OpenEdition keeps growing

livres-fleurs [cover]
Livres de fleurs du xvie au xxe siècle. Namur: Presses universitaires de Namur, 2018.
The Library has added more than 1,600 new ebooks to its collection in OpenEdition. Since 2014, we’ve been supporting this initiative based at the Université d’Aix-Marseille to open scholarly content from Europe and France in particular to the world. The Fremium program allows the UC Berkeley community to participate in an acquisitions policy that both supports sustainable development of open access (OA) and that respects the needs of teaching, research and learning communities. With our participation, Berkeley researchers and students benefit from greater functionality while making it possible for anyone in the world to view in html and in open access 70% of the ebook catalog of nearly 12,000 titles.

Here are a few titles from the latest acquisition, all discoverable in UC Library Search:

 


New book by Daylet Domínguez in the Spanish & Portuguese Department

book cover

Daylet Domínguez is an Associate Professor of Caribbean and Latin American literatures and cultures in  UC Berkeley’s Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Her new book, Ficciones etnográficas: literatura ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2021), deals with the importance of literature for the constitution of the social sciences as a modern practice and discourse in the Hispanic Caribbean. She proposes that anthropology and its related subjects began to build a place of enunciation at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, in close relationship with travel literature, the “cuadro de costumbres,” and the novel. It is at the intersection with these literary genres that the emerging disciplines shaped a large part of their tropology and discursive genealogy; although, once institutionalized, they disavowed its epistemological validity. In the process of textual and institutional differentiation, the social sciences became one of the most effective ways to consolidate national projects, organize the transition to modern citizenships and undermine the postulates of racial and climatic degeneration associated with the region.

[translated from publisher’s site]

Ficciones etnográficas: literatura ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX. Madrid : Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert,, 2021.


Opening access with Firenze University Press

Firenze per Claudio Magris [book cover]
Firenze per Claudio Magris (Firenze University Press, 2021)
Firenze University Press is at the forefront for open access (OA) publishing in Italy. By opening up access to more than 1,300 academic books and 50 peer-reviewed journals over the past decade, it has helped its research community to achieve wide and rapid dissemination, increasing exponentially the impact of their research. Today, all Firenze University Press content and metadata are published open access and are discoverable through the tools of transformational infrastructure organizations such as DOAB, DOAJ, and OAPEN.

Besides UC Library Search, many of the press’ publications, along with other Italian OA publishers, are also available through Casalini Libri’s online platform Torrossa.


New book by Mairi McLaughlin in the French Department

book cover

La presse française historique: histoire d’un genre et histoire de la langue. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021.

Mairi McLaughlin is Associate Professor of French and an Affiliated Member of the Linguistics Department and the Department of Italian Studies. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and Translation Studies. Her most recent publication presents the results of the first major study into the history of language in the French press. It has a dual aim: to shed light on the history of the genre of journalism and to explore what the study of historical periodicals can bring to our understanding of the history of language.

Professor McLaughlin discussed her recent book with David Bates (Rhetoric) on November 10, 2021 through the Townsend Center’s Berkeley Book Chats.


Celebrating Latinx Heritage Month with Arte Público Press

From its beginnings on the artistic fringe during the Hispanic Civil Rights Movement to its current status as the oldest and most accomplished publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by US Hispanic authors, Arte Público Press and its imprint, Piñata Books, have become a showcase for Hispanic literary creativity, arts and culture.

The original publishers of Sandra Cisneros’ seminal The House on Mango Street, Arte Público’s other well-known authors include Obie-award-winning playwright and filmmaker Luis Valdez, playwright Miguel Piñero and best-selling authors Nicholasa Mohr, Victor Villaseñor, and Helena María Viramontes. As part of the ongoing efforts to bring Hispanic literature to mainstream audiences, Arte Público Press launched the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program in 1992. This program represents the first nationally coordinated attempt to recover, index and publish lost Latino writings that date from the American colonial period through 1960. [from the publisher’s web site].

From children’s books and contemporary fiction to critical social history, the UC Berkeley Library is proud to hold most of Arte Púbico Press’ bilingual catalog of publications in the Main (Gardner) Stacks, the Ethnic Studies Library, and The Bancroft Library. In recent years, the Library has also acquired many of its publications in digital form through Digitalia Hispánica, Latino Literature, and other ebook platforms such as OverDrive. These can be discovered in UC Library Search with keyword phrase “arte publico press” and limiting to online through UC Berkeley.


Distinguished Alumni Lecture: Oral Narratives and Black Lives in Francophone Studies

 

poster for French Department Alumni Lecture
Poster by Alan Yeh

Oral Narratives and Black Lives in Francophone Studies

Senegalese in the Diaspora: What Sociolinguistic Interviews Can Tell Us about Language, Race, Mobility, and Belonging
Maya Smith, University of Washington

Drawing on extensive interviews with people of Senegalese heritage in Paris, Rome, and New York City, this talk explores the fascinating role of language in national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities. Senegalese in the diaspora are notable in their capacity for movement and in their multifaceted approach to discourse, shaping their identity as they purposefully switch between languages. Through a mix of poignant, funny, reflexive, introspective, and witty stories, interviewees blur the lines between the utility and pleasure of language, allowing a more nuanced understanding of why and how Senegalese move.

