Tag: Area Studies
Meeting of Library’s Global & Area Studies Interest Group
On Wednesday, January 15, members of the newly formed Global & Area Studies Interest Group (GASIG) convened via Zoom to discuss new directions and topics of interest for librarians and staff working on international issues and themes at UC Berkeley. The knowledge sharing group provides a forum for Library employees to address issues related to supporting teaching, learning and research about specific world regions and countries, as well as international and global studies broadly. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to: collection development, collection management, digitization, metadata and discovery issues, campus partnerships, and fundraising.
Since its founding in 1868, students and faculty at UC Berkeley have concerned themselves with a breathtaking range of languages. In support of teaching and research, the University Library, which collects and preserves materials in all languages, now boasts a collection of nearly fourteen million volumes. It is among the largest academic libraries in the U.S. with more than one third of its print resources in more than 400 non-English languages, and even more in digital formats. Over a dozen Berkeley departments offer instruction in more than sixty languages.
The group will meet once or twice per semester, communicate via a group email list, and endeavors to host a series of educational events such as a library resource showcase featuring both hidden and well-known collections. Membership is open to all interested UC Berkeley Library employees across units, functions, and classifications. José Adrián Barragán-Álvarez (Bancroft Library) and Claude Potts (Arts & Humanities Division) are co-facilitators for the first two years. For more information or to join the group, please either one of us directly.
Open Access Journal: ESTUDIOS DE CULTURA NÁHUATL
As some librarians scramble to collect materials in endangered languages and continue competing professionally for acquiring difficult to find low print materials in the indigenous studies and regional languages, they sometimes end up overlooking readily available open access sources. These sources can enrich students’ and faculty’s academic experiences. This is the first post in a series of occasional posts highlighting some of the well-known academic journals that deal with indigenous studies. One such Mexican journal is Estudios De Cultura Náhuatl.
The journal site’s self-description is as follows, “Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl es una revista científica del Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Difunde trabajos de investigación sobre la lengua y la cultura de los pueblos de habla náhuatl de ayer y hoy. Con más de sesenta años desde su primera aparición, Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl es un referente ineludible en su campo de estudio.” Below is the landing page of the journal. If one clicks on the photo below, you can see on the right side of the website, indexed issues. At the time of writing this post, there was a full-text access and index to issues of the journal beginning 1959.
Image 1: The landing page of the Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl