Michelle Tea founded Dopamine Books (website) with the goal of publishing queer authors and highlighting queer writing.[1] Tea has been part of the California publishing world for more than a decade, working with City Lights Press and Feminist press to get imprints Sister Spit and Amethyst Editions (respectively) off the ground.[ 2 In 2023 in Los Angeles, Tea took those experiences and extensive exploration and founded the “vulgarian queer publisher.”[ 3]
Now, two years later, Dopamine can boast the release of short story anthologies, essays, and novels. Those titles include:
Michelle Tea, ed., WITCH: Anthology, 2025. (on order)
Finding titles at UC Berkeley
In contrast to other small presses, Dopamine is difficult to find in the UC Library Search. Because of their close collaboration with Semiotext(e) (https://www.semiotexte.com/), their books are sometimes listed with the later publisher.
Nonetheless, you can get a general impression of what UC Berkeley has from Dopamine through the UC Library Search.
We invite you to attend “Art Against Artillery: Cultural Resilience in Times of War,” a panel discussion.
Date: December 4, 2025
Time: 10 am PST (8 pm Kyiv Time)
Registration: https://tinyurl.com/artagainstartillery
Organizer: Dr. Liladhar R. Pendse, Librarian for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
The event is free and open to all, provided prior registration is completed. Please sign in to your individual Zoom account and then register. All are welcome!
Founded in 2007, Silver Sprocket (https://www.silversprocket.net/) is a comics publisher in the Bay Area scene. In a 2024 interview Avi Ehrlich represented the community as a “‘radical indie comic publisher’ representing historically excluded artists’ work.” [1]
On their About page in their website, they write that they are “a San Francisco-based publisher, retail shop, and gallery space championing socially conscious and independently produced comic books, graphic novels, and related arts.”
Here at UC Berkeley, we don’t usually buy the pins and posters, but we have been able to acquire a range of their wonderful comic and other bound graphic materials including a few of their Zines including the Abortion Pill Zine: A Community Guide to Misoprostol and Mifepristone by Isabella Rotman, Sage Coffey & Marnie Galloway (UC Library catalog record, cover image in the gallery below).
They also note that “All works will remain 100% artist owned. Our aim is always to support the artist in making the best possible version of their own vision.”
Loud & Smart & In Color: an all-new collection of Loud & Smart comics by Alex Krokus
Hourglass by Barbara Mazzi
For more from the publisher at UC Berkeley, take a look at our UC Library Search.
Also note that most comics and graphic novels end up with the subject “COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS” and in the PN section of our Library stacks. If you want to Browse our comic material, consider heading down to the D level of the Main and looking for that PN section!
Request a purchase to let us know if you’re interested in other comic titles.
Please submit your feedback to your librarian for Latin American and Caribbean Studies: Liladhar
Latin America Commons Landing Page
Latin America Commons by Coherent Digital is a full-text, richly-indexed database that provides unified, cross-searchable access to millions of pages of Latin American and Latinx primary-source materials, including books, magazines, photographs, maps, letters, diaries, ephemera, videos, and audio files that were previously scattered across the internet and in archives. The project aims to preserve at-risk content, rare documents, and often overlooked resources spanning from the 16th to the 21st centuries, making it easier for scholars and students to discover vetted, high-quality material for research and study.
Physically located in Oakland, CA, speCt! (titles on Asterism) has been treating a reading public to beautiful poetry and visual art since 2012.[1] Founded by Gillian Hamel, Peter Burghardt, and Robert Andrew Perez, the group started printing on a C&P is a small letterpress.[2] The community publisher started with and continues to focus heavily on chapbooks, which they publish with beautiful covers and excellent printing. They also print the occasional full-length text with titles like Wildfires. Their authors, including Ching-In Chen, have won awards for their beautiful work, including the 2022 Markowitz Award.[3]
One can find information about their publications on Asterism and about their community activities, including readings, on their Instagram page.
Thumbnail associated with publisher map, displaying some of the publishers we collect from. Link goes to interactive map on ArcGIS.
Alongside the celebration of the many, phenomenal books we display, we’ve also made material available about what kinds of publishers UC Berkeley Library has been collecting from across the continent.
Let me (Bee, the Lit Librarian) know if you have questions or note that there is information missing. Our thanks for to the many artists, authors, and magazine editors who’ve made this possible.
Since its inception in January 2021, Abalone Mountain Press (https://www.abalonemountainpress.com) has published several phenomenal compilations of poetry and zines. Amber McCrary, the founder, operates the press on operates on the traditional lands of the Akimel O’odham.[1]
To delight, this semester (Spring 2025), UC Berkeley’s Doe Library put in an order for five of Abalone Mountain Press’s recent publications. The chapbooks, anthology, and zines will be located in Doe Library’s main stacks.
Taté Walker and Ohíya Walker, The Trickster Riots (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022).
Kinsale and Alice Mao, Hummingbird Heart, Pink (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022).
Take a look at these or other Abalone Mountain Press books in our UC Berkeley Library.
Additional Material
Several of these authors contributed to The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature. You can find an interview with Amber McCrary about the Press in the September 2022 issue of Poetry.
From Macron, L’an I: pardon de vous le dire par Zef, Kak, and Degreff (Paris: Florent Massot, 2018.)
Recent acts of censorship of late night television talk show hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel have spurred interest in not only reposting this ever pertinent blog post originally published on November 27, 2018 but also updating it with some relevant books acquired since then. With or without humor, we find both presidents still (or again) in power and in the satirical spotlight. Enjoy! Amusez-vous!
