It’s an election year. If you haven’t registered to vote yet, there’s still time! In California, you need to be registered at least 15 days before Election Day (this year that’s Tuesday, November 5). You can click on the link to the right to register.
As a quick reminder, there are two criteria to register. First (legal status), you must be a United States citizen and a resident of California. Second (age), you must be 18 years old or older on Election Day. You do not need a California state identification to register.
Once you register, you will be able to either vote by mailor at the polls on election day. Click on the link to the right to find out more information or to watch a video about how the process works.
If you aren’t from this state, be aware that California residents vote on multiple propositions alongside United States president. You can request an Official Voter Information Guide from the State which will contain a short blurb with pros/cons on each item for consideration. You can also choose to take a look at what will (probably) be on the ballot on Ballotpedia. Those propositions will include things like Mental Health Services; the right to marry; involuntary servitude; and more.
If you’re wanting to learn more about voting as a right, consider looking at this ACLU Voting 101 Toolkit:
Find the Voting 101 Toolkit on the ACLU’s website (click on image).
Lanyard with buttons created at the Accessioning Best Practices Symposium at the SAA Annual Meeting, 2024
The Society of American Archivists Annual General Meeting took place in Chicago between August 14th and August 17th. For many of the archivists at The Bancroft Library, this was the first in-person SAA meeting we have attended in years and we had lots to do, talk about, and even celebrate.
Most notably, Bancroft Accessioning Archivist Jaime Henderson helped put on a day-long symposium introducing a new archival standard: the Archival Accessioning Best Practices. The product of a few years of hard remote and in-person work by the Archival Accessioning Best Practices Working Group (of which Jaime is a member), these best practices are the first of their kind. The efforts of the Working Group were made possible by generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Archivists all over the country are excited to see dedicated best practices that center archival accessioning as a key component in ethical archival practice and management.
The Archival Accessioning Best Practices were recently submitted to the Society of American Archivists’ Standards Committee (currently chaired by yours truly) for approval as an official SAA standard and will be published as a GitBook document soon.
The Archival Accessioning Best Practices Working Group was also honored with an SAA Council Exemplary Service Award at the annual business meeting this past Saturday. We all congratulate Jaime and her colleagues for this well-deserved honor.
Bancroft Library Accessioning Archivist Jaime Henderson with SAA Council Exemplary Service Award, August 17, 2024.
Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary and Garden Arts (website) got there first, nonetheless I’m thrilled to share the news that Prof. Elizabeth Abel released Odd Affinities : Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies with the University of Chicago Press this year.
Abel’s Odd Affinities (2024).
Prof. Abel (faculty page) teaches with the UC Berkeley English Department. They teach courses on Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group as well as broader overviews of 19th and 20th century English literatures. This fall, they are leading courses “Memoir and Memory” as well as on graduate readings and special study.
In Odd Affinities, Prof. Abel discusses Woolf’s influence beyond a female tradition, looking at echoes of Woolf work in four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. Looking at those “odd affinities,” Abel looks at how “Woolf’s career and the transnational modernist genealogy was constituted by her elusive and shifting presence.”
You can access Abel’s book through the UC Library Search, where you can access it online and download the fulltext.
Image: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778. Austrian National Library
In partnership with the Voltaire Foundation, the Correspondance complète de Rousseau ONLINE makes Ralph Leigh’s critical edition in 52 volumes in the original French-language available as an ebook collection for the first time. The digital corpus gathers together all 8,000 letters written to and by one of the most important figures of eighteenth-century intellectual history, as well as the correspondence between third parties relating to the writer and his time. Drafts and copies have been collated against the original manuscripts and all variants reproduced. The extensive annotations identify individuals, events and places, explain the linguistic usages of the eighteenth century, give bibliographical information and clarify obscure allusions.
In the ever-evolving landscape of digital access to scholarly research, libraries face new challenges as they navigate the intersection of copyright law and contractual agreements. Academic institutions increasingly rely on digital content, and understanding how copyright exceptions and contract law interact is crucial for protecting the rights of libraries and our users.
Tim Vollmer (Scholarly Communication & Copyright Librarian, UC Berkeley), Sara Benson (Copyright Librarian and Associate Professor, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign), Jonathan Band (copyright attorney and counsel to the Library Copyright Alliance), and Jim Neal (University Librarian Emeritus, Columbia University) presented on these issues at the 2024 American Library Association Annual Conference in San Diego. Our panel was titled When Copyright and Contracts Collide: Advocacy for Library and User Rights.
The Role of Copyright Exceptions
Sara set the stage for our discussion by describing the importance of limitations and exceptions to copyright that empower libraries, research, and teaching. For example, Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act allows libraries and archives to make limited copies of copyrighted materials for preservation, replacement, fulfilling interlibrary loan requests, and more. Fair use—Section 107 of the Act—permits limited use of copyrighted works without having to seek the copyright holder’s permission when the use is for purposes such as teaching, research, scholarship, reporting, criticism, or parody. Faculty, students, and academic authors leverage fair use when they incorporate copyrighted materials for teaching, research, and publishing. And the fair use exception has played an increasingly important role in facilitating new types of scholarly research, including text and data mining.
