Check out some of the New York Times “Best Art Books of 2024.”
A Book about Ray At the Louvre Atlas of Never Built Architecture Emergency Money
Exit Interview Iconophages If the Snake Louis Carlos Bernal
Mandalas Painting Men Truckload of Art Hello We Were …
We are sad to announce the passing of george miller (his preference for lower-case spelling).
George entered the world of The Bancroft Library in 1997, shortly after his retirement and originally as a volunteer helping to process the records in the history of water rights and engineering in California. George had had a storied career in finance, bearing witness to and shaping some of the key developments in the US finance industry in the last half of the twentieth century. Most notable was his idea of passive investment in the form of an index fund, which would track a basket of top-performing stocks, premised on the notion that the growth of the market over time would beat active money managers. While at Bancroft, George also became captivated by the collection of oral histories produced by the Oral History Center. Over time, he began to make contributions to the archive by sponsoring oral histories with key figures in Bay Area politics, environmental activism, and journalism.
It was through this engagement with oral history that my predecessor Martin Meeker eventually persuaded George to do his own oral history. An important theme of George’s oral history is his philanthropic calling, which he described as “graduating from his day job … to more productive things.” A great feature of a life history is that one gets a sense of when values or passions took root. Early on, George developed a sense of duty, which led to a distinguished vocation as a philanthropist to institutions and causes dear to him, repaying the opportunities he was given, not just to his almae matres, UPenn and Cal, but to his community, to young students, to his city, his state, and to the world.
George was known for the pithy sayings that his friends and family called GAMOs – “george a. miller observations.” Underlying many of them was a pragmatic outlook on life, for example, “time is like money; you can only spend it once.” He took one of his father’s aphorisms to heart throughout his life as well, “There’s nothing sadder than something done well that shouldn’t be done at all.” Taking great care to identify what was worth fighting for, he was humble about his ability to bring about change. Musing on this, he proposed his own obituary: “He lived. He cared. He tried. Then he gave up.” But this is someone who spent thirty-five years finding a way to derive steady revenue from the chaos of the market. He invested where he thought he could have an impact. He cared and tried enough to build a credit union in Vietnam from the ground up to 160,000 members, fund the education of hundreds of students at UC Berkeley, make improvements to small-claims courts across the country, support environmental organizations, help revive the Market Street Railway, and secure the future of a beloved bar and grill in San Francisco, to name just a few of his accomplishments.
His friends called George “a piece of work.” He made a cheeky, no-nonsense difference in the world, a difference that we at The Bancroft Library and the Oral History Center have felt deeply and will miss.
At UC Berkeley Library, with the leadership and guidance from the library’s current acting AUL for Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Information Technology, Lynne Grigsby, we are excited to report the completion of the Russian Women Writers Collection’s digitization. The collection’s analog items can be searched here.
The digital component of the project can be accessed here.
My predecessor, Dr. Allan Urbanic, was instrumental in helping us with the description of the project, which is as follows, “Russian Women Writers Collection
This project has been created in cooperation with the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. In recent years, scholarship has focused on women’s contributions to the history of Russian literature. It has also been discovered that many of these writers were poorly represented in American libraries’ collections. The project first concentrated on filling in the corpus of women writers at the beginning of the 19th century. As the project moved forward, the works of Russian women authors of the later 19th century and the 20th century have been added.”
Terms governing use and reproduction
Researchers may freely and openly use the UC Berkeley Library’s digitized public domain materials. However, U.S. copyright law may protect some materials in our online collections (Title 17, U.S.C.). Use or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use (Title 17, U.S.C. § 107) requires permission from the copyright owners. The use or reproduction of some materials may also be restricted by terms of University of California gift or purchase agreements, privacy and publicity rights, or trademark law. Responsibility for determining rights status and permissibility of any use or reproduction rests exclusively with the researcher. Please see our permissions policies to learn more or make inquiries (https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/permissions-policies).
