Author: Lisa Weber
The Gift to Sing: Exhibit in The Bancroft Library Gallery
The Gift to Sing: Highlights of the Leon F. Litwack & Bancroft Library African American Collections
When: September 23, 2016 – February 17, 2017
Where: The Bancroft Library Gallery, 10am-4pm, Monday-Friday (excluding holidays)
For decades professor emeritus of history Leon F. Litwack has been accumulating what is arguably the world’s finest private collection of books on African American history and culture. This exhibition displays highlights of the collection that will be coming to The Bancroft Library as a bequest. The Litwack collection is particularly noteworthy for its Harlem Renaissance first editions in strikingly illustrated dust jackets. The exhibition includes books with distinguished provenance such as a copy of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave with an inscription by the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Complementing the Litwack books are treasures from Bancroft’s significant African American holdings, including the first book by an African American, Phyllis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published in 1773.
Post submitted by:
David Faulds, Curator of Rare Books and Literary Manuscripts, The Bancroft Library
Welcoming Jo Anne Newyear-Ramirez
Jo Anne comes to us from her position as Associate University Librarian for Collection Development and Management Programs at the University of British Columbia, where she served eight years. Previously she served ten years as the Assistant Head of Research Services at University of Texas at Austin, with broad responsibilities for collection management. During that time she was also selector-bibliographer for nursing.
As senior administrator for collections at UBC, Jo Anne provided stewardship to programs and practices that enhanced its library collections and supported existing and emerging academic and research needs of the university community. She was a leader on matters relating to collections, scholarly communications, open access, copyright/rights management, digital publishing and the institutional repository. She also provided leadership and direction to the Rare Books & Special Collections unit, technical services, and the University Archives.
Among many accomplishments at UBC, Jo Anne developed a preservation and conservation program. She developed and implemented the Library retention and collection location and storage strategy, which included creation of building plans and operational processes for a new long-term library storage facility. She developed a licensing negotiating strategy and model license framework for UBC. Jo Anne was also the lead investigator for UBC’s participation in the California Digital Library Mellon grant for the Pay-It-Forward Project on the economics of “gold” open access, headed by MacKenzie Smith (University Librarian at UC Davis).
At UC Berkeley, Jo Anne will lead our scholarly resource (collections and beyond) development, our new program in scholarly communications, and our Library-wide assessment and evaluation efforts.
I want to thank Jean McKenzie for serving as our Acting AUL for Collections since July 2013. Following an unsuccessful search for the AUL for Collection Services in 2013, Jean accepted the Library’s invitation to transition from her position as Head of the Engineering Library into an interim AUL position. Jean brought a wealth of knowledge and experience from her many years as a selector and participant in library committees. Over the past three years, Jean made many contributions: she reshaped collections-related staffing and services especially within the Acquisitions Department, enhanced the roles of and collaboration among the Collection Development Leadership Group, implemented new funding models to better support multi-disciplinary fields, launched a new Data Acquisition and Access Program, contributed to improved selector training, served as interim selector and liaison for Germanic Studies, and ably represented Berkeley’s position in UC systemwide conversations as a member of the Collections Licensing Subgroup and the Shared Content Leadership Group. Also under Jean’s initiative, the Berkeley Library was selected as a host for the ACRL Scholarly Communications Roadshow and welcomed our first Scholarly Communications Officer this summer. Jean’s role in this difficult job was extended by a year due to the transition in University Librarians, and I am especially appreciative of how much Jean supported and helped me during my first nine months here.
Post submitted by:
Jeff MacKie-Mason
University Librarian
Chief Digital Scholarship Officer
Professor, School of Information and Professor of Economics
Trio of fall exhibits offer diverse pleasures
Three fall exhibits at the Library—on global comics, the Spanish Civil War, and African-American history and culture—testify to the extraordinary richness of our collections. We invite you to come tour the exhibits at your leisure.
“Beyond Tintin and Superman: The Diversity of Global Comics” showcases comics and graphic novels from a dizzying array of countries, including Egypt, Poland, South Africa, Israel, the Czech Republic, South Africa, Colombia, and Japan. While treating societal issues generated by censorship, race relations, political agendas and gender biases, the comics also provide great enjoyment through their striking imagery and cultural diversity. See a video about the exhibit. (Doe Library – Bernice Layne Brown Gallery; opens Sept 19).
