Scholarly Publishing xpanded competition in scholarly communication. California Digital Library Digital Library Federation (DLF) was founded in 1995 to establish the conditions for creating, maintaining, expanding, and preserving a distributed collection of digital materials accessible to scholars, students, and a wider public. It is composed of participants who manage and operate digital libraries. California Digital Library In late January 1999 -- less than two months ago as of this writing -- the California Digital Library California Digital Library opened its "digital doors" to the public. Predictably, the doors in this case are represented by the which serves as a gateway to new collections, services, and tools as well as to legacy digital resources hosted or produced by the California Digital Library such as the California Digital Library online union catalog and the California Digital Library This article describes some of the assumptions and strategies that led to the formation of the California Digital Library and that represent its underlying organizational motivation. It goes on to describe some of the digital resources as well as core and future technologies that underlie its digital presence, and that largely will determine its usefulness. The news of public availability, announced in and widely elsewhere California Digital Library downplays the fact that, like many other large-scale digital library efforts, the California Digital Library is an organizational innovation as well as a collection of, and framework to support, digital resources and technological innovations. The California Digital Library 180,000+ students, and 140,000+ faculty and staff, sometimes lumbers in a way evocative of the mascots of two of its campuses --  California Digital Library and the scant year following that led to its public "release"  represent an explicit set of assumptions and goals, and an unusually rapid pace and sense of urgency for the University. Some key characteristics of the California Digital Library current and proposed digital content and technologies are that: "co-library" model which draws from and depends upon expertise, resources, and priorities across all of the UC campuses as well as strategic partners such as the State Library of California (this principle is well articulated in an interview with founding University Librarian Richard Lucier in a  recognition of the inter-relatedness of the library function with scholarly communication and with technological innovations; A caveat may be necessary here. While the California Digital Library has goals and an agenda that carry well outside of the university boundaries, it is, to date, primarily a product of a large academic research university. That context necessarily affects not only its origins but also the way its story is told. While the following descriptions are couched largely in academic terms, the principals in the California Digital Library have well in mind that theCalifornia Digital Library, and digital libraries writ large, are about In August 1996, California Digital Library quickly and are named in the nine campuses of the University of California UC should seek innovative and cost-effective means to strengthen UC should establish the California Digital Library Of course,just as is true throughout the world, many units in the California Digital Library-- chief among them libraries -- were already taking strategic actions and building digital collections and services. The desire to use digital technologies to capture more economies of scale and scope, to leverage expertise and momentum, and to work collaboratively for the common good was reinforced by a longstanding, and increasingly urgent, desire to preserve local strengths while enhancing the sharing of resources. At UC this has been captured in the catch phrase "One University of California, This has led to a creative tension between form and activity that underlies the "co-library" model of the California Digital Library. While the California Digital Library is being established as an independent library, with the hope that it will be recognizable and predictable as a set of collections, services, and tools, it is also a "framework for collaboration." If successful, it will enable many organizations, starting with the nine UC campuses and select strategic partners, to work together toward those economies of scale and toward synergies that produce innovations.To put it another way, the California Digital Library is both a coalesced set of digital technologies: hardware, lines of code, digital objects, and a set of softer organizational technologies: a focus of energies and resources, a condensing of experience, and a structure for experiments in collaboration and integration of digital library components.The California Digital Library commitment to supporting the University's scholarship depends on the development and acquisition of high-quality digital content. The California Digital Library has an aggressive program in licensing scholarly materials, including abstracting and indexing databases and full-content electronic journals and databases. It is creating digital access to unique and valuable special and archival collections of the University and of its California partners. The California Digital Library provides access to the following categories of digital content and is exploring methods to ensure perpetual access to them. The first three -- the Online Archive of California, Melvyl Union Catalog, and California Periodicals database -- are freely available to the public. While most of these resources can be reached directly, the also serves as a browsable and searchable gateway for their discovery.The Online Archive of California (OAC) -- a union database of digital descriptions of archival and manuscript collections from all of the UC campuses and from around California. These archival finding aids use the standard for  California. In some cases, primary sources themselves have been digitized and are available. Work to select primary source content for digitization from the UC collections is ongoing. -- records for materials (books, archives, audio-visuals, computer files, videorecordings, dissertations, government documents, maps, music scores, and recordings) in the libraries of the nine UC campuses, the California State Library, the California Academy of Sciences, the California Historical Society, the Center for Research Libraries, a University of California Division of Library Automation). California Periodicals database -- built in partnership with the California Digital it represents journal holdings not only in the University of California system, but also in