UC Berkeley Library Update

Welcome to Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies Blog!

Posted on January 13, 2021 by Liladhar

On the eve of “old” Russian New Year, I would like to extend a warm welcome to all who are interested in exploring with us both print and e-culture of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies collections. Often, we are questioned what Eurasia is? While there are multiple answers to the nuanced question, I will focus on Eurasian from the perspective of the often “forgotten” part of Asia- the Caucasus and Central Asia. An article on Russian culture in Luxembourg Times provides information on Russian Christmas. A brief overview of the Old and New Russian New Year is provided here.

While the New Year is here upon many in Russia, we must continue with our teaching and research under constraints imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. I leave you to explore openly accessible books of the Institut Vostokovedeniia RAN (1818- ). The Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The about section of the IV RAN‘s website provides information on the institute’s history and mission. The section of publications has basic bibliographic information on the items and provides access through the PDF. Happy Exploring!

Below is the landing page of one of the books with PDF access.

For example, if one clicks on the PDF icon as shown in the image, one can access the full-text of Istoricheskie, kulʹturnye, mezhnat︠s︡ionalʹnye, religioznye i politicheskie svi︠a︡zi Kryma so Sredizemnomorskim regionom i stranami Vostoka : IV mezhdunarodnai︠a︡ nauchnai︠a︡ konferent︠s︡ii︠a︡ (Sevastopolʹ, 6-10 okti︠a︡bri︠a︡ 2020 g.) : materialy konferent︠s︡ii, as shown below:

Until the next time, keep exploring!

Announcing Dates for 2021 OHC Educational Programs

Posted on January 12, 2021January 13, 2021 by sfarrell

The Oral History Center is pleased to announce that applications are now open for the 2021 Introductory Workshop and Advanced Institute!

The OHC is offering online versions of our educational programs this year due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

The Introductory Workshop will held over two days on March 5-6, 2021.

The 2021 Introduction to Oral History Workshop will be held virtually via Zoom over two days on Friday, March 5, from 12–3 p.m. and Saturday, March, 6 from 9 a.m.–1.p.m. Pacific Time. Applications for this workshop are open here and will be accepted through February 16, 2021. Space is limited so apply early to ensure a spot.

The two-day day introductory workshop tuition is $200 and is designed for people who are interested in an introduction to the basic practice of oral history. The workshop serves as a companion to our more in-depth Advanced Oral History Summer Institute held in August.

This workshop focuses on the “nuts-and-bolts” of oral history, including methodology and ethics, practice, and recording. It will be taught by our seasoned oral historians and include hands-on practice exercises. Everyone is welcome to attend the workshop. Prior attendees have included community-based historians, teachers, genealogists, public historians, and students in college or graduate school.

The Advanced Institute will be held from August 9-13, 2021.

The OHC is offering an online version of our one-week advanced institute on the methodology, theory, and practice of oral history. This will take place on the UC Berkeley campus from August 9-13, 2021. Applications will be accepted through July 16, 2021. Apply now!

The cost of the Advanced Institute has been adjusted to reflect the online nature of this year’s program. This year’s cost has been adjusted to $550. See below for details about this year’s institute.

The institute is designed for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, university faculty, independent scholars, and museum and community-based historians who are engaged in oral history work. The goal of the institute is to strengthen the ability of its participants to conduct research-focused interviews and to consider special characteristics of interviews as historical evidence in a rigorous academic environment.

We will devote particular attention to how oral history interviews can broaden and deepen historical interpretation situated within contemporary discussions of history, subjectivity, memory, and memoir.

Overview of the Week

The institute is structured around the life cycle of an interview. Each day will focus on a component of the interview, including foundational aspects of oral history, project conceptualization, the interview itself, analytic and interpretive strategies, and research presentation and dissemination.

Instruction will take place online from 8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Pacific Time, with breaks woven in. There will be three sessions a day: two seminar sessions and a workshop. Seminars will cover oral history theory, legal and ethical issues, project planning, oral history and the audience, anatomy of an interview, editing, fundraising, and analysis and presentation. During workshops, participants will work throughout the week in small groups, led by faculty, to develop and refine their projects.

