Author: Library Communications
Indian ambassador to the U.S. visits UC Berkeley Library
Navtej Sarna, the Indian ambassador to the United States, visited Bancroft, Doe and the South/Southeast Asia libraries on Monday.
The ambassador, who is a scholar of the Sikh religion, viewed parts of the South Asians in North America Collection, which is housed in Bancroft, and other Library holdings on Sikhism.
Sarna is also a fiction writer, and four of his works are held at the Library: Two are his own fiction works, one is a translation of his father’s short stories, and one is a short travelogue of Jerusalem.
When the Silicon Meets the Road sheds light on challenges of working with digital materials
The LAUC-B Committee on Affiliated Libraries Affairs (CALA) is pleased to present a spring Assembly devoted to a timely topic, When the Silicon Meets the Road: A Digital Research Reality Check. This event will feature three diverse digital researchers — a law professor, a library web services manager, and an Ethnic Studies librarian — all presently working on digital research projects. The focus of their discussion will be the challenges they encounter working intensively with digital materials, and the solutions they employ to meet those challenges. These solutions require both technological and human resources. A special feature of the discussions will be the fruitful interactions among librarians, students, and faculty on these projects.
Date: Tuesday, February 13, 2018, 8:30-9:50 a.m.
Schedule: 8:30-8:45 a.m. Affiliated business and refreshments
8:45-9:50 a.m. Presentations, incl. Q&A
Location: Morrison Library
Presenters:
Sine Hwang Jensen is Asian American Studies Librarian and Comparative Ethnic Studies Librarian at the Ethnic Studies Library (ESL) at UC Berkeley. Ms. Jensen recently won a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) grant to fund the digitization of a significant portion of the H.K. Yuen Social Movement Audio Archive, jointly held by ESL and the Bancroft Library. She will describe her work with the Archive, in particular her preparation of students and librarians to produce reliable metadata to describe and afford access to the newly digitized historical recordings.
Michael Lindsey is Director of Library Web Development at the law school at UC Berkeley. He assists Prof. Anne Joseph O’Connell with her ongoing analysis, further described below, of trends in presidential nominations. In this capacity, Mr. Lindsey develops code to glean relevant data from the Congress.gov U.S. Presidential Nominations database. There is no API for the database, nor does Congress.gov provide access to raw data. To keep the data current, he must monitor the database’s evolving public interface, and in some cases the data themselves, to effectively revise his scripts.
Prof. Anne Joseph O’Connell, the George Johnson Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, compiles and analyzes historical and current data reflecting presidential nominations and their confirmations by the Senate to cabinet, agency, and judicial posts. In addition to traditional legal scholarly journals, her work appears frequently in the Washington Post and, most recently, at Brookings. Despite the ready availability of the data she needs at Congress.gov, she and Mr. Lindsey must work continually to assure its normalization, due to the vagaries of its presentation over time.
Watch: What’s happening at the Earth Sciences and Map Library?
The Earth Sciences and Map Library — home to one of the largest map collections in California — held an open house at which a new study lounge was unveiled. The library will host a variety of spring pop-up events, too.
Feb. 2: Mapping the University
March 2: Hayward Fault Walking Tour with Horst Rademacher (registration and meeting spot TBA)
March 9: Mapping Indigenous California History with Julia Lewanoski
All events take place on Fridays 11 a.m.-12 p.m. at the Earth Sciences and Map Library unless noted. You can visit at 50 McCone Hall on weekdays.
Reframing Aging photo exhibit challenges views on growing old
“We’re old! What’s wrong with that?” asked photographer Nancy Rubin in a recent California magazine article. A new exhibit — featuring Rubin’s photos, with interviews by writer Cynthia Overbeck Bix — evokes this question, and others, while challenging existing views on aging. For the exhibit, Rubin, a former teacher at Berkeley High, photographed a dozen subjects, many of whom have embraced a new pursuit in their retirement. Their stories — and photos — will be on view in the exhibit, called Reframing Aging, in Doe Library through March 2.
Watch: New to the UC Berkeley Library? Here’s a primer. 🎥
Want to experiment with technology? Searching for a quiet place to study? Need help with research? Watch our video to learn how to get the most out of the UC Berkeley Library and its vast resources.
Announcing the reconfiguration of two important libraries
After consultation with students, faculty, and staff from across campus, the University Library confirms the decision to merge the Sheldon Margen Public Health Library and the Marian Koshland Bioscience & Natural Resources Library at UC Berkeley. The reconfiguration of these two important libraries in the Life & Health Sciences Division of the University Library will better address current campus and research needs.
The Library staff and the collection from the Public Health Library will be relocated to the Valley Life Sciences Building and integrated with the vision and operations of the campus library there. The Library will continue to memorialize Sheldon Margen’s contributions to the school, the university, and the field.
To reach this decision, the Library received feedback from individuals from a number of departments and key campus stakeholders after a call for comment was issued in September.
Read the complete announcement for details on services and the timeline ahead.
Morrison Library lights up
Longing for Berkeley’s hallowed halls? Morrison Library is adorned with winter decor to give students some seasonal cheer during finals season. Watch this special space light up.
Movies @ Moffitt: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
Wednesday, December 6th, 2017
Doors @ 6:30pm, show @ 7:00pm
405 Moffitt Library
Free; open to UCB students only (UCB student ID required)
What does it mean to be an American revolutionary today? Grace Lee Boggs is a 98-year-old Chinese American writer, activist, and philosopher in Detroit. Rooted for more than 70 years in the African American movement, she has devoted her life to an evolving revolution that encompasses the contradictions of America’s past and its potentially radical future. [This documentary presents] Boggs’s lifetime of vital thinking and action, traversing the major U.S. social movements of the last century; from labor to civil rights, to Black Power, feminism, the Asian American and environmental justice movements and beyond.
Video: Center for Connected Learning: The Undergraduate ‘Collider Space’
Moffitt Library provides undergraduates with something that no other space on campus can — a place where students of all disciplines can come together to actively discover, develop and prototype solutions that change the world. As the undergraduate hub for connected teaching, learning, and discovery at Berkeley, Moffitt Library now serves 10,000 students each day. “This is a very special place,” explains University Librarian Jeffrey MacKie-Mason.
And this is just the start. This summer, the Library received campus approval to build a campaign for the Center for Connected Learning at Moffitt Library. The Library is now laying the groundwork to bring together students, faculty, Library staff, and supporters to design an innovative and interactive teaching and learning space that spans all five floors of Moffitt Library.
We envision the Center for Connected Learning as a “collider space” where students flow between multimedia classrooms, collaborative project spaces, hands-on studios, and peer-to-peer and expert consultation — all within the same building. Students would have access to one-stop consultation on retrieval, evaluation and use of advanced information resources, tech support, and the skills required for 21st century information literacy.
Watch our video, Center for Connected Learning: The Undergraduate Collider Space, to learn more.
The Student Issue: Fiat Lux covers feature Cal artists
Students working in the revamped fourth and fifth floors of Moffitt Library enjoy fresh inspiration in the original artwork adorning the walls. Each academic year, members of the Library Undergraduate Student Advisory Board select the half-dozen paintings, drawings, photos, and mixed media works created by UC Berkeley students and displayed in the Library. There were over 100 student submissions for the upcoming installation. In the spirit of The Student Issue, Fiat Lux celebrates this student work by featuring three pieces on three different covers. Our latest issue of the Library’s news magazine also includes stories on open access publishing, lowering student textbook costs, the value of digital information skills, and rare materials at the East Asian Library and the Music Library. Flip through these stories and more in our latest issue on issuu.