The University Library is excited to announce the establishment of a new Community Archiving Program. The Program will build on the foundation of the decades-old Regional History Project (RHP). Longtime Director of the RHP, Irene Reti has announced her plans to retire at the end of June and the Library has re-envisioned the Project to broaden its scope. The Library will soon be launching a national search for the newly created position of Community Archivist. The Community Archivist will continue to promote the method of oral history to capture the rich diversity of stories of the campus and region with a particular focus on reaching out to traditionally under-represented communities. The Community Archivist will partner with campus and community stakeholders to develop and facilitate oral history projects, serving as a resource to those interested in using the methodology in their own research or in documenting the history of their own communities. Additionally, the Community Archivist will seek out partnerships with community organizations and leaders to support the preservation of community history through other means, including, but not limited to the establishment of formal archival collections and public history projects.

Founded in 1963, the RHP has been instrumental in documenting the history of both the campus and the community and has served as a training ground for students and faculty in the field of oral history. Projects have included student-led oral histories documenting the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake and the impact of Covid-19 on the UCSC Community. The program has actively engaged with the local community since its inception, publishing oral histories on topics such as the history of agriculture on the Central Coast and working closely with other local history groups to provide guidance in developing their own oral history projects.

Reti has been part of the RHP since 1989 when she was hired as an editor. In 2004 she took over directorship of the project. Under her direction, the RHP produced over sixty oral histories, documenting the history of both the campus and Santa Cruz County. An accomplished oral historian, Reti herself conducted oral histories with such notable local and campus figures as Sam Farr, Donna Haraway and George Blumenthal. She also edited the compendium oral history volumes, Cultivating A Movement: An Oral History of Organic Farming and Sustainable Agriculture on California’s Central Coast and Out in the Redwoods: Documenting Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender History at the University of California, Santa Cruz 1965-2003. In 2020, Reti, with co-authors Sarah Rabkin and Cameron Vanderscoff, published the first comprehensive history of UCSC, Seeds of Something Different: An Oral History of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

We thank Irene for her dedication and stalwart leadership of RHP over the past 17 years and are eager to see how the work of RHP continues to grow in this new chapter.

The McHenry Library and Science & Engineering Library buildings will reopen for print collections access and on-site services beginning July 1, 2021 as part of the campus reopening.

Library patrons planning to visit the buildings on July 1 are recommended to check the University Library website in advance for the most current information regarding hours of operation, service updates and campus/building safety protocols. Certain library services and spaces will look and feel different on July 1 as the campus and library work through various operational resumption phases. Since not all librarians and library staff will transition back to in-building work on July 1, faculty, students and graduate students needing resources or assistance are encouraged to continue using Remote Library Services as the first point to access library collections and services.

On July 27, 2021, the libraries on all 10 University of California campuses will be connected through UC Library Search, a unified discovery and borrowing system. 

In preparation for the migration, My Account features will be unavailable between July 9 and July 26.  

• Beginning July 9, you will not be able login to My Account to view your checked out items or My Favorites.  The items will be transferred to UC Library Search and will be available again after launch on July 27.

The name Melvyl is retiring and there is no guarantee that saved lists in Melvyl will be moved to UC Library Search. Before July 27, please take the following steps to save your lists elsewhere:

• Melvyl: Log in to Melvyl by clicking “Sign In” in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Click on your account name, and select “My Personal Lists” from the drop-down menu. From there you can access your saved lists. You can email your lists to yourself, or you can click on the “Cite” button and export them into citation management software.

For more information about UC Library Search, see our FAQ or contact the library.

The Library will be closed on Monday, July 5th in observance of Independence Day.

Proquest Ebook Central will be temporarily unavailable on Saturday, June 26 from 7AM - 3PM; this vendor outage will impact some of our ebooks. For more details about the outage, visit the Ebook Central website.

You can check if a particular title will be impacted by searching for the title in Library Search. Affected ebooks will include a note in the record as shown in the screenshot below. 

If you anticipate needing access to a Proquest ebook during this outage, download the chapters in advance. 

Read the Spring 2021 Library Newsletter.

Subscribe to the newsletter to have it delivered directly to your email inbox!

As one of the largest public university systems in the world, the University of California holds a vast collection of resources in its libraries. However, until now, each campus library used its own catalog, making it difficult for patrons to find items held at other campuses without using a separate search tool.

Beginning July 27, 2021, UC Library Search will bring all UC campus libraries together into the same system, just as a public library system uses one catalog for its many branches. UC Library Search will allow you to find resources from any UC campus,  including UCSC, quickly and simply, saving you time and effort. Additionally, you will be able to pick up UC Library materials from any campus, giving you the option to check out materials from the UC library closest to you. As an added bonus, UC Library Search will also enable you to find and request materials from outside the UC system, using interlibrary loan. 

