Tag: News

Project IRENE uses an innovative technique of non-contact optical scanning to create digital versions of audio recorded on the nearly 3000 wax cylinders in the Hearst Museum collection over a total of three years. These cylinders were recorded in the field by UC Anthropologists under the direction of Alfred Kroeber between 1900 and 1940. They recorded Native Californians from many regions and cultures speaking and singing; reciting histories, narratives and prayers, listing names for places and objects among many other things, all in a wide variety of languages. Many of the languages recorded on the cylinders have transformed, fallen out of use, or are no longer spoken at all, making this collection a unique and invaluable resource for linguists and contemporary community members hoping to learn about or revitalize languages, or retrieve important pieces of cultural heritage.

Project IRENE at UC Berkeley is a collaborative effort, funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation, with team members from the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department, UC Library, Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the particle physics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Project IRENE Exhibit

Project IRENE Website

The UC Berkeley Summer Reading List is an annual compilation of recommended (though not required) readings suggested by Cal faculty, staff, and students as a welcome to incoming freshmen and transfer students.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism?s Stealth Revolution

Why is this book a “first”? I have an idea that it will be the first coherent statement most incoming students have ever been presented with that will give them an idea of what has happened and continues to happen at “their” university, and to wider “democratic” society. The author, Wendy Brown, is a professor in UC Berkeley’s Political Science Department. (Professor Brown was also recently named a 2016 recipient of Cal’s Distinguished Teaching Award.)

KATHRYN A. KLAR Lecturer Emerita, Celtic Studies

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Post contributed by:
Michael Larkin Lecturer, College Writing Programs
Tim Dilworth First Year Coordinator, Library

The UC Berkeley Summer Reading List is an annual compilation of recommended (though not required) readings suggested by Cal faculty, staff, and students as a welcome to incoming freshmen and transfer students.

Alan Turing: The Enigma

How one man’s interest in abstract mathematics combined with his experience breaking encryption during World War II brought us from calculators–machines designed to solve only a particular problem–to computers–machines designed to be programmed to solve many problems. It’s agonizing to consider how many more “firsts” Turing might have given the world if its prejudices hadn’t robbed us of him.

TERRY JOHNSON Associate Teaching Professor, Vice Chair for Undergraduate Programs, Bioengineering

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Post contributed by:
Michael Larkin Lecturer, College Writing Programs
Tim Dilworth First Year Coordinator, Library

Philip Stark, a professor in the Department of Statistics and Associate Dean of the UC Berkeley Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, has conducted extensive research to demonstrate that student evaluations do not measure teaching effectiveness. More significantly, his research demonstrates that student evaluations are often biased against female instructors. Professor Stark’s work was recently profiled in a Chronicle of Higher Education article “How One Professor Is Trying to Paint a Richer Portrait of Effective Teaching” (June 16, 2016).

Stark and his colleagues, Anne Boring and Kellie Ottoboni, published the original study “Student evaluations of teaching (mostly) do not measure teaching effectiveness” (7 January 2016), in the open access journal ScienceOpen.com. Since its publication, according to metrics provided by the journal, the article has had more than 26,000 readers, been tweeted 200 times, and been mentioned in multiple news outlets and blogs. Its Altmetric score is “in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric.” (Altmetrics is a system which uses non-traditional metrics to gauge an article’s impact.)

Publication of this article was made possible by the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII). Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Library, BRII provides funding to Berkeley authors who wish to make their research findings free to all readers immediately upon publication. The purpose of BRII is to foster broad public access to the work of Berkeley scholars by encouraging the Berkeley community to take advantage of open access publishing opportunities.

Post contributed by Margaret Phillips, Education Librarian, Gender & Women’s Studies Librarian

The UC Berkeley Summer Reading List is an annual compilation of recommended (though not required) readings suggested by Cal faculty, staff, and students as a welcome to incoming freshmen and transfer students.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

A remarkable history of the discovery of nuclear fission, which shows how discovery becomes technology, and how technology is interconnected with society, culture, politics, personalities, and (in this case) war.