Participants will be provided with a resource packet that includes a reader, contact information, and supplemental resources. These resources will be made available electronically prior to the Institute, along with the schedule.

Applications and Cost

The cost of the institute is $550. OHC is a soft money research office of the university, and as such receives precious little state funding. Therefore, it is necessary that this educational initiative be a self-funding program. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide financial assistance to participants. We encourage you to check in with your home institutions about financial assistance; in the past we have found that many programs have budgets to help underwrite some of the costs associated with attendance. We will provide receipts and certificates of completion as required for reimbursement.

Read Amanda Tewes’s recap of the 2020 session here.

Read Q&A with Institute Alums Julia Thomas, Alex Vassar, Alec O’Halloran, Kelly Navies, Meagan Gough, Nicole Ranganath, and Marc Robinson.

Questions?

Please contact Shanna Farrell at sfarrell@library.berkeley.edu with any questions.

Spring 2021 workshops from the Office of Scholarly Communication Services

Posted on January 11, 2021 by Timothy Vollmer

Photo by Maya Maceka on Unsplash

Once again this semester the Office of Scholarly Communication Services will offer workshops as part of the Library’s Digital Publishing Series. Here’s what’s coming up over the next few months.

Upcoming Workshops

Publish Digital Books and Open Educational Resources with Pressbooks
Tuesday, February 9, 2021
2:00–3:30pm
Online: Register to receive the Zoom link

If you’re looking to self-publish work of any length and want an easy-to-use tool that offers a high degree of customization, allows flexibility with publishing formats (EPUB, MOBI, PDF), and provides web-hosting options, Pressbooks may be great for you. Pressbooks is often the tool of choice for academics creating digital books, open textbooks, and open educational resources, since you can license your materials for reuse however you desire. Learn why and how to use Pressbooks for publishing your original books or course materials. You’ll leave the workshop with a project already under way.

Text Data Mining and Publishing
Tuesday, March 16th, 2021
11:00am–12:30pm
Online: Register to receive the Zoom link

If you are working on a computational text analysis project and have wondered how to legally acquire, use, and publish text and data, this workshop is for you! We will teach you 5 legal literacies (copyright, contracts, privacy, ethics, and special use cases) that will empower you to make well-informed decisions about compiling, using, and sharing your corpus. By the end of this workshop, and with a useful checklist in hand, you will be able to confidently design lawful text analysis projects or be well positioned to help others design such projects.

Other ways we can help

In addition to the workshops, we’re here to help answer a variety of questions you might have on intellectual property, digital publishing, and information policy.

Check out our website for information on issues such as copyright and fair use, the scholarly publishing lifecycle and sharing research data, UC’s Open Access Policy.
Interested in publishing your research Open Access? UCB Library can help defray the costs of an article processing charge (up to $2,500) or book processing charge (up to $10,000). See the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) for more information.
Do you want to create an open digital textbook? Take a look at UC Berkeley’s Open Book Publishing platform (anyone with a @berkeley.edu email can signup for a free account), and get in touch with us about our Open Educational Resources (OER) grant program.
Keep an eye on our events calendar for more workshops and trainings.
Follow our blog and social media.

Want help or more information? Send us an email. We can provide individualized support and personal consultations, online class instruction, presentations and workshops for small or large groups & classes, and customized support and training for departments and disciplines.

Lines of Latitude: The Long Shadow of Vienna’s Militärgeographisches Institut (1818-1918)

Posted on January 7, 2021January 11, 2021 by Heiko Muhr

Beginning in the 1840s, the venerable Kaiserliches und Königliches Militärgeographisches Institut of the Austro-Hungarian Empire published many thousands of quality topographic sheets covering much of Central and Eastern Europe, areas where the Habsburg Empire had strategic interests. These sheets did not just survey the territory of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, they also provided solid coverage for neighboring parts of the Ottoman and Tsarist empires.

Building of the Kaiserliches und Königliches Militärgeographisches Institut, parade grounds, Josefstädter Glacis, Vienna, Austria, 1860.

The quality of the Habsburg mapping operation was greatly aided by its adaption of the Bessel ellipsoid which fits especially well to the geoid curvature of Europe. The ellipsoid data published by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, a professor of astronomy at the University of Königsberg, in 1841 were then the best and most modern data mapping the figure of the Earth. Because of the recognized high quality of their work, Austrian triangulation parties were admitted into neighboring countries. That work was reflected on Austrian topographic maps covering these areas.

