The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures

book cover
Thurber, J. (1939). The last flower: a parable in pictures. New York: Harper & brothers. Source: HathiTrust.

Originally published in November 1939, two months after World War II officially began, James Thurber’s The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures is a graphic novel ahead of its day. Inspired in particular by the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland, it chronicles the eternal cycles of war, peace, love, and the resilience of one little flower and remains as relevant today as it was then. The text has been translated into dozens of languages worldwide, among them a French translation by Albert Camus and published by Gallimard in 1952. A native of Columbus, Ohio, Thurber was not only a cartoonist but also an author, humorist, journalist, playwright, and celebrated wit who joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1927 where he remained for most of his career.

Reissued by the University of Iowa Press in 2007, the first edition and later edition are temporarily available online to the UC community through the HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access service until the UC libraries fully reopen this fall. You can learn more about The Last Flower at the Columbus Public Library’s Art Unbound II exhibition installed in its Carnegie Gallery.

 Thurber, J. (1939). The last flower: a parable in pictures. New York: Harper & brothers. Source: HathiTrust.

Six essential Library resources during the pandemic

1) eBooks galore

Millions of ebooks are accessible through the Library and Open Access initiatives such as OpenEdition, and new titles are added daily. The way easiest to find them is by searching OskiCat or Start Your Search from the Library home page.

Featured work: Burningham, Bruce R, editor. Millennial Cervantes : New Currents in Cervantes Studies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020.

 

 

 

 

La Peste by Albert Camus

 

2) HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service
Also known as UC’s emergency ebook service,  it provides access to digital versions of millions of the physical volumes held by libraries across the 10-campus University of California system — plus UC’s two expansive off-site library storage facilities.

Featured work: La peste by Albert Camus. Paris: Gallimard, c1947, 2008.

 

 

 

 

Intorno a Boccaccio 2018

3) Oski Xpress contactless pickup

The Library now provides a contactless pickup service at Moffitt Library for all borrowers who have current Cal 1 or UC Berkeley Library cards. Fourteen libraries are participating in Oski Xpress: Anthropology, Bioscience, Chemistry, Earth Sciences & Map, East Asian, Engineering, Environmental Design, Institute for Governmental Studies, Main (Gardner) Stacks, Mathematics Statistics, Morrison, Music, Physics-Astronomy, and Social Research. Only materials available from the circulating collections of these libraries are available at this time.

Featured work: Intorno a boccaccio/boccaccio e dintorni 2018 : atti del seminario internazionale di studi (certaldo alta, casa di giovanni boccaccio, 6-7 settembre 2018). S. Zamponi, Ed. Ser. Studi e saggi, 205. Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2020.

 

 

 

A Short History of Italian Cinema

 

4) Electronic course reserves

Due to COVID-19 service disruptions, the Library is not accepting print or other physical materials (such as DVDs) for course reserves for the remainder of 2021. However, the Library is helping instructors identify digital options for their course readings to ensure they remain accessible to all students — whether they are on campus or learning remotely.

Featured work: Bondanella, Peter, and Federico Pacchioni. A History of Italian Cinema. 2nd ed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, c2009, 2017.

 

 

 

 

Chéri by Colette

5) In-person research appointments at The Bancroft Library

The Bancroft Library, home to many extraordinary special collections, is one of two libraries on campus that offers limited research appointments for UC Berkeley faculty and students this spring. Access can be provided to Bancroft Library materials that are housed on-site and that are not available online. Please note that access to Bancroft Library collections housed at the Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF) is expected this semester but those collections are unavailable at this time.

The newspaper/microfilm collections, housed in Doe Library, can also be accessed through the Moffitt Library by special request.

Featured work: Colette. Chéri. Paris: Arthème Fayard & Cie, 1929.

 

 

 

Garder Main Stacks

 

6) Online research consultations

Although the UCB libraries will be physically closed this semester, we are all working remotely and happy to help you with your research needs. You can schedule a Zoom appointment with subject librarians like myself, email the general library research help line, or chat with a librarian or library specialist 24/7.

 

 

 

 

 

See also:


HathiTrust to the Rescue

hathitrust-books

“Our shelves are closed, but as long as your screens are open,
you’ll have access to most of our resources.”

HathiTrust Digital Library

UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff are able to take advantage of HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service, which provides access to digital versions of millions of the physical volumes held by libraries across the 10-campus University of California system — plus UC’s two expansive off-site library storage facilities. For Berkeley faculty, students, and staff, this opens up a trove of materials,” said Associate University Librarian Salwa Ismail, who worked with HathiTrust to bring the service to fruition for Berkeley. Access the resources by going to the HathiTrust Digital Library. You can view the materials from anywhere with an internet connection — no VPN or special setup is required. This was first announced publicly via the Library’s news story “Need a book from the UC Berkeley Library while we are sheltering in place? Check here first.”  For more information, read HathiTrust’s guide and FAQ.

Five helpful tips:

  1. Make sure you log in as a “partner institution” with your CalNet ID
  2. Before searching the catalog, select “full view only” checkbox at the top to retrieve only those works that are eligible for reading
  3. Click “temporary access” to check out the digitized work for one hour at a time (renewable)
  4. Only one user may check out a book at a time (or one user per each copy of the book we hold)
  5. Use the “return early” button to make it available for another user

 

screenshot HathiTrust search

Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.

