Day: August 19, 2011

Update: After being closed for renovation, Kresge Engineering Library will re-open on Thursday, August 25 at 8 am (not August 22 as previously announced).

During the closure, the Library’s print collections will be unavailable for borrowing.

Finding resources you need during the closure:

1. All online journals, books, reference sources, etc., will be available as usual.  Use OskiCat and  Electronic Journals A-Z to find resources you need.
2. For print materials held at other campus libraries, continue to pick them up at the other libraries and check them out there.
3. For print materials held at NRLF, log on to OskiCat and request them as you currently do.  Articles will be scanned and posted to you via email; books will be sent to another campus library that you select for pick up.
4. For print materials held at SRLF or any of the other nine UC Libraries and found in Next Generation Melvyl, click the Request button, fill in the form and submit it.  Articles requested will be scanned and posted to you via email.  Books will be shipped to UC Berkeley’s Interlibrary Borrowing office and you’ll receive an email when they’re ready to be picked up in Doe Library, Room 103.
5. Current UC Berkeley faculty and graduate students can borrow materials from Stanford and UT Austin through the Research Library Cooperative Program (RLCP).  Books requested through this service will be sent to Doe Library, Circulation Desk for pickup; articles will be delivered electronically.
6. For print materials not found at the above places, please request them using the Interlibrary Borrowing Service Form.

To return books: There will be an external book return bin near the Engineering Library.  The exact location will be posted on the Engineering Library blog as soon as it’s known.

Getting help during the closure: Engineering Library staff will be on-campus in a temporary location and accessible via email.

1. Email Jean, jmckenzi@library.berkeley.edu or Lisa,lngo@library.berkeley.edu with any questions
2. Course reserves information:  email Brice, bsulliva@library.berkeley.edu
3. Send questions to Ask Us
4. More information about phone service will be posted on the Engineering Library blog as soon as it’s available.

 

 

Thanks to recent advances in scanning technology, all of the 10 million books in the UC Berkeley Library have been digitized and are now available in abridged form on a flash drive.  This valuable and useful item, priced at $99.95, goes on sale April 1 in the Moffitt Library Copy Center.

Because the flash drive only holds 1 gigabyte of information (about 1/3000th of the storage space needed for the entire collection), there was room to include only the first sentence of each book.

Some examples:

• “Call me Ishmael.”  – Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
• “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – George Orwell, 1984
• “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.” – James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” – Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford

The librarian in charge of the project commented that “There are some real gems in here.  We’re sure Cal students and faculty will appreciate having such convenient access to this extraordinary scholarly resource. Really, people would be fools not to buy it.”

A second “library on a flash drive” product, containing the final sentence of each book, is under consideration.

Update: This announcement was, of course, an April Fool’s joke. Rest assured that we have no plans to produce such a product!

However, it is true that:

• More than 3.3 million volumes from the UC libraries, including many from Berkeley, have been scanned by Google and by the Internet Archive. Over 490,000 of these are in the public domain and freely available online.
• OskiCat includes links to over 480,000 e-books and other full text items.
• The UC Berkeley libraries subscribe to over 130 e-book and text collections.

For more information on how to access electronic texts through the library, see our Find Books and E-books page.

To learn more about book scanning projects in the UC libraries, see the California Digital Library’s Mass Digitization website.

And, yes, we do sell flash drives (but they’re blank).

Research databases branded ProQuest, Chadwyck-Healey, and Illumina, plus the RefWorks citation management tool, will be down for maintenance from 7pm on Saturday August 20 through 7am on Sunday August 21, 2011.

This outage will affect an unusually large number of our databases. The following is only a partial list:

• AltPress Watch
• American Periodicals Series
• ArchiveFinder
• Black Studies Center
• Digital Sanborn Maps
• Dissertations and Theses (Dissertation Abstracts)
• ERIC via CSA
• Ethnic NewsWatch
• GenderWatch
• Historical Annual Reports
• Historical Newspapers
• Literature Online
• MLA International Bibliography
• NTIS
• PAIS International
• PolicyFile
• ProQuest Newspapers
• PsycInfo
• Research Library
• Sociological Abstracts

For a more complete list, search on proquest, chadwyck, or illumina here. For alternative databases to use during that time, see our Electronic Resource Finder.