Tag: journals
Library event: Que vlo-ve? and Le Mot
In these austere times where both financial resources and shelving space are limited, it has become a rare occasion when we are able to pursue full-runs of older periodicals. However, the recent acquisition of these two—one from France and the other from Belgium—in more or less the same time period has sparked the idea of hosting a hands-on journal presentation for those interested in interacting with the journals before the issues are processed, cataloged, bound, and stored in their distinct library locations.
Que vlo-ve?: bulletin de l’Association internationale des amis de Guillaume Apollinaire was published from January 1973 to 2004. Centered on the work of the celebrated 20th century French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist and art critic of Polish descent, its intention was not to duplicate articles published in the annual Guillaume Apollinaire series by Lettres Modernes. Instead, it was meant to welcome articles that could not easily find a place, news of the association and of the museum as well as news that members of the scholarly society wished to disseminate internationally.
Sardonic and visually rich, this wartime French literary and artistic journal published by Jean Cocteau and Paul Iribe, was characterized by a restrained modernism and a fiercely nationalistic, anti-German perspective. Le Mot (The Word) was a wartime sequel to François Bernouard’s Schéhérazade: Album Mensuel d’Oeuvres Inédites d’Art et de Littérature (1909-11). Its primary purpose was to establish an entirely French artistic style and taste—anti-bourgeois and uninfluenced by German modernism.
Reports of the brutal treatment of noncombatants (such as mass executions that included women, small children, and the elderly) and damage to towns and cultural centers shocked the public, leading to a characterization, particularly within France, of the German soldiers as destructive and uncivilized “huns” particularly within wartime propaganda. The bi-monthly periodical included cover designs by not only Iribe and Cocteau but also Sem, Raoul Dufy, Léon Bakst, André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, and Pierre-Emile Legrain. Cocteau signed his drawings as Jim, the name of his dog. In August 1914, when war was declared with Germany, he was twenty-five years old. Like many patriotic young Frenchmen, Cocteau tried to enlist but was turned down because of his health. Looking for other ways to serve his country and the war effort, he collaborated with Iribe to launch Le Mot. As a teenager, Iribe drew illustrations for the popular caricature journal L’Assiette au Beurre (The Butter Plate), which ran from 1902 to 1912. He also freelanced for Le Témoin, Rire, Sourire and other periodicals and was enthusiastic about starting a satirical journal of his own.
Please join us for an interactive show and tell with special guest Willard Bohn, alumnus of the Department of French and Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Illinois State University.
Thursday, February 6
4-5:30 pm
223 Doe Library (accessible through south end of the Heyns Reading Room)
No rsvp required.
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Claude H. Potts (he/him)
Librarian for Romance Language Collections
Serials reductions as part of the life cycle
You need not fret about L’Infiniti, Écrits de Paris, Revue des deux mondes, Revue des études Italiennes, Revista de occidente, Claves de razón práctica, El Mediterráneo, Atena, MicroMega, Humanitas, Europe, Misure critiche, Commentaire, Nuova antologia, Il Mulino, and many more journals in the Southern European collection. These have evaded cancellation for now in the second year of a two-year planned reduction of UC Berkeley Library’s acquisitions and licensing budget.
This week, the Library has shared with the campus via CALmessages a complete list of proposed serials cancellations for public comment until May 12. For 2023/24, the budget for recurring annual costs such as subscription databases, journal subscriptions, ebook and journal packages will be reduced by $850K. The Arts and Humanities portion of the serials reduction came to about $165,000. Much of this was met through a renegotiation of the price share for a statewide Taylor & Francis journal package that met about $65,000 of our target. The remaining $100,000 came from the subject funds. (For Latin American and Caribbean Studies, please scroll down to the Social Sciences grouping.)
The proposed list of cancellations was developed to minimize the impact on the community by focusing on duplicative subscriptions; journals and databases that are available open access or in other ways; and the most seldomly accessed journals and databases. Together, subject librarians have reviewed all subscriptions and prioritized retaining titles based on strength of need and available alternatives for access. Across disciplines, the total number of titles came to 1,204 which includes large packages. These ranged from very cheap (Annali di statistica @ $9.67/year) to exorbitant (Greenwire for $17,544/year).
These exercises are never easy but have become a regular part of the scholarly resources life cycle as academic libraries continue to endure rapidly declining budgets for an expanding terrain of expensive intellectual materials in both print and digital formats. The last serials reduction was in 2018 in the amount of $1.5M. At the beginning of this year, the Library reduced its discretionary budget (mostly for books) by $850K and two years earlier by $1M.
Including our recent reductions in 2018 and 2020, this year’s serials reduction will bring the total annual reduction in acquisitions and licensing to $4.425 million – an approximately 35% reduction of campus, state, and unrestricted funding for collections since 2016. Without an influx of funding from the campus and the state, the UC Berkeley Library can expect to see another round of budget cuts in the near future.
For the month of April, I will be posting on Instagram nearly every day the cover of a different journal in the Romance languages that we are retaining access to for now in either print or digital form.
Journal Portal for Scholars of Decolonial and Diaspora Studies
The Portail Mondial des Revues/Global Journals Portal of the French Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) comprises a collection of over one thousand decolonial and diasporic periodicals spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often ephemeral and with brief publication histories, these journals offer glimpses into the literary critical and social critical practices of their times.
Publications in the database can be filtered by geographical area, language, and topic (literature, gender studies, diaspora, etc.). For those that are open access, links are provided directly inside the database. Each entry contains a list of articles and books that have recently cited the journal, allowing scholars easy access to critical work surrounding each publication.
At the core of the collection are works published in Paris, particularly during the entre-guerres period, that convey the voices of migrant and diasporic communities. Among these are journals such as the anti-imperialist Phản-Đế (1934), published by the Ligue contre l’impérialisme et l’oppression coloniale, and Césaire and Senghor’s L’Étudiant noir (1935). Many publications such as L’Arche (1944-1948), with joint editions from both Paris and Algiers, publish literary texts from around the world, placing them alongside reflections on contemporaneous philosophical and political debates.
Works span across several dozen languages and every continent of the globe. Publications such as the Catalan El Cami and the Haitian Bon Nouvèl account for just two of many periodicals published in minority languages and creoles. Other publications offer transnational and multilingual perspectives such as the Franco-uruguayan Entregas de la Licorne and Tricontinental, a social critical periodical published through the Organization for Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Cameron Flynn
Building distinguished collections one title at a time: Part 1-Revista PAN (Colombia)
Each month, we will document our activities geared towards building distinguished collections at UC Berkeley Library one title at a time. Usually, American libraries are proud of their already existing large, diverse, and the great body of print items. But with the same token, given the robust digital technologies and the Interlibrary Loan platforms, the need for building certain types of analog collections is rightfully contested.
When it comes to the 19th century North American imprints, many libraries have them sitting on the shelves as a sort of legacy records despite many of these being accessible in HathiTrust in their digital avatars. As we take great pride in our past, we must secure our future while learning from the experiences the present offers. Despite the debates, the fact remains that the libraries take great pride in their distinguished collections that set them apart. To this end, we are making conscious efforts- COVID or no COVID-19; life continues.
I am glad to report that we have acquired the following difficult to find Colombian journal for the library.
COLECCIÓN COMPLETA. 36 NUMEROS. MUY DIFICIL DE ENCONTRAR COMPLETA.
Todos los Numeros encuadernados. Los No. 1, 2 y 3 encuadernados en un solo volumen.
Esta revista incluye artículos de política, historia, filosofía, cuentos, ensayos, viajes, poesía, ciencia, notas varias y transcripciones.
Se destaco por ser un medio de difusión del arte colombiano y escenario donde algunos intelectuales de aquel momento manifestaron sus apreciaciones acerca de lo que ellos concebían como arte a través de comentarios y artículos
Por sus páginas pasaron pintores, escultores, dibujantes , caricaturistas y fotógrafos: óleos, dibujos e ilustraciones (algunas a color) de Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo, Luis Alberto Acuña, José Rodríguez Acevedo, Pedro Nel Gómez, Carlos Correa, Gonzalo Ariza, Salas Vega, Villaveces, Dolcey Vergara; pasteles de José Posada; acuarelas y caricaturas de Rendón; ilustraciones de Schloss, Scandroglio, Martínez Delgado, Rodríguez Cubillos, Ramón Ba rba, Rómulo Rozo, Gómez Campuzano, Achury Valenzuela, Félix Timmermans, P . Daguet, Carolina Cárdenas de Jaramillo; grabados en madera de Frans Masereel y témperas de Guillermo Jaramillo.
Joventut: periódich catalanista: literatura, arts, ciencias
Few books and journals in the Library stay in the same place forever. Berkeley’s copy of the renowned Art Nouveau periodical, Joventut published between 1900 and 1906 and directed by Alexandre de Riquer and Lluís Vía under the auspices of the “Unio Catalanista” has recently migrated from the Art History/Classics Library to The Bancroft Library for safekeeping. Antiquarian bookdealer Peter Bernett describes the journal as “a major forum for the presentation and reviews of ‘modernista’ literature, criticism, theater, music, and visual art in Barcelona and greater Catalonia, as well as discussing current aesthetic trends in Europe.” An extension of the Renaixença cultural and literary movement with inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelites, it featured cutting edge art, architecture and literature. In its first year of publication it was the first review to reproduce a work by Picasso. The ornamental golden binding was inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s The Yellow Book. Catalan poets, novelists and playwrights such as Jacint Verdaguer, Joaquim Ruyra, and Victor Català — who will soon be featured in The Languages of Berkeley online exhibition —were among the regular contributors.
Joventut has been digitized separately by the Biblioteca de Catalunya and the Getty Research Institute, available through the HathiTrust Digital Library and The Internet Archive.
New Resource: Almandumah Arabic Database
Almandumah is a comprehensive full text database for Arabic scholarly output. It includes almost one million items (1/3 in abstract), including about 1900 unique Arabic journals, 2500 conferences, and 200,000 dissertations from the Arab world. It consists of 6 specialized databases: AraBase for language and literature, IslamicInfo for Islamic studies and Islamic law, HumanIndex for humanities, EcoLink for economic and management studies, EduSearch for education, and Dissertations and Thesis which includes full text and abstracts for about 200,000 (1/2 in abstracts) from 170 schools across the Arab world. The database covers the Arabic scholarly output since 1920 until present.
The sweetest journal in the Library
A back issue of an award-winning bilingual cultural journal from Portugal was brought to our attention earlier this week. Usually librarians only become involved with journal receipts when they haven’t been arriving regularly, prices have increased or formats have changed but this special issue of Egoísta was like no other I had seen before. It came with a small bag of hard red candies and the cover was designed to hold them them in place. Clearly there was a connection between the issue’s theme on doce (sweet) but can you imagine the environmental risks that might ensue if we left the candies attached to the journal and housed them with the rest of the print resources in the Main Stacks? Happy Valentine’s Day!
Claude Potts
Librarian for Romance Language Collections
Primary Sources: American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection
The Library recently acquired the complete digital archive of the historical periodicals held by the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). The collection exists as a series of five databases created from 6500 American periodicals published between 1691 and 1876. The collection also contains titles in more than two dozen languages including French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and more. The series can be searched together or individually.
Primary Sources: British Periodicals
The Library now has access to three modules of the primary source collection, British Periodicals. This digitized and searchable resource is made up of collections previously available on microfilm — English Literary Periodicals and Early British Periodicals — and includes nearly 500 publications from the 17th century through to the early 21st century.
English Literary Periodicals (also known ELP) includes over 341 periodicals, published in Great Britain during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, that are predominantly literary in nature. Besides literary reviews there are also theatrical, satirical, political, religious, and women’s magazines, such as Monthly Review and Critical Review.
Early British Periodicals is a supplement to ELP, consisting of additional 168 titles (1681-1921), and includes titles such as Quarterly Review and Edinburgh Review.
Search results can be filtered to article type and downloaded in either PDF or JPEG format.
Primary Sources: Independent Voices
Independent Voices is a digital collection of magazines, journals, newspapers, and newsletters housed in the alternative and small press archives of participating libraries and historical institutions.
The focus is on materials published during the 1960s-1980s that stem primarily from the second wave of feminism, LGBT activism, GI and student protest movements, and the Black, Chicano(a), and Native American movements.