“Un désordre indescriptible”: Folklore as Mask in the Congolese Nervous State
Jonathon Repinecz, George Mason University

This paper is part of a larger project about how colonial explorers, missionaries, and magistrates in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo used strategies of “folklorization”—that is, the framing of oral traditional materials as quaint, rural, and authentic—as propaganda in the service of popularizing the colony and obscuring the everyday violence of the colonial state. It will focus on the archives of Léon Guébels, a prosecutor and judge who published many folklore collections under a pseudonym, contain manuscripts written by Congolese schoolchildren in both French and African languages, sent to him by their teachers, which he overwrites in large red letters with appreciations such as “IDIOTIC,” “NOT WITTY ENOUGH,” or “CLEARLY THE INVENTION OF A SILLY CHRISTIAN GIRL.” I will examine some of the reasons he finds these tales inconvenient, framing my findings in the context of colonial racial anxieties over subversive ideologies, urbanization, “detribalization,” and open rebellion.

Thursday, September 23 • 4-6pm
French Department Library (4229 Dwinelle)
https://french.berkeley.edu


Celebrating South and Southeast Asian Studies at Berkeley (1970-2020)

Photo of curators for South and Southeast Asia
Photo: Virginia Shih (left) and Adnan Malik (right) in Doe Library by Claude Potts, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

We are pleased to announce the launching of the South/Southeast Asia exhibit entitled “Celebrating 50 Years of Excellence: South & Southeast Asia Scholarship and Stewardship at Berkeley, 1970-2020” at the Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, First Floor of Doe Library. This exhibit will be on display until the end of October 2021.

This exhibit celebrates the academic achievements of Berkeley South and Southeast Asia scholars across disciplines. It recognizes Berkeley’s robust South and Southeast Asian language instruction program, distinguished teaching award recipients, and previous Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research winners and honorable mentions.

The South/Southeast Asia Library plays a pivotal role in building interdisciplinary collections in all major formats and languages and has, for five decades, served as the scholarly lifeline for vibrant South and Southeast Asian Studies communities, both local and global.

This exhibit uses a variety of faculty publications and special collections to highlight Berkeley scholarship’s evolution, scope, and profound impact. Source collections and libraries whose noteworthy treasures are most featured in the exhibit include The Bancroft Library, Doe Library, Music Library, and the South/Southeast Asia Library.

We hope you will enjoy viewing this exhibit.

Sincerely,

Virginia Shih, Adnan Malik, and Vaughn Egge
Co-curators of the South/Southeast Asia Exhibit

For more information, see the Library Events & Exhibits page.


Romance Language Collections Newsletter no.6 (Fall 2021)

It has been a challenging year and we look forward to most of you returning to campus where you can take advantage of all the resources the Library has to offer. By August 25, most of UC Berkeley’s libraries will have reopened. This year’s welcome back newsletter for those working in the Romance languages focuses on both digital and print resources. For the most up-to-date information on the UC Berkeley Library’s services, please continue to check the Library services and resources during COVID-19 page.

book sculpture
Photo: Centre Cultural La Nau – Universitat de València by Claude Potts, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
What’s new in the Library for Fall 2021?

  • UC Library Search
  • bCourses
  • Reference & Instruction
  • New Books and More
  • Library Research Guides
  • Print Books
  • eBooks
  • Databases
  • Library Workshops
  • Featured Digitized Work

See also:


Jim Church in print: The Government Information Landscape and Libraries

report cover

Librarian for Economics, Political Economy, and International Government Information Jim Church is one of the three editors of the just released IFLA publication The Government Information Landscape and Libraries, which provides case studies on challenges and opportunities for access, preservation and digitization of government information around the world. Jim is also the author of the chapter on international governmental organizations (IGOs), and he provides a terrific overview of this complex and challenging area. As Jim states, “IGO documents and publications often do not show up in Google Scholar or in the Indexing and Abstracting databases that libraries purchase. They are often not cited, or cited poorly.” Yet they are an important, often essential, source for researchers seeking information (numeric and textual) on a wide array of global topics.

We are very fortunate to have Jim’s expertise at Berkeley, and it’s great that it’s now being shared globally through this open access resource!

Susan Edwards,
Head, Social Sciences Division

Social Welfare Librarian & Interim African Studies Librarian


New French ebooks in Cairn.info

This past spring, the UC Berkeley Library added 181 French ebooks to our existing collection from Franco-Belgian vendor Cairn.info. Though they aren’t yet discoverable in OskiCat or in the new UC Library Search unified catalog which launches on July 27, they can be read along with other ebooks and ejournals on the Cairn website.