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As two of the oldest modern democracies, France and the United States share a long tradition of freedom of speech and of the press (and at times governmental censorship). The two societies have found catharsis in the mockery of their highest elected officials through caricatures, cartoons, and critical writings. Here are a few recent library acquisitions, in English and in French, from both sides of the Atlantic in this category of political critique:
Insert Press was found in 2005 by Mathew Timmons to focus on interdisciplinary and/or hybrid works.[1] Initially, Insert Press focused on poetry in chapbook form, but over the following decade turned to increasingly toward “translation, poetics, artist books.”[2]
Balcony of the Chinese Restaurant, Dupont Street, San Francisco, Chinese in California, 1850-1925, BANC PIC 1905.06485:044–PIC, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Closing the Loop
It has been almost a year since Leah Sylva joined the Digital Collections Unit (DCU) at The Bancroft Library as the Digital Collections and Metadata Librarian. In that time, she has provided crucial technical services support, moving the program forward by building on its past successes. With Christina Velazquez Fidler at its head, the DCU has largely focused on how to “close the loop” in regards to descriptions of digital materials. This process of “closing the loop” refers to an integration of the data points created at various stages of representing the archival material in our care. In the Bancroft context, this translates to ensuring that digitized materials are represented in the records of their originating collections whenever possible.
Underscoring this issue is the iterative nature of archival description, especially in the digital context. As we work with digital materials, we hold in mind the goals of maintaining archival context and improving access and discovery. These goals can only be accomplished by strategic decision-making to guide processes of observation, evaluation, and action. This often requires returning to past projects to ensure that they are meeting current standards and needs of library users. One example of this is the DCU’s newly completed The Bancroft Library Archived Websites LibGuide which preserves and provides context to past digital projects that are no longer hosted on the Library website.
As archival material passes through discrete stages of arrangement and description, new data points are created:
Archival material is acquired and accessioned → creation of catalog record
Archival material is arranged and described → creation of finding aid
Archival material is digitized -> creation of digital object and Digital Collections record
Since these processes can be completed years apart, there are often overlapping fragments of metadata existing in different platforms without reference to one another. With limited resources and staff capacity, we are always making choices about what to prioritize and what to leave for another day, creating backlogs and technical debt that future generations must repay with effort and creative problem solving. With migrations between systems, changing accessibility standards, and shifts in the direction of our work, we understand that the digital landscape is ephemeral and in need of attention, maintenance, and augmentation. Digital projects offer new pathways for access and discovery alongside significant technical challenges that must be resolved as part of a process of quality control.
“Closing the Loop” case study: Moving Images from Environmental Movements in the West, 1920-2000
These recordings, comprising 130 videos from 8 distinct collections, were digitized under a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) grant to preserve audiovisual material in need of reformatting.
At the end of the project, the recordings were added to the Berkeley Library Digital Collections, but there were many inconsistencies and a lack of archival context for these materials. This necessitated a careful review of the digital objects and archival collection information to note what information existed in each system and where there were discrepancies.
Catalog
Problem
Catalog records did not include digital material
Some material did not have item-level catalog records
Solution
Updated collection level records and item-level records to reflect digital material
Finding aid
Problem
Some audiovisual material was separated from original collections or appeared in multiple resource records
Some recordings did not have archival objects
Solution
Archival objects confirmed, moved, or created in ArchivesSpace
Digital objects created in ArchivesSpace linking out to Digital Collections records
Digital Collections
Problem
Objects had incorrect collection names in some cases
Many items did not have links to their catalog records or finding aids
Solution
Reviewed and resolved metadata issues
Added links in Digital Collections to connect digital object with catalog record and finding aid
This project is a prime example of “closing the loop” – circling back to the system of record, augmenting metadata, and ensuring that the various systems we employ connect to one another. It is only at the closing of this loop that we can truly consider a digitization project complete.
Delivering Archives and Digital Objects: A Conceptual Model (DadoCM)
This approach is supported by the emerging Delivering Archives and Digital Objects: A Conceptual Model (DadoCM). This model acknowledges that while digital repositories are largely designed for managing single discrete objects, archival principles are focused on efficiently describing materials in the aggregate. This model is centered on facilitating access and provides a framework which aims to resolve the inherent tensions in archival description of digital collections through a series of guiding principles and technical structures. UC Berkeley Library’s maría a. matienzo, Head of the Application Development Services Department, is a contributor to the DadoCM and she has been a helpful resource in conceptualizing DadoCM.
Two core ideas of DadoCM that we can apply to our work:
The meaning of an individual record becomes impoverished when it is removed from its context.
Information may be displayed in multiple places, but it must only be created and updated in one, canonical system of record.
The DCU’s focus on “closing the loop” lays down the foundation of DadoCM by keeping materials described within the context of their collections as well as maintaining connections through our canonical system of record, ArchivesSpace. We hope to continue implementing the DadoCM framework in our practices.
Completed Loops
During FY 2024/2025, Leah added 891 digital objects to ArchivesSpace. The following finding aids were republished by Leah to include newly added digital objects from ArchivesSpace.
Looking ahead, we are excited to build on this momentum, and we are exploring how emerging technologies can enhance discovery and access to our collections. We are also continuing to learn from and contribute to our vibrant digital archives community. Our collaboration with our campus stakeholders is the cornerstone of this work, and we are eager to continue this journey together.
Post written by Christina Velazquez Fidler and Leah Sylva
As two of the oldest modern democracies, France and the United States share a long tradition of freedom of speech and of the press (and at times governmental censorship). The two societies have found catharsis in the mockery of their highest elected officials through caricatures, cartoons, and critical writings. Here are a few recent library acquisitions, in English and in French, from both sides of the Atlantic in this category of political critique:
Collard, Susan P., ed. 
Drezner, Daniel W. 
Lee, Bandy X. 
Ngono, Emmanuel. 
