Tag: e-books
600 downloadable ebooks from Gallica
Through the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s digital library Gallica, more than 600 books are now available in a format called ePub that can be downloaded to mobile devices (smartphones, e-readers, and tablets). Among the first freely available and downloadable books, you will find 19th century classics – Jules Verne, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Émile Zola, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Guy de Maupassant, and Alphonse Daudet. From the 20th century, Anatole France, Raymond Radiguet, Marcel Proust, Jules Renard, and more.
Read more on the Gallica blog post.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO), parts 5-8
Last year, the California Digital Library negotiated the purchase of Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO), parts 1-4 for all ten UC campuses. Among other specialized archives such as one for photography, African colonialism and encounters between the East and the West, the first parts of NCCO include more than 6500 digitized books in French from the The Corvey Collection of European Literature, 1790-1840. UC Berkeley has trial access to parts 5-8 of NCCO through October 17 and we are currently seeking feedback. Please email cpotts AT berkeley.edu with your impressions of the second installment of this “ground-breaking resource” focused on digitized primary source collections of the long nineteenth century.
Digitalia E-books
This summer, the Library finalized its purchase of 300 Spanish e-books from Digitalia – one of the largest providers of Spanish-language e-books and e-journals. This initial selection (the first ever multi-title acquisition of Spanish e-books at Berkeley) is a combination of backlist and newer titles across the humanities and social sciences. While most are available to the Berkeley community for the first time, some duplicate what the Library already owns in print. To preview the complete list of titles, just search in OskiCat for “Digitalia e-Books UCB access.” Represented publishers include Biblioteca Nueva, Universidad de Alicante, Iberoamericana, Editorial Trotta, Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Ediciones Alfar, Sílex, Anthropos Editorial, and more. Digitalia e-books can be read as PDFs, HTML, or Flash files.
Open access at the Università di Trieste
The University of Trieste is a long-standing exchange partner of the UC Berkeley Library. As the exchange of printed materials decreases, Open Access (OA) is transforming the way scholars share knowledge. The website of Edizioni Università di Trieste (EUT) makes available hundreds of OA ebooks and more than a dozen journals that are not yet discoverable in OskiCat, Melvyl, or the through the E-journal Titles A-Z list. Here are just a few noteworthy journals in their freely available digital collection:
- Letterature di frontiera = Littératures frontalières
- Polymnia: Collana di Scienze dell’Antichità. Studi di Archeologia
- Polymnia: Collana di Scienze dell’Antichità. Studi di Filologia classica
- Prospero
- QuaderniCIRD
- Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione = International Journal of Translation
- Slavica Tergestina
new resource Corpus Montaigne
With some year-end funds and a substantial discount through our membership in CIFNAL, the Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections, the Library was able to permanently acquire access to the Corpus Montaigne – our third database from Garnier Classiques Numérique. This digital corpus contains all the works published in Montaigne’s lifetime and after his death by his “daughter-in-law” Marie de Gournay, all the editions published from the 16th to the 20th century, their annotation and critical apparatus, and also the best editions of the complete works in Italian, English, German and Spanish.
database trial to L’Harmatheque
Through its membership in the Center for Research Libraries and more specifically CIFNAL, the Library has trial access to L’Harmathèque – a large collection of French language ebooks, articles, films and audio files – through Wednesday, May 1.
Collection Content
L’Harmathèque’s multimedia platform offers ebooks, articles, videos, and audio recordings on many subjects in the humanities and social sciences. The content of the ebooks comes from a variety of French publishing imprints, including L’Harmattan, Pagala, Odin, IXE, etc. A full list of included titles can be downloaded in excel.
Currently the platform contains more than 26,000 ebooks, 17,000 articles, 400 films, and 600 audio files available. At least 2,300 new titles are added to the collection annually (the publishers estimate that around 230 ebook titles are added monthly). This impressive number of ebooks covers a wide range of subject areas in the humanities and social sciences, novels, and children’s books.
According to the description provided on the web site, article content is from journals and book chapters, although no further selection criteria are given. The videos are primarily documentaries and theatrical productions. The audio collection includes many audiobooks, in a variety of languages.
Delivery
The interface is in French. In the portals, ebooks are divided by subject into browsable bouquets. An advanced search option allows the user to narrow down the large amount of content.
Ebooks can be read either on the platform’s online reader (which requires Flash), or downloaded and read using the free Adobe Digital Editions reader. Viewing the videos requires the use of DivX and the audio content is also available through Flash.
