Day: March 12, 2009

Roundtable: John Francis Pyle and the Economic Culture of Rural California in the Late-Nineteenth Century

Posted on by ltitango

March 19th, Faculty Club
12:00 noon

Led by R. Todd Welker

Since the early modern period, Europeans and Americans have kept diaries in order to monitor their economic obligations around the communities in which they lived. California farmers in the late-nineteenth century were no exception. Based on a systematic analysis of a few sample years of the diary of one farmer in Santa Clara County, this talk explores the everyday economic practices of ordinary farmers in the Golden State and the meanings that they attached to those practices.

Agriculture lies at the heart of California’s prosperity; the culture of the vast California countryside remains a powerful element in the complex mix that has shaped the fabled and unique contemporary identity of the Golden State. We invite the campus community to join us for this informal talk. Our Round Tables aim to highlight the fruitfulness of Bancroft’s collections to developing an understanding of our society and its history.

20,000+ Springer ebooks now available

Posted on by bquigley

The UC Libraries have purchased most of the Springer ebooks published from 2005 to 2009. This purchase builds on our existing access to Springer book series – such as Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Topics in Current Chemistry, and Landolt-Bornstein – to greatly expand our ebook collections.

Each book chapter is available as a PDF file without digital rights management (DRM). These files can be downloaded, printed, and even transferred to a PDA or Kindle. Eventually, these ebooks will be linked from our catalogs and UC-eLinks. In the meantime, you can search or browse them directly at SpringerLink.

Books are available in the following subject collections:

Note: A few Springer ebooks are excluded from this purchase because they have been jointly published with another publisher.

This purchase will help the libraries to study the viability of ebooks, including such factors as preferences, behaviors, and usage. We will be soliciting feedback from our users regarding the advantages and disadvantages of the electronic format for their specific disciplines. If you have questions or feedback, please contact your librarian.