The Threat of Contractual Override
Despite these protections, contractual agreements can sometimes override copyright exceptions. Vendor licensing terms may include clauses that restrict activities such as text and data mining. And even though fair use is a statutory right (meaning it’s in the law) in the U.S., and even though there have been court cases that confirm that activities such as text data mining falls under fair use, there is no protection against the practice where private parties such as academic publishers “contract around” fair use for actions that already are lawful.
As a result, academic libraries are forced to negotiate and often pay significant sums each year to try to preserve fair use rights for campus scholars through the database and electronic content license agreements that they sign.
Jonathan discussed alternative international approaches to the problem of contractual override. The European Union, for example, has implemented directives that nullify contract terms which override specific copyright exceptions. Countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Norway have also adopted similar measures. However, the United States and Canada lack comprehensive contract override prevention laws, making it challenging to protect copyright exceptions at the national level.
Advocating for Fair Contracts in Library Licensing
Tim discussed how academic libraries are demanding license agreements that preserve fair use rights. But at the same time, libraries are already starting to see contract amendments put forth by scholarly publishers that attempt to impose outright bans on any use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for the content we’re licensing from them. The challenge is that we know that researchers are using library-licensed materials for many AI uses in the context of nonprofit scholarship and research, and these uses should be a fair use, just as it’s fair use for researchers to conduct text data mining on licensed resources.
Library workers can smartly negotiate to protect the rights of instructors, students, and other academic community members to use library-licensed resources in the ways they need to conduct their teaching and research while simultaneously taking into consideration the concerns of publishers.
Moving Forward: A Coordinated Approach
To address the issue of contractual override, Jim suggested several approaches, including educating library stakeholders such as administrators and faculty, building constructive relationships with publishers, monitoring international developments, and pursuing legislative change to protect copyright exceptions.
The University of California Libraries are already collaborating on this and related issues with our colleagues. After outreach to several library and faculty committees, the UC’s Academic Senate sent a letter to UC President Michael Drake to advocate that the UC Libraries need to be able to negotiate to preserve fair use rights when licensing electronic resources—including the rights to conduct computational research and utilize AI tools in academic studies and scholarship. President Drake and UC System Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Katherine S. Newman affirmed this commitment.
Please reach out to schol-comm@berkeley.edu with any questions. For more information, please see the links below.
The archivists of the Bancroft Library are pleased to announce that in the last quarter (April-June 2024) we opened the following Bancroft archival collections to researchers:
To my delight, the Booker Prize longlist has been announced! I’m rather looking forward to a couple long weekends reading through these.
For the list, I’ve gone ahead and included the Booker Prizes’ official links for title and authors as well then a UC Search or Berkeley Public Library link in the parenthesis.
The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) makes available the transcripts of debates, lectures, seminars, and symposia given by luminaries from both sides of the Atlantic over the years. Here are a few of these printed lectures, now published as bilingual pamphlets by Editorial Breus, now in the UC Berkeley Library collection:
The Oral History Center’s Freedom to Marry collection features interviews from key members of the Freedom to Marry organization. Officially launched in 2003 by Evan Wolfson, the campaign worked to legalize same-sex marriage across the United States. The campaign originally worked on helping same-sex couples get married on a smaller case-by-case scale, as at the time, no state in the country had legislation protecting same-sex marriage. The first state to even do so was Massachusetts in 2004. Throughout the organization’s lifespan, same-sex marriage went from being legally unprotected on a state level to federally protected as an unequivocal right across the United States.
Freedom to Marry
However, in June 2024, the Supreme Court countered this ruling in Department of State v.Muñoz, in which it declared that the right to bring a noncitizen spouse to the United States is not constitutionally protected. This ruling could be detrimental towards married same-sex citizens and noncitizens who would have to leave the United States, a country where their marriage is legal, back to a home country where it isn’t.
Given the June 2024 Supreme Court ruling, as well as this being Pride month, it’s a great time to look back on the work that Freedom to Marry did to legalize same-sex marriage. The lessons from the organization remain as important today as they were twenty years ago. When initially proposing the Freedom to Marry campaign to potential investors, Wolfson remembers:
I would be saying things to them like, look, if you just want to sprinkle some money around and do some ordinary building programs and helping people, I’m not the right person for you. And if you want to stay in your work up till now, which has been primarily in the Bay Area, and certainly only in California, not nationally, I’m definitely not the right guy for you. But if you really want to make a difference, what you really ought to do is support a campaign to win the freedom to marry. They went, “Marry?” “Yes, marriage. Marriage is the engine of change, marriage is what we’re going to have to be fighting for. You can do good work this way, but if you want to be transformational, you need to do this.”