Globe on the roof of the building which housed the Militärgeographisches Institut until 1918.

The K.u.K. Militärgeographisches Institut issued iconic map series such as the Spezialkarte der Österreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie im Masse 1:75 000. Eventually, 752 quadrangles of this legendary map series were produced, starting in 1873.

Spezialkarte 1:75 000, sheet # 5456 Pettau shows parts of the Drava river valley, with the borders of Nazi Germany, Hungary, and Croatia, last updated 1943 by Hauptvermessungsabteilung XIV in Wien, a regional survey office of Germany’s civilian mapping agency Reichsamt für Landesaufnahme.

After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I Austria’s Kartographisches Institut, and Hungarian, Czechoslovak, and German mapping agencies continued to issue updated sheets.

In March 1938 Nazi Germany annexed Austria. This was an important stepping stone in Adolf Hitler’s plans for waging a war of aggression. In Vienna the Nazi regime gained access to important resources and capabilities.

German civilian and military mapping agencies moved quickly to incorporate Austrian government institutions active in the fields of surveying and cartography. The new Vienna office of Germany’s civilian Reichsamt für Landesaufnahme absorbed Austria’s well-regarded Kartographisches Institut and also integrated mapping and surveying staff of the Bundesamt für Eich- und Vermessungswesen. The German military incorporated the Austrian Army’s survey office, from now on identified as Heeresvermessungsstelle Wien.

Rather than reinvent the wheel German World War II military planners pragmatically worked within an established Austrian framework when they mapped parts of central and southeastern Europe. They continued to issue a number of Austrian map series with a long publishing history which reached far back into the 19th century. The Kaiserliches und Königliches Militärgeographisches Institut, defunct since 1918, had a very long shadow.

A German military map series with more limited geographical coverage, the Spezialkarte von Österreich, von Ungarn, und der Tschechoslowakei 1:75 000, was published between 1935 and 1944. It was based on 1:75,000 source maps issued 1924-1939 by Kartographisches Institut, Vojenský zeměpisný ústav, Magyar Királyi Állami Térképészet, Topographische Zweigstelle des Bayerischen Landesvermessungsamts, and the Reichsamt für Landesaufnahme’s Hauptvermessungsabteilung XIV in Wien. Spezialkarte sheets also provided the source map data for various German military map series which covered large parts of central and southeastern Europe at a scale of 1:50,000.

The UC Berkeley Library acquired 420 sheets of this German military map series through the depository program of the U.S. Army Map Service (AMS) in the 1950s. U.S. Army military intelligence had collected these maps in Germany between October 1944 and September 1945, in the final months of World War II. Today these maps are part of the UC Berkeley Library’s German Captured World War II Maps collection.

Zotero Day – January 26 and February 1

Posted on January 7, 2021 by Margaret Phillips

Do you … ?

… save random URLs in a Word or Google Doc?
… save article PDFs on your desktop and as email attachments?
… have a pile of article printouts sitting on your desk?
… write down citations on sticky notes and post them to your monitor?
… stay up late the night before a paper is due reconstructing your citations?

If you answered yes to any of the above … the answer is YES, you need Zotero (or some other citation management system).* Come to Zotero Day and learn more about this powerful tool for organizing your citations and creating bibliographies. Jennifer Dorner and David Eifler have been tag-team teaching Zotero classes which were very successful last semester, with one attracting over 150 attendees!

Spend an hour with Jennifer and David and learn to use this robust citation manager with Firefox and Chrome. These zoom workshop covers importing citations, exporting bibliographies into Word and Google Docs and sharing resources among groups. Three 1-hour sessions each day. (If you have a chance, download the program and browser connector at www.zotero.org before the workshop.)

