example, work on XML crosswalks, that the IU is carrying out with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will relate directly to our proposed work with the CDL. Moreover, we expect to find substantial synergy between this project and our existing collaborations with faculty, research units, libraries, and museums on the Berkeley campus.

Updated June 2004