UC Library Search expands what UCSC Library Search has already been doing for the past 2 years. The main difference is that you will no longer have to go through a separate system (Melvyl or Worldcat) to find and request items from outside UCSC. You will easily be able to see what you have borrowed, request extensions, and manage your account with a single login; you’ll no longer need to log into your local catalog, Melvyl, and Interlibrary Loan (ILL) separately.

Powered by ExLibris Alma/Primo, UC Library Search is the same system currently used by five UC campuses (including UCSC), the SUNY and CSU systems, as well as other consortia that include major research libraries such as Carnegie-Mellon, Northwestern, and the University of Washington. UC Library Search is the next step in the evolution of a unified UC discovery tool, and will enable greater collaboration between campuses in research and collections management. 

For more information, including an updated FAQ, please see our UC Library Search website, or contact library@ucsc.edu.  

Applications for the CART Fellowship Program in Summer and Fall 2021 are now open! The deadline to apply is Monday, May 10th.

Come to an online information session to learn more about this year’s project options at 12pm on Wednesday April 14th. Register here!

In the Center for Archival Research and Training, you can:

• Get paid experience working remotely with archival materials
• Create your own digital project aligned with your research and creative interests
• Enhance your research skills using archives and primary sources
• Help make archival collections more discoverable to researchers
• Learn about different library and archives career options
• Explore innovative digital tools that you can use in your research and teaching
• Make connections with graduate students from different disciplines and interests

More information about this year's CART fellowship.

Contact CART Archivist Alix Norton at alix.norton@ucsc.edu with any questions you have about the application and the program.

The University Library’s Regional History Project at Special Collections & Archives announces the publication of The Empty Year: An Oral History of the Pandemic(s) of 2020 at UC Santa Cruz, a book of twenty-two transcribed and edited oral histories gathered in late 2020 by a team of five UCSC student oral historians (undergraduate and graduate students). The team of students gained valuable and versatile professional skills and personalized knowledge in the areas of interviewing, project design and execution, communication, recording, team-building and collaboration, storytelling, and oral history research. The project was funded by a Radical Resilience small grant from the Division of Student Affairs and Success and funding from The Humanities Institute and the University Library.

2020 was a year of, not just the COVID-19 pandemic, but pandemics, plural. Some narrators in the book speak primarily of racism and racial justice; for others, COVID-19 is in the extreme foreground; others raise questions of economic justice in America and more locally for graduate students at UCSC; still others address climate change, since the CZU Lightning Complex fires exploded across Santa Cruz County and nearly consumed the campus itself. COVID-19’s pandemic tide scattered the UCSC community, swept us away from not only our routines, but from one another and from our interdependent sense of normalcy and self. While the pandemic can be mapped and tracked and tallied with numbers, for it to be understood and felt for many, if not most people, we need stories. The Empty Year calls for the deep listening of another to bind and cohere into something more whole, something more sustainable and resilient. The book is an impressionistic illustration of an unstable present and documents that present as part of the historical record, for an unknown future.

The 540-page book is published in both hardbound and electronic format and illustrated with full-color images by Shmuel Thaler and several other local photographers. The electronic PDF can be downloaded for free from eScholarship. Copies of the hardback book will be archived in the UCSC Library and are available for purchase from Lulu.com. For more information contact Irene Reti, Director of the Regional History Project at ihreti@ucsc.edu.

Photo by Shmuel Thaler.

After more than two years of negotiations, this morning the University of California announced a transformative open access agreement with Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher. This successful outcome is the result of UC’s faculty, librarians, and university leadership coming together to stand firm on our goals of making UC research freely available to all and transforming scholarly communication for the better.

The new four-year agreement will go into effect on April 1, 2021, restoring UC’s direct online access to Elsevier journals while accomplishing the university’s two goals for all publisher agreements:

1. Enabling universal open access to all UC research; and 
2. Containing the excessively high costs associated with licensing journals.

These goals directly support UC’s responsibility as a steward of public funds and its mission as a public university to make its research freely available. The agreement with Elsevier will double the number of articles covered by UC’s open access agreements.

What the agreement means for the UC community

• Reading access: By April 1, 2021, UC will have regained access to all articles published in Elsevier journals the libraries subscribed to before, plus additional journals to which UC previously did not subscribe. Access to those journals in ScienceDirect will start to be restored now and will continue to be added until they are all available on April 1. If you cannot access a particular journal yet, you can access articles in other ways in the interim. 
   