One major battle that Freedom to Marry faced was when Proposition 8 passed in California. This ballot proposition intended to ban same-sex marriage measure passed in 2008. At the time, this was a massive blow to Freedom to Marry’s campaign, especially due to California’s reputation as a more progressive state. Tim Sweeney, a member of Freedom to Marry’s board of directors, recalls:
We were just devastated. It was devastating. Right? In California, the progressive beacon of the west, right? And we lost handily. It wasn’t close, which would have just taken a bit of the sting out of it. But what was interesting is the number of non-LGBT people who were outraged that their friends and family that they loved and cared about were basically being told you’re second-class citizens and your love is not legitimate. It created such a wave of we’re going to commit ourselves to fix this. And we have to be willing to be with them in their anger, invite them in in a new way, let them lead with us. All of that is hard to do, I think, in a social movement because you get worried they don’t really get it, their message is not your message, are they going to do some half measure, are they going to compromise, what do they know? But you got to kind of trust that they’re with you and you got to really in some cases step aside and realize, for instance, the message you may say to yourself or within the community is different than the one the non-LGBT community needs to hear. And maybe they need to have different messengers that just talk about the journey in a way that maybe an LGBT person wouldn’t sound authentic or real on. So that was just such an interesting moment. It’s almost like after Prop 8 we needed to step back a bit and let the world realize, “Wait a minute, what happened here? This is not okay.”
After the loss in California, support for LGBT rights increased due to the sheer amount of media coverage of the loss nationally. A Pew poll from 2010 cited that over 60% of Americans supported same-sex marriage, a drastic difference from polls in the 1990s that cited 60% of Americans against same-sex marriage. But by 2012, President Barack Obama made his support for same-sex marriage clear, stating that his views had “evolved” since his first presidential term. Thalia Zepatos, the Director of of Research and Messaging for Freedom to Marry recalls in her 2016 interview the impact of Obama’s statement:
I think really two things happened. One was that Governor [Martin] O’Malley really got involved in the campaign, but the big one was that our long-term effort to really engage the White House and President Obama came to fruition, you know not long before the election and President Obama made his statement in support of same-sex marriage, and within twenty-four hours, polling support for marriage among black voters in Maryland went up by twenty points. I mean, it was the biggest single day increase I’ve ever seen anywhere and I think it contributed just in a very great way.
By 2015, 37 states had legalized same-sex marriage, but it would not be a federal right until the Supreme Court case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which argued that same-sex marriage was a right under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause. On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court announced its ruling: same-sex marriage was guaranteed as a fundamental right. The same night, the White House was bathed in rainbow lights, an unmistakable show of support for the ruling. Jo Deutsch, Freedom to Marry’s federal director from 2011-2015, recounted this event:
It was a truth that, from every level, we had won. It was an acknowledgement from the President of the United States that our lives and our marriages mattered, in a just obvious way…This is the symbol of America and the symbol of the President of the United States, all in rainbow color. It was just breathtaking and so beautiful…We had come so far through our lives from asking can we walk down the street holding hands, or can we actually, in an introduction, say this is my wife? And now to this moment, there we were in front of the White House, in all of its colorful glory, with all of these people holding hands. I can’t tell you how many proposals we saw, with people just dropping to their knees right and left. It was like, another one dropping to their knees, and everybody started to clap. It was just phenomenal.
The White House in 2015
As the end of Pride month nears, it is important to remember that it hasn’t even been 10 years since the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. In many other countries around the world it is still taboo or even illegal. When we celebrate Pride month, it’s important to remember the work that many people and organizations did to ensure LBGTQIA rights, especially as they continue to face challenges. Celebrations can only happen as a result of triumph over tribulations, and should be remembered together.
Katie Gonzales is currently a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying English and Anthropology. She works as a student editor for the Oral History Center.
About the Oral History Center
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.
The Library now has access to the online archive 1980s Culture and Society, which brings together resources from archival collections in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada.
“From the rise of Conservatism, the threat of nuclear war, and the AIDS crisis, to rampant consumerism, economic crises, and technological advancements, the 1980s was a turbulent and complex decade in which some individuals reaped significant benefits whilst others experienced severe poverty and hardship. Drawing on material from the late 1970s through to the early 1990s, this resource focuses on the voices of under-represented groups, grassroots organizations, and countercultural movements, addressing themes such as sexuality and identity, Black resistance movements, Indigenous land rights, subcultures, and health and social issues.
“These themes are represented within a broad range of sources which feature a variety of perspectives. For example, campaign materials, newspapers and newsletters from grassroots organizations and local communities provide a keen insight into social and political activism during the 1980s, whilst government papers and speeches from the Reagan and Thatcher administrations demonstrate the rise in political conservatism that dominated the decade. Collections of zines highlight the rich creativity and productivity of 80s subcultures, whilst mainstream and consumer culture is epitomised in fashion catalogues, photojournalism and gaming ephemera.” (Source)
The Library now has access to the online archive