Author: Lisa Weber

Summer Reading List: Essential Keats: Selected by Philip Levine

Posted on by Lisa Weber

Summer Reading - Essential Keats

The UC Berkeley Summer Reading List is an annual compilation of recommended (though not required) readings suggested by Cal faculty, staff, and students as a welcome to incoming freshmen and transfer students.

Essential Keats: Selected by Philip Levine

John Keats was what you would call a punk–constantly getting into fights with other kids–until a schoolmaster lent him a copy of Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queen. After being exposed to this work John Keats had to be forcibly evicted from the school’s library.

Philip Levine writes a good introduction to this edition where he gives a brief account of Keats’s short life. It will be reassuring to young poets to learn that John Keats’s work wasn’t universally accepted when he wrote it. He received harsh criticism, sometimes outright rejection, from some of his contemporaries whose names have since been forgotten except by scholars specializing in 19th century English literature.

This selection contains many jewels, one of which is “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” Overall, the poetry of John Keats is relevant for any young person whose youth allows them to experience the world with a freshness that has yet to be weathered and eroded by age. His best work is incredibly sensual; resonating deeply for a sensitive reader. Keats was gifted and his magnificent odes, written when he knew he would die within a year, are heartbreakingly beautiful, enduring wonders.

MIKE PALMER Curriculum Planner, College Writing Programs

Post contributed by:
Michael Larkin Lecturer, College Writing Programs
Tim Dilworth First Year Coordinator, Library

Current access problems

Posted on by Lisa Weber
  • Early Modern Italy – Reported: February 3, 2010 (Help Ticket #3396)
  • Linguistics Abstracts Online – Reported: August 5, 2010
  • Multidata Online – Reported: February 8, 2010 (CDL Helpline ticket #2603)
  • Si ku quan shu – Reported: February 8, 2010 (CDL Helpline ticket #2604)

Interface Change: Wiley electronic journals

Posted on by Lisa Weber

Wiley InterScience will be unavailable beginning at 1 a.m. on Saturday, August 7. The new Wiley Online Library is scheduled to launch at 9 a.m. on Sunday, August 8.

Once this transition is complete, all of the content made available by Wiley InterScience and Blackwell Publishers should be available in the Wiley Online Library.

» For more information

Access canceled: Landolt-Bornstein

Posted on by Lisa Weber

Due to cost concerns, UC has decided that we cannot subscribe to SpringerMaterials, the new digital version of Landolt-Börnstein, at this time. We will no longer have access to new content.

We will continue to have access to the archival content on another platform, but this is not yet available.

In the meantime, print volumes (through 2004) are available in the Physics-Astronomy Library: QC 61 .L32.

Berkeley Research Impact Initiative

Posted on by Lisa Weber

Advancing the Impact of UC Berkeley Research

The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) supports faculty members, post-docs, and graduate students who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication.

An 18-month pilot program, BRII will subsidize, in various degrees, fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication. The pilot will also yield data that can be used to gauge faculty interest in — as well as the budgetary impacts of — these new modes of scholarly communication on the Berkeley campus.

Update: Findings from the BRII pilot are available in a recent article in the May 2010 issue of PLoS Biology. In Institutional Open Access Funds: Now Is The Time, authors Eckman and Weil describe how this innovative program has helped to increase the amount of Berkeley research universally accessible to readers by proving funding to pay open access fees.

» Resources about BRII and many other similar funds from the SPARC website

CRCnetBASE: interface change and resulting problems

Posted on by Lisa Weber

Update: most of the links to the individual CRCnetBASE handbooks have been fixed. As of April 7, there are still about 200 problems that are in the process of being resolved, including the links to the following titles:

  • The Communications Handbook, 2nd ed., CRC Press, 2002.
    (No longer available online)
  • Computer-Aided Design, Engineering and Manufacturing: Systems Techniques and Applications, Volume I. 2001.
    (No longer available online)
  • CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics, 2nd ed. CRC Press, 2003.
    (No longer available online)
  • The VLSI Handbook. CRC Press, 2000.
    (No longer available online)
  • Wireless Technology: Protocols, Standards and Techniques. CRC Press, 2002.
    (No longer available online)

Library staff: For more information, see CDL help ticket #2630.

In the meantime, if you need access to the books in the above list or if other CRC Press handbooks are not accessible, please check the library catalog for a print version, or contact a reference librarian.

Original Posting:

On Monday, February 15, all of the CRCnetBASE resources have migrated to a new single interface for all of the collections (with the exception of CHEMnetBASE). Due to this migration, problems have arisen and the CDL is working to resolve them.

  • Many of the links to the individual CRCnetBASE handbooks currently are broken in the records in the library catalogs as well as on the pages containing resource listings on the library websites.
  • The home page lists all of the CRCnetBASE collections, including resources that haven’t been licensed.

Tips:

  • Go directly to the CRCnetBASE home page to select a handbook collection and search or browse for the handbooks that you need.
  • Look for the green check marks when viewing handbook chapter listings — this indicates that the resource has been licensed for our use. If you see lock icons, access has not been enabled.

Note: CHEMnetBASE will continue to remain on its own domain.

Melvyl Catalog maintenance: the effects of the migration to OskiCat

Posted on by Lisa Weber

Due to the launch of OskiCat, the new UCB library catalog, it is necessary to do maintenance work on the Melvyl Catalog to accommodate the transition from GLADIS and Pathfinder to OskiCat. Most of the work should be transparent to Melvyl and OskiCat users, but some user services will be affected.

Automatic Updates: During the transition, the Melvyl Catalog will be frozen between July 15 and August 30, 2009. During this period, no new catalog records from any of the UC campuses will be added to Melvyl, and this means that users will not receive their usual Automatic Updates.

Request Service: Since the Melvyl Catalog will be frozen for approximately six weeks, this may cause temporary problems with the Request service.