In Hathi We Trust
Over the summer library bits, bots, and elves have been hard at work batch loading hundreds of thousands of HathiTrust records for the digitized versions of public domain items into OskiCat. As you search for books and other library materials, you’ll undoubtedly begin to encounter these new records for materials published prior to 1923. Here is just a sampling of the kinds of digitized texts in the HathiTrust Digital Library and that are now discoverable through OskiCat:
When the project is complete, there will be over one million new records in OskiCat. You can limit a search to these by combining “hathitrust” with some other keyword(s), such as hathitrust roma or hathitrust “victor hugo”, etc.
Public domain means that the items are not protected by copyright. U.S. government documents and works published before 1923 are examples of items in the public domain. All users can view the full-text of these books online. UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and students can download the whole book (PDF) by logging in with your CalNet ID.
This service is possible because the University of California libraries are partners in HathiTrust (pronounced “hah-tee”), a national project to create a shared archive of books scanned into electronic format.
This is a remixed and updated version of a library blog post from June 18, 2012.
Heart of the Campus: Doe Library 1912-2012
This year, Doe Library celebrates the centennial of its dedication. The estate of Charles Franklin Doe funded the construction of the library building, designed by architect John Galen Howard who was trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Ground was broken for the library in 1905, the cornerstone laid in 1908, and it was completed in the summer of 1911 and formally dedicated on Charter Day of 1912.
Throughout the year—including a big birthday party on Wednesday, March 12—the Library will host an array of events. Last week, an exhibit titled Heart of the Campus: Doe Library 1912-2012 was installed in the Bernice Layne Brown Gallery on the first floor. Curated by Steve Mendoza, assistant for the Romance Language Collections, the exhibit puts on display some of the Library’s earliest acquisitions. Founding donors to the Doe Library included Henry Douglas Bacon, Michael Reese, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, Mrs. Benjamin Avery, the Class of 1883, and the estate of Marius Spinello, a Berkeley professor in Romance languages from 1902-1904.
It is no surprise that many of Doe’s first tomes were in French and Italian. Works on display include the 1823 edition of Voltaire’s Oeuvres complètes, Tommaso Piroli’s Les monumens antiques du Musée Napoléon (1804), Litré’s Histoire de langue française (1869), Notizie per la vita di Lodovico Ariosto (1896), Dictionnaire historique et critique de Pierre Bayle (1820), and the Journal des sçavans (savants) – the world’s oldest scholarly journal first published in 1665 and still active today.
Hyperlinked titles listed above take you directly to the Berkeley-owned texts (now in public domain) that have been digitized and are freely available for the world to use through the HathiTrust Digital Library.
trial to Digitalia
The Library has enabled a 30-day trial to DIGITALIA – one of the most comprehensive collections of Spanish language e-book and e-journals on the market. Founded in 2007, DIGITALIA aims to “to be a global leader providing Spanish titles, bringing to libraries, academics, students and all readers in general qualitative content driven by information technology and the best practices in content management.” At present, there are more than five thousand e-books from Spanish publishers such as Anthropos, Biblioteca Nueva, Calambur, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, Ocho y Medio, Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante, Trotta, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and more. The e-journal list includes both academic and commercial titles as well as the Colección de revistas históricas españolas. In addition, libraries can subscribe to one or more of the thematic collections.
Before December 21, 2011, please take some time to check out DIGITALIA and send your comments and feedback to cpotts [AT] library.berkeley.edu.
40,000 e-books via ebrary
Ebrary’s Academic Complete is UC Berkeley’s newest and largest subscription-based collection of e-books. It offers nearly 40,000 current titles in a wide range of subjects and provides immediate access to many current titles (mostly in English) for French studies such as Blood and violence in early modern France / Stuart Carroll, France and women, 1789-1914: gender, society and politics / James F. McMilland, Colonial memory and postcolonial Europe : Maltese settlers in Algeria and France / Andrea L. Smith, Politics and theater: the crisis of legitimacy in restoration France, 1815-1830 / Sheryl Kroen, The feminist encyclopedia of French literature / Eva Martin Sartori, Pulp surrealism: insolent popular culture in early twentieth-century Paris / Robin Walz, and hundreds more.
All records have already been loaded to Pathfinder to facilitate their discovery. For direct access to and information on how to download the ebrary reader, please see http://site.ebrary.com/lib/berkeley.