Source
Russian Women Writers
One can look at the usage data of the item called Di͡evochka Lida razskaz dli͡a di͡eteĭ as shown below,
February marks the start of Black History Month, a perfect time to celebrate the cultural and artistic impact of African American writers. Check out our list of novels and poetry by both acclaimed and budding Black authors for you to explore!
Today, we are launching a new library research guide for Iberian Literatures & Criticism. The new guide will improve navigation and discovery in UC Berkeley’s vast literature collection in Romance languages, mostly found in a classification commonly known as the PQs. Over the course of the past year, we have critically reviewed the former guides, weeded outdated resources, and replaced them with more current content with links to digital resources when available.
This literary research guide, like the others for Italian and French & Francophone literatures launched last year, is now benefiting from the LibGuides platform, which makes it much easier to revise than the former PDFs. The guide is structured by sections for article databases, general guides and literary histories, reference tools, poetry, theater & performance, and literary periods. In addition to literature in Spanish and Portuguese, it also includes less commonly taught literatures and languages such as Catalan, Galician, Basque, Arabic, Ladino, and more. There is also a new section for Luso-African and Hispano-African literature.
The online guide also interfaces seamlessly with related guides published by the UC Berkeley Library. For example, on the home page, there is a prominent link to the online list of recently acquired publications on the general Spanish & Portuguese guide, making it even easier to stay current on new books in all of the call number ranges.
Because the guides are much easier to update, they encourage user interaction and invite community suggestions for inclusion (or deletion).
When you have time, please take a look at this new resource and let us know what you think.
Claude Potts, Romance Languages Librarian
Cameron Flynn, RLL Doctoral Candidate
La semana pasada colgué las versiones últimas y finales de BETA, BITECA y BITAGAP en la web de PhiloBiblon de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Desde este momento no habrá más cambios en los datos presentados allí. Dentro de unos meses, un PhiloBiblon nuevo y renovado aparecerá en FactGrid:PhiloBiblon en la universidad alemana de Jena, donde compartirá espacio virtual con otros cuarenta proyectos históricos, desde los estudios cuneiformes hasta la época nazi en Alemania.
Es el final de un largo periplo que empezó en 1975 con el proyecto Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language de la University of Wisconsin, encabezado por Lloyd Kasten, con quien había estudiado yo ecdótica unos diez años antes. Fue el primer proyecto de humanidades digitales en el ámbito hispanico. Kasten fue secundado por su joven colega John Nitti, el arquitecto del entorno informático del proyecto. Para garantizar la autenticidad del corpus de español antiguo, se necesitaba un repertorio de manuscritos españoles escritos antes de 1501. Tal repertorio no existió y pusieron a ayudantes de investigación a vaciar dos obras, el Catálogo de los manuscritos castellanos de la Real Biblioteca de El Escorial, del benemérito, y martirizado, padre Julián Zarco Cuevas; y la Bibliografía de la literatura hispánica del igualmente benemérito José Simón Díaz. Identificaron 966 obras y Kasten y Nitti imprimieron el resultado como Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts en 1975. Siguió una segunda edición en 1977, con 1869 fichas. Al año siguiente yo me encontraba en la Hispanic Society, redactando su catálogo de manuscritos medievales y enviando adiciones y correcciones a BOOST. En 1981 Kasten y Nitti me ofrecieron la dirección de BOOST como proyecto autónomo, y lo demás, como dicen, es historia.