Exhibit opening reception:
Date: Friday, October 14
Time: 5-7pm
Place: Morrison Library
Brown Gallery Viewing 5-5:30pm
Welcome & Introduction at 5:30pm with Liladhar Pendse, Exhibit Curator
with special guest speakers Ron Turner & Ivy Mills, Ph.D.
Enjoy the Exhibit 6:30-7pm
Ron Turner is the founder of the Last Gasp, a book and underground comics publisher and distributor based in San Francisco.
UC Berkeley Lecturer Ivy Mills, Ph.D. specializes in the visual and literary cultures of Africa and the African diaspora.
The Library attempts to offer programs in accessible, barrier-free settings. If you think you may require disability-related accommodations, please contact the event sponsor prior to the event. The event sponsor is Ashley Bacchi.
“The Gift to Sing: Highlights of the Leon F. Litwack and the Bancroft Library African American Collections” includes treasures such as Harlem Renaissance first editions with strikingly illustrated dust jackets, and a 1845 copy of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave with an inscription by the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. One of UC Berkeley’s iconic professors and a noted scholar, Leon Litwack retired from a storied career in 2007. His collection—arguably the world’s finest private collection of books on African American history and culture—will be coming to the Bancroft as a bequest. (The Bancroft Library Gallery, opens Sept. 23)
“Guerra Civil at 80” marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). A visual and textual display of the struggle to defend the Second Spanish Republic, the exhibition documents the role of the Republicans and the Nationalists; the impact on civilians and on American volunteers; and the intense creative response from within and outside Spain. (Bancroft Library, 2nd floor corridor, between Bancroft and Doe, through June 2017)
A companion exhibit, “Incite the Spirit: Poster Art of the Spanish Civil War” will be on exhibit through December 16 at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, 220 Stephens Hall. Please visit spanishcivilwar80.berkeley.edu to learn more about the UC Berkeley events commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War.
Post submitted by:
Damaris Moore, Library Communications Office
Russian America or Russkaia America
Russian America or Russkaia America
An exhibition that is dedicated to the 150th Anniversary of purchase of Alaska by the United States.
Where: Moffitt Library Gallery
When: September 2016 through December 2016
The discovery of Alaska by Vitus Bering in 1741 marked a new era in the expansion of Russian Empire eastwards. The “Russian America” was born in 1784, when on Kodiak Island, Grigory Shelikhov, a Russian fur trader, founded the Three Saints Bay, the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska. In 1808, under the charter from the Czar, the Russian-American company established a permanent settlement near today’s Sitka that was called “Novo-Arkhangel’sk”. The Company, chartered in 1799, managed Russian America for the Imperial Government from that time until 1867 when the United States purchased what is now known as Alaska. The Company also established posts or conducted business in other Pacific Rim areas such as Siberia, Hawaii, and California; and attempted, unsuccessfully, to initiate trade with Japan.
The Sitka settlement was followed soon after by the foundation of the first Russian settlement in California in 1812, when the Fort Ross was founded as the southern-most outpost of the Russian-American company. The term “Russkaia Kaliforniia or Russian California” is used to indicate Russian presence in California until the sale of the Fort Ross holdings in 1841 to Captain Sutter. Russian America continued to exist until the sale of the Alaska to the United States in 1867.
The exhibition highlights early Russian efforts to colonize North America using the trade and Russian Orthodoxy along with the Imperial expansion into California and finally ends with the purchase of Alaska by the United States. Several rare books on Aleuts, Russian trade in the region, Russian California along with the facsimile of the first Russian language newspaper in California-the Alaska Herald are exhibited.
Post submitted by:
Liladhar R. Pendse, PhD
Librarian for East European, Armenian, Caucasus, Central Asian, Balkan, Baltic,and Mongolian Studies
Voting Rights and the US Constitution – FSM Café Sept. 21
Voting Rights and the US Constitution:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied
A conversation with Jonathan Stein JD ’13, MPP ’13, Voting Rights Attorney for Asian American Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus, on the state of voting rights in the United States.
Place: Free Speech Movement Café, Moffitt Library
Date: Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Time: 6-8pm
Jonathan Stein is a voting rights attorney, currently of Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus and previously of the ACLU of California. He works to increase access to California’s democracy for historically disenfranchised communities. While receiving a joint MPP/JD from UC Berkeley, Jonathan served as the Student Regent on the University of California’s Board of Regents, fighting for access, diversity, and affordability and advocating for the interests of the UC’s students. At Berkeley Law, Jonathan was a member of the Men of Color Alliance and the South Asian Law Student Association. Prior to graduate school, Jonathan spent four years as a journalist at Mother Jones magazine.
