Author: Lee Anne Titangos

“Nearly 70 years after World War II, authorities are calling Port Chicago sailors to duty once more. Not to load explosives on warships, as they were doing in one of the deadliest domestic calamities of the war, but for a task that could require even more courage: to tell their stories.

‘We want to hear the truth of what happened at Port Chicago, firsthand,” said David Dunham, manager of a World War II home-front oral history project at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. “For a long time, no one wanted to talk about Port Chicago at all. But we want to hear about the working conditions, the significance and complexity of the race issues.’

Historians will be at the annual Port Chicago memorial Saturday near Concord in hopes of finding sailors and civilians who lived through the explosion and subsequent trial for mutiny, which some credit as the catalyst for desegregation of the military and an early chapter in the civil rights movement.” – Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer

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“Officials at the University of California, Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office are looking to a July 23 memorial service for the hundreds of servicemen and civilians killed and hurt in the largest homeland disaster during World War II to aid the office’s search for first-hand accounts of the 1944 accident that helped desegregate the U.S. military.

The Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) is a research unit within UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, and has initiated interviews with surviving witnesses to the explosion of more than 5,000 tons of TNT as sailors loaded munitions. The explosion demolished the Liberty ship SS A.E. Bryan as well as the SS Quinalt Victory and rocked communities for miles around. UC Berkeley seismographs recorded the strength of the disaster’s second explosion as equal to an earthquake measuring 3.4 on the Richter scale …

‘We will honor those who have passed, as well as the resistance of African American soldiers who certainly are a part of the civil rights movement and the desegregation of the military,’ said David Dunham, manager of ROHO’s World War II Homefront Project.

ROHO will have an informational table at the memorial and commemoration, which will be held at the Military Ocean Terminal in Concord, Calif. The memorial will take place on July 23 from 10 to 11 a.m., followed by an informal gathering and ranger-led tours from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.” – Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations

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“The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, has received two grants from the U.S. National Park Service to expand its efforts documenting the World War II era experiences of Japanese Americans.

A $50,000 grant will underwrite work by The Bancroft’s Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) to find Japanese Americans who were interned during the war and conduct audio and video interviews with them. The interviews will be posted on the ROHO website, supplementing the office’s existing World War II Homefront interview series.

Meanwhile, a $220,493 grant will further The Bancroft’s efforts to digitize and make available online the library’s extensive Japanese American internment materials, and to integrate the resources into a new digital archive that will serve as a central resource for students of the Japanese-American evacuation and resettlement.

‘The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is an unfortunate part of the story of our nation’s journey, but it is a part that needs to be told,’ said U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in announcing the grants.” – Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations

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Reading Room Hours, May 14th – June 19th

MONDAY-FRIDAY	SATURDAY	SUNDAY
1PM – 5PM	CLOSED	CLOSED
Paging ends 30 minutes before closing CLOSED: May 30th (Memorial Day Holiday) Normal hours of operation will resume June 20th

Please note: The Bancroft Rotunda Gallery will still be open 10am – 4pm, Monday – Friday, during this time.

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) has selected five winners and one honorable mention for the 2011 Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab ‘American Book Prices Current’ Exhibition Awards.

The awards, funded by an endowment established by Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab, editors of ‘American Book Prices Current,’ recognize outstanding exhibition catalogues issued by American or Canadian institutions in conjunction with library exhibitions as well as electronic exhibition catalogues of outstanding merit issued within the digital/Web environment. Certificates will be presented to each winner at 4 p.m. CDT on Sunday, June 26, during the RBMS Membership Meeting and Information Exchange at the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans.

…

The Division Two (moderately expensive) winners are the Stanford University Libraries Department of Special Collections and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley for ‘Celebrating Mexico: The Grito de Dolores and the Mexican Revolution, 1810 | 1910 | 2010.’

‘This volume celebrating the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution is also an implicit celebration of inter-institutional collaboration,’ said Schwartzburg. ‘Documenting concurrent exhibitions mounted at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University, it reveals to audiences the complementary resources of these institutions through twin checklists and essays by library staff and faculty at both universities. Bilingual text – in English and Spanish – makes the volume accessible to a wide audience, and a careful integration of text, images and the checklist offers readers a fully unified reading experience. Richly illustrated with extensive commentary, the volume serves not just to document the exhibitions but to provide an excellent introduction to the Mexican Revolution more generally. The use of historic typefaces and colorful section dividers throughout the volume confirms the volume’s welcoming, celebratory success.'” – David Free, American Libraries Magazine

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The collections from the Western Jewish Americana archives of the Magnes are beginning to become available to researchers, and can be accessed in the reading room of the Bancroft Library.

Many of these collections are stored off-site and must be requested a few days ahead of your visit to the Bancroft Library. Please check UC Berkeley’s Library Catalog, OskiCat, for each collection for locations and details on access. You can request information about these materials by submitting an online research request form.

For a list of now available collections, please click here.

Back in 2006, the San Francisco Examiner Photograph Archive consisting of more than 4 million images in photographic print and negative form was donated to the Bancroft Library.  With generous support from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), work has begun to restore photographic print files now in disarray to their original filing order, enhance descriptions of selected portions of the original negative files, and create an online guide to accessing the contents of this immense archive.

Visit the San Francisco Examiner Photograph Archive Project page to view regular updates about the ongoing efforts to preserve, arrange, describe, and provide access to the archive, along with staff picks of historically interesting, humorous, or bizarre photographs.

SPRING BREAK HOURS: March 21 – March 25

MONDAY-FRIDAY	SATURDAY	SUNDAY
1PM – 5PM	CLOSED	CLOSED
Paging ends 30 minutes before closing
CLOSED: March 25 (Cesar Chavez Holiday)