Community Briefs

Thursday, January 21, 1999

Community Briefs

Land, sea mammals both energy efficient

As any swimmer knows, moving through water is nothing like
moving on land. When the ancestors of modern marine mammals first
ventured into the ocean some 60 million years ago, they had to
adapt to a medium 800 times denser and 60 times more viscous than
air. The spectacular success of their descendants illustrates the
remarkable power of natural selection.

According to a new study comparing the athletic abilities of
different types of animals, modern marine mammals are so well
adapted to aquatic life that they are as efficient in swimming as
specialized land mammals are in running. Terrie Williams, an
associate professor of biology at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, found that elite animal athletes, from horses to killer
whales, achieve an optimal efficiency for locomotion that is
determined more by their basic mammalian physiology than by their
mode of transportation.

Digital library is ready

The California Digital Library (CDL) opened its public digital
doors Jan. 20 by making available an integrated web gateway to
digital collections, services and tools at
http://www.cdlib.org.

When launching CDL’s organization in October of 1997, UC
President Richard Atkinson described the electronic library as the
beginning of "a future when our libraries, at the press of a
button, can come to us, wherever we are, whenever we wish."

Complementing the physical libraries on the nine campuses of the
University of California system, the CDL focuses on selecting,
building, managing, preserving and providing access to shared
collections of high-quality digital materials for the University
and its partners.

Browsing and searching tools at the website provide enhanced
access to more than 2,000 electronic journals from major scholarly
publishers and information providers such as the Web of Science,
the American Chemical Society, Highwire Press, the Association for
Computing Machinery and the Academic Press. More than 3,000
inventories or finding aids for special and archival collections
throughout the state are also represented, along with dozens of
journal abstracting and indexing databases as well as reference
databases.

Through its directory of collections and services, the new CDL
website provides a single point of entry for access to these
collections. It complements the Melvyl Union Catalog of UC-owned
print and non-print material, as well as campus-based catalogs and
websites, by directing patrons to a catalog or database search, or
directly to electronic journals, finding aids and other digital
material.

The directory is designed to be collaboratively maintained by
staff across the UC system and to allow a local view of available
digital resources at the user’s choice. Specific views, including
subject-based views, can also be created for a particular entrance
to the UC shared collections.

UC Irvine chancellor

to have new home

The long-delayed construction of a chancellor’s residence on the
UC Irvine campus received approval from the UC Board of Regents at
its meeting last week.

The development of the residence, which had been placed on hold
in 1993 as a result of the budget crisis that faced UCI and the UC
system in the early 1990s, was reinitiated by UC President Richard
C. Atkinson early in 1998 as part of his efforts to ensure that
each UC campus has an on-campus residence for its chancellor.

The University House will be built on a 3-acre site in
University Hills – a housing community on campus for faculty and
staff. The single-story, ranch-style house is designed to blend
naturally into the University Hills community.

Compiled from Daily Bruin wire reports

Comments, feedback, problems?

© 1998 ASUCLA Communications Board[Home]