Digital Olschki

Leo S. Olschki Editore

The scholarly publications of Leo S. Olschki are among the most widely held Italian publications in UC Berkeley’s collections. Recently, the Library acquired a digital package which comprises 1286 e-books published by Olschki between 2000 and 2012, half of which were new to us. These books can be discovered through Casalini’s Torrossa full-text platform, or in OskiCat searching with the phrase “Olschki e-books.”

Olschki’s digital collection is cross-disciplinary but is especially strong in all periods of European history, political science, literature, linguistics, classics, musicology, architecture, environmental design, art history, religious studies, philosophy, and the history of science. It also includes the backfiles to six journals:

  1. Archivio storico italiano (1842-2012)
  2. Belfagor (1946-2012)
  3. Inventari dei manoscritti delle biblioteche d’italia (1890-2013)
  4. Lares: rivista quadrimestrale di studi demo-etno-antropologici (1930-2012)
  5. Lettere italiane (1949-2012)
  6. Il pensiero politico: rivista di storia delle idee politiche e sociali (1968-2011)

Along with Editoria Italiana Online (EIO), it is one of the most significant Italian digital resources available through the Library. A special thanks to the Art History/Classics Library, the Bancroft, Environmental Design Library, Graduate Services, the Hargrove Music Library, the Italian Studies Department, Near Eastern Studies Collection,  the Robbins Collection, and the AUL for Collections for their contributions towards this major purchase.


OpenEdition’s Fremium Program

OpenEdition

Through next fall, the Library will have access to an extended trial to one of the most innovative research publishing models coming from Europe. Through a combination of open access (OA) and fee-based subscriptions, OpenEdition Freemium offers an infrastructure for electronic publishing dedicated to academic communication across the humanities and social sciences. OpenEdition is the umbrella portal for OpenEdition Books, Revues.org, Hypotheses and Calenda–four platforms dedicated to electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences. While most of the content is in French and freely available through OpenEdition, an institutional subscription would allow Berkeley to participate in an acquisitions policy that both supports sustainable development of OA and that respects the needs of teaching, research and learning communities: no DRM or download quotas are applied. Other advantages of an institutional subscription is that it would seamlessly integrate all OpenEdition ebooks and journals into our catalogs and bibliographic search tools while also benefitting from a full range of digital formats, some optimized specifically for e-readers, tablets, and smart phones. With the current database trial, UCB affiliates can access html, ePub, and PDF formats for 120 freemium journals and 140+ open access journals in Revues.org in html. For OpenEdition Books, 64 ebooks and 57 OA ebooks also currently available in the same three formats.

OpenEdition is run by the Centre for Open Electronic Publishing (Cléo), a unit that brings together the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Université d’Aix-Marseille, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse.


New semester, new book lists

Jacques Rancière - Le fil perdu (2014) Lumières de la sagesse : écoles médiévales d'Orient et d'Occident / sous la direction d'Éric Vallet, Sandra Aube et Thierry Kouamé Trasluz de vida : doce escorzos de Gerardo Diego / Julio Neira Il Boccaccio inciso : la vita e le opere : gli ex libris di 73                 artisti illustrano e narrano / a cura di Gian Carlo Torre Antologia poética / Natália Correia (2013)

For those of you new to Berkeley, this blog post serves as a reminder that new acquisitions lists are available through OskiCat. Just click on the “Recent Acquisiitons” link from the search screen and you will find regularly updated lists for French, Iberian Studies, Italian and more. New books for the Gardner “Main” Stacks also get sent directly to the new book display in Moffitt Library for 2-4 weeks before they’re shelved in Main. See last spring’s post on the revitalization of Moffitt Library.


Moffitt’s revitalized Information Gateway

New books display in Moffitt Library

In anticipation of a major renovation set for the Moffitt Undergraduate Library in 2015, the so-called Information Gateway on the third floor has already been transformed. The reference desk, print reference collection, and many tired beige PCs have been supplanted by 30 fast iMacs and lots of cool, cozy, and modern seating configured for laptop and tablet users (you can even borrow them there). The space is buzzing like never before, but what gives me the most pride as a librarian of seven years in the UC Berkeley Library is the decision to keep the bookshelves and do something utterly novel with them on a grand scale.

“The lounge is ringed by 2,000 new books on a wealth of subjects, attractively displayed in their book jackets, as in a bookstore, and available for check-out,” writes Cathy Cockell in the UC Berkeley Newscenter. What’s not mentioned is that these 2,000 books constitute nearly every book processed and cataloged for the Doe/Moffitt Libraries in a 3-4 week period. They are then arranged by Library of Congress classification for all to peruse before they are shelved indefinitely in the Main Stacks.

No new book goes undisplayed in the Moffitt Lobby, providing a unique opportunity for the library’s users to delight in the incredible spectrum of materials acquired in all subjects, from around the world, and across languages. These walls of books are a testament to UC Berkeley’s commitment to not only the printed book but also to the linguistic and cultural diversity of the planet, unfiltered by translation. From French books on African philosophy to 12-volume sets on the history of Thailand before 1782 in Thai to the orginal Dutch version of David Van Reybrouck’s Congo: een geschiedenis, there’s something for everyone. I commend the Library for putting its resources into this extra workflow that facilitates serendiptious discovery. This is Berkeley at its best as you can see for yourself in the Flickr slideshow!

And don’t forget that new acquisition lists for books  in the Romance languages can still be viewed aquí, ici, and qui anytime from anywhere.