Pronto tuve un colaborador, un jovencísimo Ángel Gómez Moreno (UCM), que acababa de pasar un año de estudios de posgrado en Wisconsin. Al volver a España se lanzó con entusiasmo a la tarea de repasar los ficheros y catálogos (en papel, por supuesto), de la BNE, la Biblioteca de Palacio, la RAE y la RAH, siempre en busca de nuevos manuscritos para BOOST. En los años 80 estudiantes de carrera y posgrado sirvieron como ayudantes de investigación, primero María Morrás (UPF), y en los 90 Ángela Moll Dexeus y Antonio Cortijo (UC Santa Barbara), durante su paso por las aulas de Berkeley. Ya desde 1993 BOOST era BETA, la Bibliografía Española de Textos Antiguos en CD-ROM y en la red en 1997. En 2000 Ángel me mandó como becario por dos años a Óscar Perea Rodríguez; y desde entonces Óscar ha sido mi mano derecha en el proyecto, organizando los seminarios de PhiloBiblon, primero en San Millán de la Cogolla y luego en Madrid. Más recientemente ha trabajado como ayudante en Berkeley Heather Bamford (George Washington University), mientras que, en España, en la UCM, Álvaro Bustos ha participado en varias campañas de investigación conmigo y ha reclutado nuevos miembros del equipo de BETA.
Kasten y Nitti fueron responsables también de la Bibliography of Old Catalan Texts (BOOCT, 1985), base de datos gemela a BOOST, compilada por Beatrice Concheff (†), antigua alumna de la University of Wisconsin y que, en aquel tiempo, ejercía como profesora de inglés en una escuela de lenguas de Barcelona. Era una aficionada a la literatura catalana, pero no era experta en ella en términos académicos; por ello, la inmensa mayoría de sus citas a obras y manuscritos medievales provenía de fuentes secundarias. Y además, en el año de 1989, por desgracia, Concheff se encontraba con una salud muy delicada y era consciente de que no podría dedicarse a la compilación de una segunda edición de BOOCT.
En una de las sesiones de trabajo del congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas de Barcelona de 1989, mi amigo Francisco Marcos Marín me presentó a Vicenç Beltrán. Expuesto el caso a Vicenç, vio inmediatamente la importancia de seguir adelante con BOOCT. En seguida Vicenç embarcó en el proyecto a su jovencísima alumna, doctoranda en aquel entonces, Gemma Avenoza i Vera (†). Fue Gemma la que enseguida quedó al cargo del mismo. Era ya una codicóloga consumada, como se puede comprobar en su tesis doctoral, Repertori dels manuscrits en llengües romàniques conservats a biblioteques barcelonines. Además, Gemma era de los escasos expertos en filología de la época que sabía manejar un ordenador, habilidad absolutamente necesaria para trabajar con PhiloBiblon. Ambos, Gemma y Vicenç, romanistas al estilo antiguo y expertos no sólo en las literaturas medievales ibéricas, sino también en las de Francia e Italia, comprobaron la utilidad del (entonces recién bautizado) PhiloBiblon, pues podría facilitar la tarea de catalogación y descripción de los textos y testimonios del corpus de literatura medieval ibérica en lenguas castellana, catalana, portuguesa y gallego-portuguesa.
A los pocos meses de ese primer encuentro en Barcelona, en el otoño de 1989 Gemma ya pudo visitarme en Berkeley para adentrarse en el arcano mundo de PhiloBiblon y encargarse, junto con Vicenç, de BOOCT, que pronto cambiaría su nombre en BITECA (Bibliografia de Textos Catalans Antics), de forma paralela a BETA. Desde entonces hasta su demasiado temprana muerte en 2021, Gemma fue la mano directriz de BITECA, pronto secundada por Lourdes Soriano, alumna tanto de Gemma como de Vicenç. Durante casi 20 años, pues, Gemma, Lourdes y yo estuvimos en contacto constante. Las dos supieron atraer a más de medio centenar de colaboradores y ayudantes de investigacíon. Los miembros actuales del equipo de BITECA son Joan Mahiques Climent (Universitat Jaume I), Joan M. Perujo (Universitat d’Alacant), Helena Rovira Cerdà (Universidad de Murcia), Glòria Sabaté (Universitat de Barcelona) y Ferran Triadó Sales, (Universitat de Barcelona), todos ellos alumnos o antiguos alumnos de Gemma y Lourdes.