Tuesday, January 26 (all classes are Pacific Standard Time)

10AM – 11AM
Noon – 1PM
5PM – 6PM

Monday, February 1

9AM – 10AM
2PM – 3PM
4PM – 5PM

Please register to get the Zoom link – https://berkeley.libcal.com/calendar/workshops

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Can’t make it to these workshops? Try a self-paced tutorial? This tutorial includes 24 slides and 18 embedded screencasts (totalling approximately 18 minutes of viewing). Do the tutorial at your own pace and skip or fast-forward through the screencasts. In total, the tutorial can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. Check it out at: Zotero Basics

* * * * * * * * * * * *

* adapted from Why use a citation management tool?, Gallagher Law Library, University of Washington.

Open Access in Latin America: The Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) Publications

Posted on January 6, 2021 by Liladhar

This is our first post in the New Year so we wish all a very happy new year. New Year is supposed to bring hope but hope is something that we always harbor. So we wish you resilience and success in your lives. Open Access in Latin America mandates a brief discussion of the publications of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). Its publications repository provides access to hundreds of OA publications in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

ELCLAC’s Publications Page

As shown below, the thematic selections now include ECLAC publications on COVID-19.

ECLAC’s website also offers access to statistical databases related to Latin America.

ECLAC Statistics

We leave you with good wishes and invite you to explore the ECLAC Open Access this year. Open Access Matters!

530K Primary Resources Now Available Online through The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement: A Digital Archive

Posted on January 5, 2021January 5, 2021 by Marissa Friedman

Map of Minidoka War Relocation Center. — BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder P1.05, Blueprints and charts, general layout, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records 1930-1974, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

The Bancroft Library has recently completed the digitization of nearly 150,000 items related to the confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II as part of a two-year effort to select, prepare, and digitize these primary source records as part of a grant supported by the National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. This program helps to support the preservation and interpretation of U.S. confinement sites where Japanese Americans were detained during World War II. This recent project, The Japanese American Internment Sites: A Digital Archive, represents our fourth grant from this program, which together have culminated in over 530,000 primary resource materials being made available online.

Annual Report cover with image of Arizona landscape. — BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder fJ2.18, Annual report, photograph album, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records 1930-1974, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

The project focused on the U.S. War Relocation Authority (WRA) files from the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records (BANC MSS 67/14 c). The WRA was created in 1942 to assume jurisdiction over the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war. Between 1942-1946, the agency managed the relocation centers, administered an extensive resettlement program, and oversaw the details of the registration and segregation programs. These newly digitized records from the Washington Office headquarters and the district, field, and regional offices, formally document WRA management of internment of Japanese Americans in “relocation” centers and resettlement of approved individuals under supervision in the eastern states. Digitized materials document the registration of individuals; disturbances such as strikes; policies and attitudes; daily life in the camps including educational and employment programs; correspondences and other writings by evacuees; Japanese American service in the armed forces; and public opinion.

Out of the Desert cover with a red cross and image of desert landscape. — Poston I High School, “Out of the Desert”, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records 1930-1974, BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder fJ2.92B, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Topaz Scrap Book cover. — BANC MSS 67/14c, folder fH1.46, Topaz scrapbook, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records 1930-1974, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Since 2011, the Bancroft has been awarded four grants from the National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. The previous grants have digitized records from the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study and archival collections selected from individual internee’s personal papers, photographs, maps, artworks, and audiovisual materials. The Bancroft’s Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement: A Digital Archive website (http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/jacs) brings together all the digitized content and the recently published LibGuide (https://guides.lible.berkeley.edu/internment) that explains how to use and access these collection resources.

As we now embark on our recently awarded fifth grant from this program, we look forward to bringing even more collections online to support researcher access. We are honored and grateful to be able to make these important resources available to help interpret this period in American history and to preserve them for future generations.

Page of a typewritten report. — BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder E2.91, Miller, Ray, Evolution of a Wartime Procedures Manual, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records 1930-1974, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

The project was led by digital project archivist Lucy Hernandez and principal investigator Mary Elings, Assistant Director of Bancroft and Head of Technical Services. Special thanks to Julie Musson, digital collections archivist at Bancroft and Jennafer Prongos, BackStage Library Works technician for their work on this project, as well as support from Theresa Salazar, Bancroft curator of Western Americana. Many thanks to the Library Information Technology group at the University Library for their work in managing the files, maintaining the information systems used in the project, and ensuring the publication and long term preservation of the digitized collections through our partnership with the California Digital Library.

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This project was funded, in part, by a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of the Interior.