Jonathan serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the nonprofit organization California Common Cause and is a Commissioner on the City of Oakland Public Ethics Commission.
» See the event flyer
This event is free, open to the public, and all are invited to participate. Sponsored by the University Library’s Free Speech Movement (FSM) Café Programs Committee For more information: contact fsmprograms@lists.berkeley.edu.
The Library attempts to offer programs in accessible, barrier-free settings. If you think you may require disability-related accommodations, please contact the event sponsor prior to the event. The event sponsor is Jean Ferguson, fsmprograms@berkeley.edu, 510-768-7618
Maps and More 9/16/16: Introducing the Digital Globe
Please join us for the first Maps and More of the semester:
Introducing the Digital Globe
When: Friday, 9/16/16
Time: 11 am – 12 pm
Where: Earth Sciences & Map Library, 50 McCone Hall
The Library attempts to offer programs in accessible, barrier-free settings. If you think you may require disability-related accommodations, please contact the event sponsor prior to the event. The event sponsor is Sam Tepliztky.
Oakland Asian Branch Library exhibit at the Ethnic Studies Library
The first of its kind in the United States, the Asian Branch Library was founded in 1975 to serve the Asian community in Oakland. Today, this branch in Oakland Chinatown is one of the busiest in the Oakland Public Library system. It houses materials in 8 different languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, Tagalog, and Thai. The Oakland Chinatown Oral History Project documents this living history through interviews of long-time branch advocates, librarians, and patrons spanning four decades. The exhibit was curated by Lora Chan & Roy Chan of the Oakland Chinatown Oral History Project.
The exhibit will be on display through October 2016
Ethnic Studies Library
30 Stephens Hall
University of California, Berkeley
See a short documentary on the history of the Oakland Asian Branch Library.
Adam Hochschild Book Talk: Sept. 14
Adam Hochschild discusses the writing and research behind his new book: Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
Date: Wednesday, September 14
Time: 5:00 PM
Place: Morrison Library
This event is free and open to the public
Award-winning author Adam Hochschild delved deeply into letters, diaries, memoirs and other documents, published and unpublished, to weave a compelling narrative in his new book Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. One of those Americans, Bob Merriman, was a graduate student at Berkeley. Hochschild will discuss how he found the story in a vast and complex array of sources, some of them from the Doe, Moffitt and Bancroft libraries.
Post submitted by Jennifer Dorner, Librarian for History and History of Science & Technology
Roundtable: Bobby Soxers in the Fields: Girls’ Emergency Farm Labor During World War II
September 15th
12PM
Lewis-Latimer Room, The Faculty Club
Presented by Jennifer Robin Terry, doctoral candidate, History, UC Berkeley
By early 1942, farmers across the United States clamored for congressional aid to supply an agricultural labor force sufficient to meet the food and fiber demands of World War II. Among the various solutions, Congress authorized youth labor programs that recruited urban minors to harvest the nation’s crops. During the peak farm labor year of 1944, child and youth volunteers outnumbered adult laborers in better-known programs, such as the Braceros and Women’s Land Army. Participation in emergency farm labor programs enabled young workers to become partners in the war effort, and many identified as citizen soldiers on a martial mission. Drawing on government documents, youth-serving organizations’ reports, recruitment material, popular media, and the writings and recollections of girl participants, this talk examines adolescent girls’ participation in two programs: the U. S. Crop Corps’ Victory Farm Volunteers and the Girl Scouts’ Farm Aides. Examining these programs through teenage girls’ experiences complicates our understanding of the wartime identities of these girls and reveals how gendered rhetoric influenced their nuanced affinity for situational masculinity.
Movies @ Moffitt, Sept. 7 – Men: A Love Story
The Movies @ Moffitt series features films selected by students for students, on the first Wednesday of each month.
Title: Men: A Love Story
Director: Mimi Chakarova
Synopsis: After covering the sex trade for over a decade, award-winning filmmaker and journalist Mimi Chakarova questioned her ability to love and be loved. This film documents her journey across the United States as she talks about love with men from all walks of life, laying bare men’s multifaceted relationship with tenderness and care. An unflinching and darkly comic look at American masculinity in all its complexity, Men: A Love Story is sure to ignite productive and probing discussion concerning both the political and personal registers of gender and sexuality.
Date: Wednesday, September 7
Time: 7pm
Place: 150D Moffitt Library
Doors open @ 6:30pm
Free with UCB ID
Post contributed by Tim Dilworth, First Year Coordinator, The Library