Author: Library Communications

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.

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.

“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.