Tag: e-books
Romance Language Collections Newsletter no.1 (Fall 2016)
What’s new in the Library for Fall 2016?
The graphic novel Le piano oriental by Zeina Abirached will be on display in the Doe Library exhibition Beyond Tintin and Superman: The Diversity of Global Comics opening September 19.
Welcome back everyone! Here’s a brief sum-up of new services and library resources with a focus on the Romance languages and southern European studies in particular.
New Blog – Over the summer the Library migrated all of its blogs to WordPress. From this point forward, please look here for all Romance Language Collections news. If you choose not to subscribe to the blog, don’t worry. I usually forward the most important posts to your respective department listservs.
Electronic Resources
OpenEdition Books – With a combination of generous discretionary and endowment funds, the Library was able to acquire the complete ebook catalogue of this open access book initiative based at Université d’Aix-Marseille. We now have enhanced and permanent access to more than 2700 open access books (most in French but also in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese) that can be read in four different formats (epub, pdf, html, or reader) from prestigious academic presses like CNRS Éditions, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, and l’École française de Rome. We have also have become partners in an acquisitions policy that both supports sustainable development of OA and that respects the needs of teaching, research and learning communities.
OpenEdition Journals – Also known as Revues.org, the Library has purchased permanent access to the 140 journals available through OpenEdition’s freemium model, eliminating moving walls and gaining similar formats enhancements as the ebooks. Representative titles include Arzanà: Cahiers de littérature médiévale italienne, Cahiers d’études romanes, Flaubert: Revue critique et génétique, and L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques.
Ebooks on Casalini’s Torrossa platform – Besides the Italian ebooks the Library receives through its subscription to Editoria Italiana Online, we added 200 additional titles last spring. Casalini Libri also unveiled a new reader in July which greatly improves the readability (especially on smartphones and tablets) of the near 2500 titles in Berkeley’s collection of Italian ebooks.
Kanopy and the Media Resources Center – New films and documentaries in the Romance Languages from not only Europe but also Africa and Latin America are regularly added to this online streaming service. Beginning this semester, check-out periods for DVDs and VHS tapes from the MRC will be extended to 7 days for faculty, lecturers and graduate student instructors!
Continue reading “Romance Language Collections Newsletter no.1 (Fall 2016)”
Trial resource: English Historical Documents
The Library has a trial of the digitized version of English Historical Documents through August 31, 2016.
Key features of English Historical Documents Online include:
- Instant access to over 5,000 historical documents
- Highly discoverable content through Quick, Advanced and Faceted search
- Search refinement through adding and removing search filters directly on the results page
- Explore content by Date, Historiography and Historical methods, Population and environment, Society, Economic affairs and technology, Intellectual, cultural and the arts, Religious belief, practice and organization, Politics, administration and law, Military, Foreign affairs, Status entries and Source types
- Personalized login for individual users: bookmark entries, and save and manage searches
- Download, print, share and citation tools
Please use the following to view the FAQ: http://www.englishhistoricaldocuments.com/help-and-information/faqs
No Legacy || Literatura Electrónica
Exhibit – Multimedia | March 11 – September 2, 2016 | Doe Library, Bernice Layne Brown Gallery
OPENING SYMPOSIUM – A Round Table Discussion
Friday, March 11 from 10am to 12:30pm, BIDS (Doe 190)
OPENING RECEPTION with poet Amaranth Borsuk and writer Doménico Chiappe
Friday, March 11, 2016, 5:30pm, Morrison Library
The exhibition No Legacy || Literatura electrónica (NL||LE) presents a collection of works of digital literature in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and English alongside print works of the 20th-century avant-garde. It gathers an unprecedented team of collaborators from across the UC Berkeley campus (the University Library, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Institute of European Studies, and the Berkeley Center for New Media) as well as national and international partners to showcase the impact of technology on literary production in the 21st-century networked world.
Electronic literature, or e-lit, refers to works that utilize computers and other digital media in creative literary ways. Examples include hypertext or interactive fiction, digital poetry, narrative generators, Twitter bots, augmented reality texts, iPad applications, etc. Meant to be read on computers and other devices, electronic literary works reveal new ideas about literary and media developments while inviting interaction with readers. The characteristics of e-lit pose challenges for writers, scholars, and curators when issues like software and hardware obsolescence and preservation come to the forefront. Exhibits like NL||LE have become an ideal medium of projection for this kind of literary expression.
NL||LE brings forth the historical dimension of e-lit works. Reading a work online with a shiny new computer or tablet makes it easy to forget that what one is seeing might be a legacy work from the early 1990s. Only two decades ago, computation and devices were drastically different. Their affordances in terms of graphics, speed, memory as well as the fact that the Internet did not exist yet have influenced the way these pieces were created and read. By incorporating vintage computers in the exhibit, the NL||LE team highlights the historical grounding of the works. Claude Potts, Romance Languages Librarian at UC Berkeley, has furthered the temporality of the project by assembling more than fifty print works that inform the creation and reading of the digital pieces. Exhibition design and fabrication was done by students in a Berkeley Center for New Media seminar taught by Stephanie Lie.
Although e-lit exhibits have proliferated in the US and around the Spanish speaking world, in NL||LE co-curators Alexandra Saum-Pascual and Élika Ortega propose to recover the previously unseen relationships of English language e-lit with Spanish and Portuguese language works, both print and digital. NL||LE launches a speculative exploration of literary history: an alternative to making connections between movements and authors. Instead, it asks questions that highlight less common kinds of literary relationships like the look or the handling of the work as objects.
No Legacy || Literatura electrónica opens on March 11, 2016 and runs through September 2, 2016 in the Bernice Layne Brown Gallery of UC Berkeley’s Doe Library. Find more details about the opening symposium and reception.