Ya por la misma época, en 1988, entablé discusiones con mi querido colega y vis-à-vis (literalmente) en el departamento de español y portugués de Berkeley, Arthur Askins, sobre la posibilidad de crear una base de datos paralalela a BOOST y BOOCT. Se llamaría Bibliography of Old Portuguese Texts (BOOPT) y formaría un nuevo tomo en la “Bibliographic Series” de la Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. Pero ya la época de publicación en papel había pasado. Con una subvención de la Sociedad Estatal del Quinto Centenario, BETA, BITECA y el recien bautizado BITAP (Bibliografia de Textos Antigos Portugueses) saldría en disco CD-ROM en 1993. Más tarde, el nombre BITAP se cambiaría en BITAGAP (Bibliografia de Textos Antigos Galegos e Portugueses).
Arthur había sido testigo ocular de mis investigaciones con BOOST desde 1981 y se había dado cuenta de la utilidad de las bases de datos en sus propias investigaciones sobre la biblioteca de Fernando Colón. Estaba intrigado, pero se dio cuenta desde el principio que esto tendría que ser un proyecto de equipo. Reclutó a sus amigos y antiguos compañeros de estudios de Berkeley, Harvey Sharrer (†), profesor en la University of California, Santa Bárbara, y Martha E. Schaffer, en aquel entonces profesora la University of Chicago y actualmente en la University of San Francisco.
Iniciados sus viajes de investigación anuales en Portugal, muy pronto los tres persuadieron a Aida Fernanda Dias (†), profesora de la Universidade de Coimbra, que se uniera al equipo. Luego, comenzando en 2008, se incorporaron Pedro Pinto (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), con su olfato extraordinario para encontrar manuscritos de interés, Cristina Sobral (Universidade de Lisboa), Filipe Alves Moreira (Universidade do Porto, actualmente Universidade Aberta), Maria de Lurdes Rosa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Ricardo Pichel Gotérrez (Universidade de Santiago y actualmente Universidad de Educación a Distancia), Mariña Arbor (Universidade de Santiago y Diana Fontão (Universidade de Porto / Universidad de Salamanca).
Como en los casos de BETA y BITECA, el equipo de BITAGAP ha contado con al menos una centena de buenos colaboradores, entre estudiantes y colegas del mundo entero.
PhiloBiblon no sólo ha sido creación de las personas mencionadas aquí, sino de todos aquellos colegas que nos han escrito pidiendo u ofreciendo información sobre tal o cual texto, manuscrito o persona. Por y para ellos hemos dedicado tanto esfuerzo durante más de cuarenta años, el mismo esfuerzo precisamente que todos los miembros del equipo vamos a continuar haciendo en esta nueva etapa que se abre ante nosotros.