See also:

 

 


Joventut: periódich catalanista: literatura, arts, ciencias

Joventut (Barcelona: Janer-Febrer, 1900) from HathiTrust

Few books and journals in the Library stay in the same place forever. Berkeley’s copy of the renowned Art Nouveau periodical, Joventut published between 1900 and 1906 and directed by Alexandre de Riquer and Lluís Vía under the auspices of the “Unio Catalanista” has recently migrated from the Art History/Classics Library to The Bancroft Library for safekeeping. Antiquarian bookdealer Peter Bernett describes the journal as “a major forum for the presentation and reviews of ‘modernista’ literature, criticism, theater, music, and visual art in Barcelona and greater Catalonia, as well as discussing current aesthetic trends in Europe.” An extension of the Renaixença cultural and literary movement with inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelites, it featured cutting edge art, architecture and literature. In its first year of publication it was the first review to reproduce a work by Picasso. The ornamental golden binding was inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s The Yellow Book. Catalan poets, novelists and playwrights such as Jacint Verdaguer, Joaquim Ruyra, and Victor Català — who will soon be featured in The Languages of Berkeley online exhibition —were among the regular contributors.

Joventut has been digitized separately by the Biblioteca de Catalunya and the Getty Research Institute, available through the HathiTrust Digital Library and The Internet Archive.

Drawing by [Pablo] Ruiz Picasso in Joventut from HathiTrust

HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) UnCamp Fellowships

HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) UnCamp Fellowships
The UCB Libraries are delighted to offer a limited number of general fellowships for free admission to the 2018 HTRC UnCamp at UC Berkeley.
These fellowships are open to current UC Berkeley students and staff. All qualified applicants will be accepted in order of application while fellowships are available, though priority will be given to student applicants. Fellowship applications are due by Nov 13.
Apply here:
Note: Those who do not receive fellowship awards will be informed in time to register at the UnCamp Early Bird price.
About the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) 2018 UnCamp
Location: University of California Libraries, Berkeley, CA
Dates: January 25-26, 2018
HTRC UnCamp 2018 aims to facilitate the creation of a national community focussed on improving research use of the HathiTrust corpus through computational analysis. The UnCamp will discuss topics relevant to understanding and utilizing the HathiTrust Digital Library corpus within the modern computational research eco-system. This includes discussion of practices and experiences in mass-scale data mining, visualization, and analysis of the HT collection, with the goal of improving the quality of access and use of the collection by means of the HTRC Data Capsule and other affiliated research tools.
Stacy Reardon
Literatures and Digital Humanities Librarian
438 Doe Library | University of California, Berkeley | Berkeley, CA 94720
sreardon@berkeley.edu

Event: HathiTrust Research Center Text Analysis Tools workshop

Please join us for a workshop on text analysis with HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) tools, hosted by the Library and Digital Humanities. This workshop is designed for library and information science professionals, but all are welcome. 
Workshop: HathiTrust Research Center Text Analysis Tools
Date & time: August 15th from 2:30 – 4:30
Location: Berkeley Institute for Data Science (190 Doe Library) UC Berkeley
This workshop will introduce attendees to text analysis, primarily as it is employed in the digital humanities, as well as common methods and tools used in this area of scholarship. The session will provide an overview of the field, with particular attention to the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) and its tools and services. The HTRC is developing capacity for researchers to build sub-corpora of text from the HathiTrust Digital Library and perform non-consumptive analysis on them. Workshop attendees will develop skills that will allow them to actively support and partner in text analysis research.
I hope to see you there,


Jamie V. Wittenberg

Research Data Management Service Design Analyst
Research IT  |  Library
University of California, Berkeley

Resource: HathiTrust collection builder tool

Collection Builder in HathiTrust allows users to create their own subsets of the repository to share with others (or keep private). It is an ideal way for researchers to aggregate sources around a particular subject for classes, group projects, or personal use.

To use Collection Builder, you must be logged in to HathiTrust. Click on LOG IN, choose your home institution, and authenticate with your Calnet ID and passphrase.

Then, either from the PageTurner interface or from the full-text search search results page, you can select items to be added to a collection. When logged in, you can add items to a new or existing permanent collection, or a temporary collection. If you are not logged in, a temporary collection is created. One main advantage of saving items to a collection is that you can then perform full text searches on just this subset of HathiTrust content.


Resource: HathiTrust collections

Here are a few updates on HathiTrust’s collection and tools:

HathiTrust currently contains over 11 million volumes, digitized from the partnering library collections:

  • 11,135,776 total volumes
  • 5,801,121 book titles
  • 290,893 serial titles
  • 3,897,521,600 pages

Visualizations of holdings by call number, by language, and by publication date are available.

 Embed codes are available for the books, allowing you to insert them into any webpage (please note that you may need to update the URL to https for iframes to work properly in recent versions of browsers).

This title came from the “Copyright Review project (CRMS) little gems” collection.

Another way to see some featured titles is to visit HathiTrust on pinterest.