- For visiting hours please check lib.berkeley.edu/hours
- Website: nolegacy.berkeley.edu
Travel Light with Ebooks
While acquiring and establishing access to ebooks from southern Europe remains a challenge for American research libraries, the Berkeley Library has made some inroads this year with more Spanish books from Digitalia (625 titles to date), more Italian ebooksfrom Torrossa (2112 titles to date), and most recently 252 titles from France’s largest publisher L’Harmattan. Hosted on their Harmathèque platform, these books are discoverable through OskiCat just like print books, and less seamlessly through most of the vendor’s web sites:
- For ebooks in Digitalia, do a title search in OskiCat for “Digitalia UCB access” or “Digitalia ebooks UCB access”
- For ebooks in Torrossa, use “EIO – Italian Studies Basic Collection” or “Olschki E-books and Journals”
- And for ebooks in L’Harmathèque, try “Harmathèque eBooks”
new batch of Digitalia ebooks
The Library has recently acquired 246 more ebooks from Digitalia – one of the largest providers of Spanish-language ebooks and ejournals. To view the complete list of titles, do a title search in OskiCat for “Digitalia UCB access.” All Digitalia ebooks can be read as PDFs, HTML, or Flash files.
Digital Olschki
The scholarly publications of Leo S. Olschki are among the most widely held Italian publications in UC Berkeley’s collections. Recently, the Library acquired a digital package which comprises 1286 e-books published by Olschki between 2000 and 2012, half of which were new to us. These books can be discovered through Casalini’s Torrossa full-text platform, or in OskiCat searching with the phrase “Olschki e-books.”
Olschki’s digital collection is cross-disciplinary but is especially strong in all periods of European history, political science, literature, linguistics, classics, musicology, architecture, environmental design, art history, religious studies, philosophy, and the history of science. It also includes the backfiles to six journals:
- Archivio storico italiano (1842-2012)
- Belfagor (1946-2012)
- Inventari dei manoscritti delle biblioteche d’italia (1890-2013)
- Lares: rivista quadrimestrale di studi demo-etno-antropologici (1930-2012)
- Lettere italiane (1949-2012)
- Il pensiero politico: rivista di storia delle idee politiche e sociali (1968-2011)
Along with Editoria Italiana Online (EIO), it is one of the most significant Italian digital resources available through the Library. A special thanks to the Art History/Classics Library, the Bancroft, Environmental Design Library, Graduate Services, the Hargrove Music Library, the Italian Studies Department, Near Eastern Studies Collection, the Robbins Collection, and the AUL for Collections for their contributions towards this major purchase.
OpenEdition’s Fremium Program
Through next fall, the Library will have access to an extended trial to one of the most innovative research publishing models coming from Europe. Through a combination of open access (OA) and fee-based subscriptions, OpenEdition Freemium offers an infrastructure for electronic publishing dedicated to academic communication across the humanities and social sciences. OpenEdition is the umbrella portal for OpenEdition Books, Revues.org, Hypotheses and Calenda–four platforms dedicated to electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences. While most of the content is in French and freely available through OpenEdition, an institutional subscription would allow Berkeley to participate in an acquisitions policy that both supports sustainable development of OA and that respects the needs of teaching, research and learning communities: no DRM or download quotas are applied. Other advantages of an institutional subscription is that it would seamlessly integrate all OpenEdition ebooks and journals into our catalogs and bibliographic search tools while also benefitting from a full range of digital formats, some optimized specifically for e-readers, tablets, and smart phones. With the current database trial, UCB affiliates can access html, ePub, and PDF formats for 120 freemium journals and 140+ open access journals in Revues.org in html. For OpenEdition Books, 64 ebooks and 57 OA ebooks also currently available in the same three formats.
OpenEdition is run by the Centre for Open Electronic Publishing (Cléo), a unit that brings together the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Université d’Aix-Marseille, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse.
E-books in French from Numerique Premium
A subsidiary of the publisher Nouveau Monde éditions, Numérique Premium is a leading provider of e-books in the humanities and social sciences. In partnership with more than 30 publishers in the French-speaking world, they currently offer about 1,000 ebooks. UC Berkeley has access to their entire collection through May 30. Please take a look and send your feedback to cpotts AT berkeley.edu.
Editoria Italiana Online
The University Library is pleased to announce the acquisition of its first ever Italian e-book and e-journal collection. The subset of Editoria Italiana Online (EIO) comprises nearly 800 e-books and 50 scholarly journals published in Italy including Critica letteraria, Filologia e critica, Italia medioevale e umanistica. It comes to us via Casalini Libri’s full-text digital platform Torrossa. Most titles are in the humanities and social sciences and include works from prominent publishers such as Bulzoni, Carocci, Firenze University Press, Polistampa, Palerno, Viella, and more. The available backfiles to all journals have also been acquired and approximately 50 new e-books will be added every year. Once the records have been loaded to OskiCat, they’ll be discoverable there but at the moment, Berkeley’s holdings in EIO can only be accessed through Torrossa.
Mas y mas Digitalia
In conjunction with a group of other UC libraries, the Library has begun a one-year trial to Digitalia’s complete package of e-books in the social sciences and humanities published in Spain and Latin America. This collection comprises more than 4,500 e-books and an impressive selection of current and historical journals. Representative journals, previously only available in print through UC Berkeley, include Al-Qantara, El viejo topo, La Nueva literatura hispaníca, Quimera, Orígenes, Revista de indias, Revista internacional de sociología, Siglo Diecinueve, Revista Iberoamericana de Lingüística, Hora de España and more.
The Library will have access to Digitalia through September 1, 2014 but please email cpotts AT library.berkeley.edu your requests for individual titles that you would like to see permanently acquired. Last year, the Library acquired 300 e-books and their records now appear in OskiCat.