This year’s welcome back newsletter for those working in the Romance languages focuses on digital and print resources. For the most up-to-date information on the UC Berkeley Library’s services, please continue to check the Library’s Get Help page.
A substantial run of the Spanish weekly film magazine Cinegramas: Revista Semanal (1934-36) was acquired months before the Covid pandemic hit but can now be consulted in The Bancroft Library. It ceased publication with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936.
The UC Berkeley Library is pleased to announce access to a new text and data mining platform, Nexis Data Lab from LexisNexis. The cloud-based platform enables users to run computational analysis in a Jupyter notebook on content licensed for use at UC Berkeley. Please take a look at this brief, two minute video to see how the environment works. Researchers should be familiar with Python or R. Each account may have up to 6 projects (workspaces), with a limit of 100,000 documents per project. The number of seats are limited, so we ask that you have a TDM project in progress.
Please view the list of content and titles available to UC Berkeley users. LexisNexis will continue to make additional content available as the platform grows. (Note that the following publications are NOT available: The New York Times (NDL does include NYT International), The New York Times Blogs, Wall Street Journal Abstracts, Information Base Abstracts, and Jane’s Defence Weekly.)
If you would like to get started using the platform, request a seat by filling out this form. The Library is holding a training session for the platform (hosted by LexisNexis) on August 15, 2022 at 9:00 AM. Please register here for the event. For more information on text and data mining platforms and resources available at UC Berkeley, please check out our guide to Text Mining and Computational Text Analysis. Contact the Library Data Services Program at librarydataservices@berkeley.edu with questions.
The Romance Language Collections Instagram feed brings forth little known and new resources and services in the UC Berkeley Library. Once you start following you’ll instantly receive early notices of new books, e-resources, exhibits, readings and more through your smartphone or any web browser.
It has been a challenging year and we look forward to most of you returning to campus where you can take advantage of all the resources the Library has to offer. By August 25, most of UC Berkeley’s libraries will have reopened. This year’s welcome back newsletter for those working in the Romance languages focuses on both digital and print resources. For the most up-to-date information on the UC Berkeley Library’s services, please continue to check the Library services and resources during COVID-19 page.
Photo: Centre Cultural La Nau – Universitat de València by Claude Potts, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
The Bancroft Library has recently completed the digitization of nearly 150,000 items related to the confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II as part of a two-year effort to select, prepare, and digitize these primary source records as part of a grant supported by the National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. This program helps to support the preservation and interpretation of U.S. confinement sites where Japanese Americans were detained during World War II. This recent project, The Japanese American Internment Sites: A Digital Archive, represents our fourth grant from this program, which together have culminated in over 530,000 primary resource materials being made available online.
The project focused on the U.S. War Relocation Authority (WRA) files from the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records (BANC MSS 67/14 c). The WRA was created in 1942 to assume jurisdiction over the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war. Between 1942-1946, the agency managed the relocation centers, administered an extensive resettlement program, and oversaw the details of the registration and segregation programs. These newly digitized records from the Washington Office headquarters and the district, field, and regional offices, formally document WRA management of internment of Japanese Americans in “relocation” centers and resettlement of approved individuals under supervision in the eastern states. Digitized materials document the registration of individuals; disturbances such as strikes; policies and attitudes; daily life in the camps including educational and employment programs; correspondences and other writings by evacuees; Japanese American service in the armed forces; and public opinion.
Since 2011, the Bancroft has been awarded four grants from the National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. The previous grants have digitized records from the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study and archival collections selected from individual internee’s personal papers, photographs, maps, artworks, and audiovisual materials. The Bancroft’s Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement: A Digital Archive website (http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/jacs) brings together all the digitized content and the recently published LibGuide (https://guides.lible.berkeley.edu/internment) that explains how to use and access these collection resources.
As we now embark on our recently awarded fifth grant from this program, we look forward to bringing even more collections online to support researcher access. We are honored and grateful to be able to make these important resources available to help interpret this period in American history and to preserve them for future generations.
The project was led by digital project archivist Lucy Hernandez and principal investigator Mary Elings, Assistant Director of Bancroft and Head of Technical Services. Special thanks to Julie Musson, digital collections archivist at Bancroft and Jennafer Prongos, BackStage Library Works technician for their work on this project, as well as support from Theresa Salazar, Bancroft curator of Western Americana. Many thanks to the Library Information Technology group at the University Library for their work in managing the files, maintaining the information systems used in the project, and ensuring the publication and long term preservation of the digitized collections through our partnership with the California Digital Library.