Charles B. Faulhaber
University of California, Berkeley
Referencias:
Faulhaber, Charles B., PhiloBiblon, pasado, presente, futuro: Historia de un proyecto de investigación, San Millán de la Cogolla: Congreso Internacional. Códices literarios españoles (Edad media) 2007-11-29
_____, PhiloBiblon: Pasado y futuro, (Incipit 29 2009: pp. 191-200)
_____, PhiloBiblon, Information Technology, and Medieval Spanish Literature: A Balance Sheet, Bern: Humanitats a la Xarxa: Món Medieval – Humanities on the Web: The Medieval World 2014: pp. 15-43
_____, PhiloBiblon and the Semantic Web. Notes for a Future History, València: La Literatura Medieval Hispánica en la Imprenta (1475-1600) 2016: pp. 75-93
____. Harvey L. Sharrer (1940-2024). PhiloBiblon blog 2024-10-10
Dias, Aida Fernanda, Arthur Lee-Francis Askins, Harvey L. Sharrer, A ‘Bibliografia de Textos Antigos Galegos e Portugueses’ na Internet, Lisboa: Revista Portuguesa de História do Livro 1 n. 2 1998: pp. 173-80)
Martín Molares, Mónica PhiloBiblon 2020 n. 1 (febrero): Crónica del V Seminario Internacional PhiloBiblon-BNE-UCM (Madrid, junio de 2019), (PhiloBiblon Blog 2020-02-28)
Perea Rodríguez, Óscar, y Charles B. Faulhaber, Esbozos sobre la evolución y el futuro de un pionero de las humanidades digitales hispánicas: el proyecto de PhiloBiblon, Revista Digital Universitaria 18 n. 1 2017
Schaffer, Martha E. Homenagem a Aida Fernanda Dias oferecida pelos seus colegas de Philobiblon, eHumanista 31 2015: pp. i-v, 1-275)
Sharrer, Harvey L., BITAGAP (Bibliografia de Textos Antigos Galegos e Portugueses): um armazém da memória histórica, Madrid: (Tenh’eu que mi fez el i mui gran ben. Estudos sobre cultura escrita medieval dedicados a Harvey L. Sharrer 2022: pp. 39-67)
_____, A BITAGAP no seu 30o aniversário: a expansão de dados e expectativas para o futuro, Berlin: O Medievalismo no século XXI 2020: pp. 157-68)
_____, The BITAGAP project since 1988 – Expansion of the corpus of texts and important discoveries, Bern: Humanitats a la Xarxa: Món Medieval – Humanities on the Web: The Medieval World 2014: pp. 169-83
Check out these, and other books that explore and represent the use of art as social and political resistance, currently on display in the Art History/Classics Library.
Elizabeth Catlett How to Design a Revolution LaToya Ruby Frazier
Propagandopolis Resist! The Art of Resistance Showing Resistance
UC Berkeley Library has set up a trial of Brill’s Muslim in Russia Online Database. The database trial will continue until February 1, 2025. You can access the trial here.
This collection examines the varied Russian Muslim population during the period of 1861-1918. It includes works by and about Muslims, highlighting the significance of this heritage as the history and spirituality of Muslims in Russia are being reexamined. A word of caution: Most of the periodicals in this database have been digitized from microfilms; thus, digitization quality is problematic. The OCR seems unchecked and automated “dirty,” so one has to look at the images.
Please access the database here: https://shorturl.at/M4IyT
Please see the screenshot below:
![Title: V mīri͡e musulʹmanstva:ezhenedelʹnai͡a, literaturnai͡a, politicheskai͡a i obshchestvennai͡a gazeta.<br />Date: 1911<br />
Date in Source: [1911-1912]](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-08-105604.jpg)
Date: 1911
Date in Source: [1911-1912]
Here are the key points about this database are highlighted below:
Please save the date on your calendars for an exciting upcoming conversation-book talk (On Savage Shores : How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe) for our community of UC Berkeley Library and affiliated staff and librarians.
Date: February 6, 2024
Day: Thursday, Time: 12-1 pm (Pacific Time) 8 pm-9 pm UK Time
Zoom Webinar Link: https://berkeley.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_LGoU0V9ZQXegc5fHxlF_WA
Registration: https://ucberk.li/3GW
Free and Open to All with prior registration. If you need special assistance or accommodation, please contact Dr. Liladhar R Pendse, the event organizer.
About the Webinar: In this webinar, Professor Caroline Dodds Pennock (She/her) will discuss her book, On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe. This book challenges the traditional Eurocentric view of the Age of Discovery by focusing on the Indigenous Americans who crossed the Atlantic to Europe after 1492. For centuries, history has taught that global history began when the “Old World” met the “New World” with Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. However, Caroline Dodds Pennock’s research reveals that, for many Indigenous people—Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit, and others—Europe was the “New World.”