Editoria Italiana Online

Elsa Morante: l'ultimo romanzo possibile

The University Library is pleased to announce the acquisition of its first ever Italian e-book and e-journal collection. The subset of Editoria Italiana Online (EIO) comprises nearly 800 e-books and 50 scholarly journals published in Italy including Critica letteraria, Filologia e critica, Italia medioevale e umanistica. It comes to us via Casalini Libri’s full-text digital platform Torrossa. Most titles are in the humanities and social sciences and include works from prominent publishers such as Bulzoni, Carocci, Firenze University Press, Polistampa, Palerno, Viella, and more. The available backfiles to all journals have also been acquired and approximately 50 new e-books will be added every year. Once the records have been loaded to OskiCat, they’ll be discoverable there but at the moment, Berkeley’s holdings in EIO can only be accessed through Torrossa.


Boccaccio conference starts today

 Giovanni Boccaccio engraved by Raffaello Sanzio Morghen (1758-1833) after Vincenzo Gozzini.
A Boccaccian Renaissance – an interdisciplinary and international conference – will explore the figure and works of Giovanni Boccaccio from the point of view of their extraordinary, yet little remarked impact on early modernity. It will have a dual focus on Boccaccio’s own understanding of his cultural program and on the direct and indirect impact of his works on the vernacular and Latin culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy and throughout Europe (esp. England, Spain, and France).

 A  joint University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University Conference, October 24-26, 2013. With a generous contribution from the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. For details, see: http://www.boccaccianrenaissance.com.


Open access at the Università di Trieste

Edizioni Universita 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:


Giulia Calvi @ Berkeley

Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle Corti (Polistampa, 2008) edited by Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli
Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle corti XVI-XVIII secolo: atti del Convegno internazionale, Firenze, San Domenico di Fiesole, 6-8 ottobre 2005 / a cura di Giulia Calvi e Riccardo Spinelli. Firenze: Polistampa, c2008.

Giulia Calvi, professor at The European University Institute, has been invited to become the 58th holder of the Chair of Italian Culture at the University of California, Berkeley for the fall semester of 2012 for her work on early modern Italian cultural and social history from the perspective of gender.

Chair of Italian Culture in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley was established in 1928. It annually calls one of the ablest and most eminent citizens of Italy in order to lecture and teach in illustration and interpretation of Italian culture, as well as for the periodic presentation of international symposia. Past holders of this prestigious Chair have included literary critic Gianfranco Contini, historian Gaetano Salvemini, literary critic Ezio Raimondi, art historian Leo Steinberg, novelist Giorgio Bassani, philosopher Giorgio Agamben, historian Luisa Passerini, political philosopher Adriana Cavarero, paleographers Armando Petrucci and Franca Nardelli and, in fall 2008 historian Paul Ginsborg and essayist and novelist Tim Parks.

Calvi will give a public lecture titled “Across Three Empires (Venetian; Ottoman; Hapsburg): Clothing the Balkans in XVI Century Europe” on Tuesday, November 27 at 6pm in 370 Dwinelle Hall. The invitational flyer can be downloaded from the Department of Italian Studies events calendar.

↑↔↓ This post is reposted in part from The European University Institute’s web site. (7/12/12)


Set the Default to Open Access

Open Access Week 2012

From Paris to Buenos Aires, open access (OA) is changing the way scholars communicate. It is removing price and permission barriers and opening up the content of books and journals, which have become increasingly more difficult for academic libraries to acquire as collection budgets decline and subscription costs skyrocket. Here at Berkeley, faculty and students have been using eScholarship to publish their own peer-reviewed journals like California Italian Studies Journal, L2 Journal, Lucero, and nineteen sixty nine for the world to read, free of charge.

Next week is the 6th International OA Week which promotes open access as a new norm in scholarship and research. On Tuesday, October 23, the Library will sponsor a faculty conversation on scholarly communication with associate professor Richard Schneider who led the effort to pass and implement the landmark open access policy at UCSF last May. This was a significant breakthrough for UC but also for the United States, making UCSF the largest scientific institution and the first public university to adopt an open access policy:

Open Access at UC: Maximizing the Reach, Visibility and Impact of Your Research
Richard Schneider moderated by Molly Van Houweling (Berkeley Law)
Tuesday, October 23
3:30-5:00pm
Education/Psychology Library, Tolman Hall

Do you have an article you want to publish? Are you trying to decide where to place it? Throughout the week, librarians will offer three different workshops on the importance of retaining your rights as an author:

Publish Smart, Maximize Impact – OA Week workshops

Social Sciences
Wednesday, October 24
3:30 – 5:00pm
251 Doe Library

Sciences
Thursday, October 25
11:00am – 12:30pm
Engineering Library

Arts, Humanities and Area Studies
Thursday, October 25
3:30 – 5:00pm
251 Doe Library

Students, researchers, faculty and the public are invited to attend.
Come early to the workshops and get a free t-shirt! (a limited number of open access t-shirts will be distributed)


Oxford Bibliographies

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) provides authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to scholarship across a wide variety of subjects. Updated regularly, with 50-75 articles added per year to each subject area, some of the areas available now include: Anthropology, Atlantic History, Classics, Communication, Criminology, International Relations, Islamic Studies,  Medieval Studies, Music, Philosophy, Renaissance and Reformation, Social Work, Sociology, Victorian Literature, and more.