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This project was funded, in part, by a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of the Interior.
We all feel our wings are clipped this holiday season, but you can enjoy a tour around turn-of-the-century California, journey up the Pacific Coast, around the American West, or even visit Hawaii and the Philippines, thanks to newly published content on the Berkeley Library’s Digital Collections site.
Over 10,000 postcards issued by San Francisco publisher Edward H. Mitchell, circa 1898-1920, are now online. This nearly-comprehensive collection was compiled over many decades by Walt Kransky, who generously donated it to The Bancroft Library. Walt’s website has been the go-to site for collectors interested in Mitchell cards; there he compiled a checklist of all known Mitchell postcards, whether he owned examples or not. And he did own the vast majority!
Must-see tourist sites from Yosemite to Southern California beaches and the mountains and forests of the Northwest are in abundance, but so are local industries, agriculture, and countless examples of small town pride.
In addition to great images, Kransky’s Mitchell collection provides insight into the business of early postcard production. This was a new form when 1898 “Private Mailing Cards” were first issued as “authorized by act of Congress.”
Walt Kransky arranged his collection by back type and imprint style and he collected duplicates of given images in all their various styles of presentation. This variety, all from a single publisher, offers great opportunity for scholarship and close studies of visual culture early in the 20th century.
Many Library staff collaborated to bring this collection online. Bancroft curatorial and acquisitions staff worked with the donor to preserve this collection at Berkeley, and hundreds of hours of work on descriptive data and inventory alignment were carried out in Bancroft Technical Services’ Pictorial Unit. Library Imaging Services created the thousands of high resolution scans, and the descriptions and images were linked together and brought online through the efforts of Library IT. Most importantly, thanks are due to Walt and Gail Kransky for their generosity, his decades of collecting, and the years of expertise he committed to documenting his collection.
This year’s welcome back newsletter for those working in the romance languages focuses mostly on digital resources. After abrupt closures in March due to the global pandemic, the UC Berkeley Library has recently resumed acquisitions of non-digital formats but the bulk of this material remains in transit or is still being processed. For the most up-to-date information about the evolving services in the Library, please consult the Library services and resources during COVID-19 page.
Dibs Earth by Philip Chapman-Bell on Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Along with these titles, find additional ebooks on art, race, and social justice; image collections from the Bancroft Library on Calisphere; and films and videos available through our Kanopy subscription. This resource guide provides a sample of some of the resources available online through the U.C. Berkeley Library’s collections.
This collection contains full-text, digitized collection of comics, comix, and graphic novels from the pre-Comics Code era works to modern sequential releases from artists in the US, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, England, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Korea, Japan, and more. This includes:
Titles like Essex County by Jeff Lemire, From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, 120 Days of Simon by Simon Gardenfors, Gen Manhwa by various artists, Werewolves of Montpellier by Jason, and God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga.
Selected works from artists such as Alex Toth, Boody Rogers, Fletcher Hanks, Steve Ditko, Joe Kubert, Bill Everett, Joe Simon, and Jack Kirby
Series such as Crime Does Not Pay and Mister Mystery.
25,000 pages of interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism from journals, books, and magazines, including The Comics Journal.
The Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Frederick Wertham and the complete transcripts of the senate subcommittee hearings that led to the Comics Code Authority and, inadvertently, the underground comix movement.
The UC Berkeley community now has access to new content through our subscription to Drama Online. Drama Online is an online resource of primary and secondary sources for the study and performance of drama. It contains 1700 playtexts, 350 audio performances, and 150 hours of video. The new resources include:
Shakespeare’s Globe on Screen (2016-2018): Shakespeare’s Globe on Screen 2 (2016-2018) is composed of streaming productions from the theatre’s 2016, 2017 and 2018 seasons.
Shakespeare’s Heroes & Villains: A 1.5 hour streaming production featuring actor Steven Berkoff’s mediations on and performances of excerpts from Shakespeare’s heroes and villains.
This strengthens existing content in Drama Online, including:
1,100+ playtexts from Methuen Drama, Faber and Faber, and Arden Shakespeare, as well as contextual and critical background through scholarly works and practical guides.
Shakespeare’s Globe on Screen 1
Early modern drama titles staged and filmed specifically for educational use (Doctor Faustus, The Duchess of Malfi, Volpone and School for Scandal).
