Day: August 12, 2009

Global Road Warrior

Posted on by Anna Sackmann

Global Road Warrior logo

The Library is trying out a new online resource for country information: Global Road Warrior. Global Road Warrior is a world-class e-content database offering country-by-country information on 175 nations and territories. It features more than 8 million words of editorial content, over 6,500 color photos and 1,575 maps, all presented in a consistent 92-category framework for each country. Categories include: Society and Culture, Business Culture, Travel, Maps, and Photos.

Created by an international team of researchers, cartographers and writers, Global Road Warrior is continually updated. This database is valuable to multiple educational disciplines and promotes cross-cultural understanding through comparative studies. Global Road Warrior is a great source for students who are preparing to study or travel abroad.

Global Road Warrior is available via computers on campus or through the library proxy server. Users can also connect to Global Road Warrior and other electronic journals through the Electronic Resources page on the library site.

Check out Global Road Warrior and let us know what you think!

Next steps for NextGen Melvyl

Posted on by UC Berkeley Library

The University of California Libraries are moving to a new stage in evaluating the Next Generation Melvyl Pilot catalog system.

Beginning Wednesday, August 19, the Next Generation Melvyl Pilot will be the only UC-wide catalog linked from the Library’s homepage and some other pages. This is intended to encourage people to try it, and also to provide an accurate test of its performance under real-world, full-load conditions.

The current version of Melvyl will still be available, and you may wish to bookmark it using this link.

The Bancroft Survey Project Blog

Posted on by Lee Anne Titangos

The Bancroft Survey Project began in February 2008.  Funded by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon and the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundations, the survey project is intended to be a simultaneously broad and in-depth survey of all manuscript holdings of the Bancroft Library, which has been collecting for over a century.  Four archivists were hired to scour the collections for a three year term, during which they will review the vast myriad of manuscript materials and use a survey instrument designed to gather data on collection scope, subject categories, and physical condition. 

The survey archivists are Marjorie Bryer, Amy Croft, Dana Miller, and Elia Van Lith, and they have kindly agreed to share with us some of their discoveries via a project blog – http://bancsurvey.blogspot.com/

– that will be updated regularly with interesting (and occasionally odd) finds.