International & Area Studies

Emergency HathiTrust service is now live

Starting today, current UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and students will be able to take advantage of HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service, helping the Library continue to serve its mission even during the COVID-19 pandemic. The service provides view-only access to digital versions of millions of the physical volumes held by libraries across the 10-campus UC system — plus NRLF and SRLF. With careful consideration of fair use guidelines, these materials are available only to the current campus community (with CalNet IDs). We will announce this publicly via multiple channels, including the Library’s news story: Need a book from the UC Berkeley Library while we are sheltering in place? Check here first. And we encourage you to share this news generously with patrons. “For Berkeley faculty, students, and staff, this opens up a trove of materials,” said Salwa Ismail, who worked with HathiTrust to bring the service to fruition for Berkeley. “Our shelves are closed, but as long as your screens are open, you’ll have access to most of our resources.” For more information, read HathiTrust’s guide and FAQ on the Emergency Temporary Access Service. (Source: Email from the University Librarian  Professor/ Dr. Jeff Mackie-Mason, dated April 2, 2020)

As an example, please see- USSR in construction. 1930:no.2-8.

View full catalog record Rights: Protected by copyright law.

Shoah or more widely known as the Holocaust in the Western world was an event that one must never forget. It also caused a mass exodus of people of the Jewish faith to their historic homeland and also to Latin America and to the different parts of the world. The new online exhibition as posted by Yad Vashem allows us to explore the narratives from our venues of COVID-19 pandemic mandated social separation.

The exhibition has historical and area studies aspects and that is why it is being posted for our colleagues to inform themselves about the following, “The testimonies of Holocaust survivors are filled with recollections of Jewish acts of kindness and solidarity. ” (source: https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/rescue-by-jews/index.asp#about)

In the world, we experience these acts of kindness everywhere from people of all nationalities. These happen all around us all the time and I wanted to appreciate my colleagues and administrators who have been incredibly supportive in these difficult times of Pandemic. Thank you, and enjoy the exhibition!

Smithsonian Institute in its magazine announced  a launch of their open access platform that will allow its user to search for 2.8 million images that the institution has released into public domain. See the image of this new OA platform below. If you click on the image, you can actually conduct search in a new window. Stay safe and stay well! (Source of this information was my colleague and our librarian for History, Ms. Jennifer Dorner).

As we get used to the concepts of Social Distancing in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we must think of how we can leverage our abilities to provide reference services using the online tools that are accessible to our users. Despite the intensity of COVID-19, many publishers are making their content freely available to individual users, and the British Library is not an exception.

Below is an excerpt from the BL Blog announcement, “British History Online (BHO) is a digital collection of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a special focus on the period 1300 to 1800. From 30 March, all transcribed content on BHO is now freely available to individual users, and will remain so until 31 July 2020. The BHO collection includes over 1,280 volumes of primary content and secondary sources.Most of this content (over 1000 volumes or c.80% of the total) is always available free to use by anyone, anywhere with access to the BHO site.”

A simple keyword search for the term, “Mexico“, provides more than four hundred results. Enjoy!

My colleague, our librarian for Romance Languages and Literatures, Mr. Claude Potts informed me this morning the following, that the OpenEdition after getting authorization from the publishers has opened up most of their catalog of nearly 10,000 ebooks to full-format access (pdfs and ePub) to everyone during the period of shelter in place. We already had full-format access to the 175 freemium journals, but the additional formats for the remaining ebooks is a great gift to Academia during the time of this covid-19 pandemic.

See announcement in French: https://leo.hypotheses.org/16941

Today another French-language vendor Cairn which focuses on th social sciences has opened up its entire ebook catalog of 10,174 titles, the Que sais-je? reference series and also some popular magazines during the closure as well.

There are several important Latin America Related titles that one can access.

A search for Mexico is shown in the OpenEdition’s interface above!

In light of the Shelter in place order in the Alameda County through April 7, 2020, I wanted to bring you to your attention a completion of our Cuban Posters collection digitization project that you can visit from the comfort of your home.
My predecessor Dr. Carlos Delgado, our former Librarian for Latin American Studies, had acquired these during his trips to Cuba during the height of the Cold War. Dr. Delgado pioneered the establishment of an exchange program with the Cuban National Library. These posters are now housed in the Bancroft Library. However, their digital surrogates can be accessed here:https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/search?&cc=Cuban+Poster+Collection+1960-2000
There are a total of 482 posters that were published in Cuba from 1960-2010. Enjoy your visit to our digital collections. Stay safe and stay well!

Since the access to the library’s physical collections is currently non-existent until the potential reopening provided the Alameda County’s Shelter in place order gets modified or expired and knowing that the students need access to our collections, I have created two library guides that introduce students to our rich e-resources collections. These are introductory guides, and the students can contact me further using the email or skype or google hangouts during the closure.

E Resources: The Caribbean and Latin American Studies and E Resources: Slavic and East European Studies at UC Berkeley Library.

Below is a screenshot of E-Resources: The Carribbean and Latin American Studies at UC Berkely. guides. I hope that you will find these helpful.

Effective today — Monday, March 16 — at 5 p.m., the libraries are moving to a full closure of all facilities due to today’s announcement by Alameda County for residents to shelter in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus until April 7, 2020. An update should be coming from our library’s administration in coming days. The latest information on COVID-19 and how UC Berkeley is dealing with it can be found here: https://news.berkeley.edu/coronavirus/

Please see the message from the Chancellor’s office here.

However, we are here for you as your librarians to help you remotely. Here is more information on remotely accessing our resources: https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/help/research-help/remote-resources

We’ve received some queries about how students will access library resources if they are leaving campus. We have a significant amount of book and journal content available electronically that students can access from off-campus. If they tell you they are having difficulty accessing it, please point them to https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/using-the-libraries/connect-off-campus.  If they are returning to a country that has restricted access to the Internet (like China) the VPN is the better option.

Remember that we are here to help students find the information they need and also access it. We may not be able to solve all their technical issues, but I can at least try to troubleshoot them. If a student cannot successfully connect to our electronic resources, we can try and deliver the content they need via email.

The students can use the 24/7 chat reference service, which has been expanded. https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/help/research-help