![A Collage of pages of Codex Mendoza. The Codex Mendoza is an Aztec codex, believed to have been created around the year 1541.[1] It contains a history of both the Aztec rulers and their conquests as well as a description of the daily life of pre-conquest Aztec society. The codex is written using traditional Aztec pictograms with a translation and explanation of the text provided in Spanish. It is named after Don Antonio de Mendoza (1495-1552), the viceroy of New Spain, who supervised its creation and who was a leading patron of native artists.](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/imgonline-com-ua-twotoone-Ddaw07KdHVpPXVF-scaled.jpg)
About the author
Professor Caroline Dodds Pennock (She/her) has been at the University of Sheffield since 2010, where they are known as one of the few British historians specializing in Aztec studies. Their current research, however, has expanded to include Indigenous histories in a global context, with a particular focus on the Atlantic world. Dr. Caroline Dodds Pennock recently published On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, which tells the stories of Indigenous Americans who traveled to Europe in the sixteenth century. These accounts, often involving abduction, loss, and cultural appropriation, have largely been overlooked in mainstream history.
Dodds Pennock, Caroline. On Savage Shores : How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe / Caroline Dodds Pennock. First American edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.
https://search.library.berkeley.edu/permalink/01UCS_BER/1thfj9n/alma991086032106106532
Event Sponsors: Social Sciences Division. Library’s Equity and Inclusion Committee, Institute for European Studies, UC Berkeley and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), UC Berkeley
In these austere times where both financial resources and shelving space are limited, it has become a rare occasion when we are able to pursue full-runs of older periodicals. However, the recent acquisition of these two—one from France and the other from Belgium—in more or less the same time period has sparked the idea of hosting a hands-on journal presentation for those interested in interacting with the journals before the issues are processed, cataloged, bound, and stored in their distinct library locations.
Que vlo-ve?: bulletin de l’Association internationale des amis de Guillaume Apollinaire was published from January 1973 to 2004. Centered on the work of the celebrated 20th century French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist and art critic of Polish descent, its intention was not to duplicate articles published in the annual Guillaume Apollinaire series by Lettres Modernes. Instead, it was meant to welcome articles that could not easily find a place, news of the association and of the museum as well as news that members of the scholarly society wished to disseminate internationally.
Sardonic and visually rich, this wartime French literary and artistic journal published by Jean Cocteau and Paul Iribe, was characterized by a restrained modernism and a fiercely nationalistic, anti-German perspective. Le Mot (The Word) was a wartime sequel to François Bernouard’s Schéhérazade: Album Mensuel d’Oeuvres Inédites d’Art et de Littérature (1909-11). Its primary purpose was to establish an entirely French artistic style and taste—anti-bourgeois and uninfluenced by German modernism.
Reports of the brutal treatment of noncombatants (such as mass executions that included women, small children, and the elderly) and damage to towns and cultural centers shocked the public, leading to a characterization, particularly within France, of the German soldiers as destructive and uncivilized “huns” particularly within wartime propaganda. The bi-monthly periodical included cover designs by not only Iribe and Cocteau but also Sem, Raoul Dufy, Léon Bakst, André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, and Pierre-Emile Legrain. Cocteau signed his drawings as Jim, the name of his dog. In August 1914, when war was declared with Germany, he was twenty-five years old. Like many patriotic young Frenchmen, Cocteau tried to enlist but was turned down because of his health. Looking for other ways to serve his country and the war effort, he collaborated with Iribe to launch Le Mot. As a teenager, Iribe drew illustrations for the popular caricature journal L’Assiette au Beurre (The Butter Plate), which ran from 1902 to 1912. He also freelanced for Le Témoin, Rire, Sourire and other periodicals and was enthusiastic about starting a satirical journal of his own.
Please join us for an interactive show and tell with special guest Willard Bohn, alumnus of the Department of French and Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Illinois State University.
Thursday, February 6
4-5:30 pm
223 Doe Library (accessible through south end of the Heyns Reading Room)
No rsvp required.
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Claude H. Potts (he/him)
Librarian for Romance Language Collections