TERRY JOHNSON Associate Teaching Professor, Vice Chair for Undergraduate Programs, Bioengineering

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Post contributed by:
Michael Larkin Lecturer, College Writing Programs
Tim Dilworth First Year Coordinator, Library

Along with their work providing research assistance and building library collections, UCB librarians and staff often pursue their own scholarly research agendas. Below are just a handful of librarian and staff publications from 2015/2016, including extensive scholarship from staff of the Mark Twain Project, a case study on the adoption of the flipped instruction model in information literacy training from the Library’s Teaching & Learning Expertise Group, and much more!

Edwards, S. “Education Information” in E. Forte, C. Hartnett, and A. Sevetson (eds). Fundamentals of Government Information: Mining Finding, Evaluating and Using Government Resources. Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2016 (Forthcoming).

Education research in the U.S. is particularly challenging — it is both highly decentralized (think of the wide variety of government and statistical sources at the school, district, county and state levels) while also subject to extensive, and growing, federal oversight.

 

Emmelhainz, C. Altmetrics: Measuring your scholarly impact with tweets, posts, citations, and teaching scores. ANSS Currents, 31, no 1 (Spring 2016).

This short article reviews ways for librarians and researchers to increase and track exposure of their academic work online.

 

Emmelhainz, C. and Bukhtoyarova, D. “I Fell into Librarianship”: Experiences of Post-Soviet Librarians at the National Academic Library in Astana, Kazakhstan. Slavic & East European Information Resources, 17, no. 1-2 (2016).

This peer-reviewed article uses interviews and surveys to explore the experiences of Russian- and Kazakh-speaking librarians in Kazakhstan’s capital city.

 

Fischer, V. and Griffin, B.. “A Dialogue on the Autobiography.” In: Mark Twain and Youth, Mac Donnell, K. and Rasmussen, R.K. (eds). London: Bloomsbury Academic Press. 2016.

Two editors at the Mark Twain Project were invited to share their reflections on the theme of “Youth” in the Autobiography. When one of the editors found a subterranean inclination to revise the other’s statements, the essay was reborn in dialogue form. It forms part of a collection of essays on the theme of Youth in the life and works of MT.

 

Griffin, B. “Twins of Genius? — Not! On Twainquotes.org.

This article corrects a small but often-repeated statement — the misapprehension that Mark Twain and George Washington Cable, on their 1884-85 lecture tour, were billed as the “Twins of Genius.” They weren’t. The Twins of Genius were two other lecturers, five years later. The error would hardly be worth correcting had it not attained the status of a knee-jerk reaction among literature scholars to trot out the slogan “Twins of Genius” in connection with Mark Twain.

 

Griffin, B.,  Smith, H., Fischer, V., Frank, M., Gagel, A., Goetz, S., Myrick, L.D., and Ohge, C. (eds). Autobiography of Mark Twain, volume 3. Oakland: University of California Press. 2015.

The final volume of three, containing the first publication of the complete Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited from the manuscripts and typescripts in The Bancroft Library.

 

Griffin, B. “Infant Jesus and Young Satan: Mark Twain’s Apocrypha.” Forthcoming in Mark Twain Annual, 2016.

This essay explores Mark Twain’s use of the apocryphal New Testament, specifically the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Mark Twain utilized this source most gainfully in the manuscript tale “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” in which this “gospel’s” arrogant, death-dealing Christ-child feeds Clemens’s fantasies of childhood, cosmology, and death.

 

Loo, J. L., Eifler, D., Smith, E., Pendse, L., He, J., Sholinbeck, M., Tanasse, G., Nelson, J. K., Dupuis, E. A. (2016). Flipped Instruction for Information Literacy: Five Instructional Cases of Academic Librarians. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 42(3), 273-280.

The article is also available via eScholarship at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m7177q0

 

Mitchell, E. Metadata Standards and Web Services in Libraries, Archives and Museums. Libraries Unlimited, 2015.

Mitchell, E. Library Linked Data: Early Activity and Development. Library Technology Reports, 52, no. 1 (January 2016).

Silva, J. and Orlando, L. “Energy and Environment Information” in E. Forte, C. Hartnett, and A. Sevetson (eds). Fundamentals of Government Information: Mining Finding, Evaluating and Using Government Resources. Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2016 (Forthcoming).

In the second edition of the leading library science textbook about government information, our chapter covers strategies on locating energy and environmental information produced by the United States and other governments.