over 500 libraries statewide. Contributors include the 9 UC campuses, the 22 campuses of the California State the California Academy of Sciences, the California Historical Society, Stanford University, the University of Southern California, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Other contributors include community college libraries, public libraries, selected special or corporate libraries and California medical libraries in other universities and hospitals. Digital resources via the California Digital Library "Directory of Collections and Resources". User or library-oriented views of/windows into digital resources. Success of the California Digital Library in achieving and maintaining its charge is dependent on collaboration with librarians and academics on all of the UC campuses as well as with partners across California and the US. Some recent highlights include: Experiments with other libraries, including the California Digital and its "Library of California" initiative to develop new, sustainable, methods and services for sharing resources among multitype libraries.  California Digital Several major licenses for the full content of core scholarly journals, including those with the American Chemical Society and with JSTOR, include the flexibility to experiment with extending access to the California State University system, community college campuses, and public and school libraries.  California Digital California Digital partners have included the Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Stanford University. Serving as a testbed for technology transfer in NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative --  California Digital Membership in the California Digital Library Although the California Digital Library is very young, it has inherited significant core technologies represented by the Melvyl Union Catalog and the telnet and web interfaces to that catalog and other California Digital Library-hosted resources. The California Digital Library encompasses the activities -- formerly carried out by UC's Division of Library Automation -- to maintain and enhance these key technologies. More specifically, the California Digital Library has among its core technologies the following list which is likely to be familiar to D-Lib readers: To establish advisory and working groups that help us choose technologies to deploy and on which to focus for development. Two such groups -- the Technology Architecture and Standards Working Group and the Strategic Innovations Working Group -- have been established and charged. Further information on these and other California Digital LibraryTo contribute resources and energies to emerging best practices such as those promulgated by the California Digital Library Metadata standards for digital objects and resources -- to further, among other things, the distributed architecture already emerging. Persistent naming of resources and objects -- to increase the stability and decrease the maintenance of pointers to resources.California Digital Library Better authentication and authorization -- to allow location-independent ubiquitous access and increased ease in defining authorized users and user groups.California Digital Library Digital object standards, such as for image quality -- for example, to distinguish archival/preservation level objects from those in regular use.California Digital Library New representation of search processes and results that can be absorbed and manipulated by users -- to better match discovery tools with desired functionality and ease of use. Viewer technologies for different data (e.g. multimedia, geospatial) -- to increase the ease and dimensions of use immediately available after discovery of a resource. Flexible "profiling" and user customization of environments -- to better match services and tools to particular needs and behaviors. California Digital Library The new California Digital Library is both a set of digital collections, services, and tools and an important organizational innovation for the California Digital Library.. It operates on principles of intensive collaboration and integration. Its success, and its usefulness to others as a model, depends not only upon its existing and future core technologies, but upon its ability to create and support innovations in sharing resources, in scholarly communication, and in meeting information needs of scholars and students. Ober, John (1999). California Digital Library Website Opens. California Digital LibraryUniversity of California (1998). Library Planning and Action Initiative Task Force Final Report. California Digital Library. A Conversation with Richard E. Lucier of the University of California. February. California Digital Library. See, for example, Lisa Guernsey (1999). University of California Digital Library Opens Its On-Line Doors. 2. The ongoing challenges of labelling in this arena extend even to simple concepts such as "a beginning." Should one follow a physical metaphor -- the California Digital Library "opening;" a high-tech/software metaphor -- the California Digital Library "release;" or an explorer's metaphor -- the California Digital Library to a general principle of consistent labelling, we have used all three.The California Digital Library web site features a browseable and searchable Directory of Collections and Services and descriptive information about the California Digital Library. The University of California currently includes nine campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. A tenth campus is being planned for Merced, California. California Digital Library For historical information about Library Planning and Action Initiative, as well as information about continuing planning and advisory activities, see the Systemwide Library Planning web site at The EAD standard is maintained by the Library of Congress in partnership with the Society of American Archivists. California Digital LibraryThe State Library of California is a strategic partner of the California Digital Library Scholarly Publishing Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an alliance of libraries that fosters expanded competition in scholarly communication. California Digital Library The Digital Library Federation (DLF) was founded in 1995 to establish the conditions for creating, maintaining, expanding, and preserving a distributed collection of digital materials accessible to scholars, students, and a wider public. It is composed of participants who manage and operate digital libraries. California Digital Library Advisory working groups for the California Digital Library are described as part of its planning structure. California Digital Library