• Open access publishing in Elsevier journals: The agreement also provides for open access publishing of UC research in nearly 2,300 Elsevier journals from day one. The Cell Press and Lancet families of journals will be integrated midway through the four-year agreement; UC’s agreement is the first in the world to provide for open access publishing in the entire suite of these prestigious journals.
   
• Library support for open access publishing: All articles with a UC corresponding author will be open access by default, with the library automatically paying the first $1,000 of the open access fee (also known as an article publishing charge or APC). Authors will be asked to pay the remainder of the APC if they have research funds available to do so.
   
• Discounts on publishing: To lower those costs even further for authors, UC has negotiated a 15 percent discount on the APCs for most Elsevier journals; the discount is  10 percent for the Cell Press and Lancet families of journals.
   
• Full funding support for those who need it: To ensure that all authors have the opportunity to publish their work open access, the library will cover the full amount of the APC for those who do not have sufficient research funds for the author share. Authors may also opt out of open access publishing if they wish.

If you have any questions, please contact the library at research@library.ucsc.edu.

Journal images courtesy of Elsevier

UC Library Search will replace Melvyl on July 27, 2021.  Additionally, all of the sources currently available in UCSC’s Library Search will also be available from this one tool.

What is UC Library Search? What does it do?

We believe UC Library Search will vastly improve the research experiences of faculty, students, and other members of campus. This tool will enable searching of the UCSC local and UC-wide collections as one, while preserving the benefits and features of the local system, such as access to Course Reserves. Search results will benefit from inclusion of the combined UC campus collections, including items found in separate databases like HathiTrust. Most importantly, as discovery of materials improves, borrowing across campuses will become easier with a simplified interlibrary loan user interface.

Why is Melvyl retiring?

Behind the scenes, Melvyl relied on a complex patchwork system that connected multiple catalogs and databases in order to coordinate interlibrary loan and full-text access. As several of these systems approached the end of their life spans, the UC Libraries recognized the technical unsustainability and inherent risks associated with keeping the Melvyl system.

Celebrating Melvyl!

Melvyl debuted in 1981, revolutionizing the UC Library system by enabling researchers to find books at other UC campuses through computer terminals on their own campuses. Over the years, Melvyl has undergone various iterations. The most recent of these was upgrading to a discovery layer. 

As the sun sets on Melvyl, we celebrate the 40 years of innovative thinking and dedicated work that went into this vital tool. We also enthusiastically welcome UC Library Search, which will move us forward on this constantly evolving front and continue the UC Libraries tradition of working cooperatively and collaboratively.

The two state-of-the-art spaces in the Science & Engineering Library have been named in the honor of these distinguished science pioneers: the Sandra M. Faber Floor (third floor) and the Kathryn D. Sullivan Floor (first floor), thanks to naming gifts from donors Claudia and Alec Webster.  See the full article in the UC Santa Cruz Newscenter.

Three new transformative agreements for UC authors to publish open access are launching this week. The agreements are with the following publishers:

• Canadian Science Publishing
• Company of Biologists 
• Royal Society

We are excited to partner with these not-for-profit publishers.  

Each of these agreements is for three years. Articles accepted for publication from January 1, 2021 or after are eligible. 

Similar to the other transformative deals the UC has reached, these three also aim to expand the reach of UC-authored research, reduce financial barriers to author participation, and maintain journal affordability. Read more on the UC Office of Scholarly Communication site.

UC libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the open access fee, or article processing charge (APC), for authors at the participating campuses. Authors are asked to pay the remainder if they have research funds available to do so. Authors who do not have research funds available can request full funding of the APC from the libraries, ensuring that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for UC authors who wish to publish open access.

You can now find all books available online through the HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service digitized from any UC collection directly from Library Search! This equals over 2.4 million titles owned by the University of California Libraries.

Just enter your search terms in the Library Search box on the homepage.

Items from HathiTrust ETAS will be shown as “Available Online” in your search results. Click the “Available via HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service” link to access the item.

Note that you will be asked to authenticate using your CruzID gold username and password to view the item in HathiTrust.

On July 27, 2021, UC Library Search will go live, unifying the 10 University of California campus libraries under one integrated library system. UC Library Search will offer an integrated discovery and borrowing experience and will feature the following enhancements:

• Ensures access to local materials without sacrificing discoverability from the wider collections of the UC and WorldCat (Libraries Worldwide) 
• Eliminates the need to toggle between two systems (UCSC Search and Melvyl)
• Simplifies the process of borrowing and renewing from another UC library
• Greater discovery and access of full-text digital content throughout the library’s online collections

With this system/platform change, the long-used name Melvyl will be retired. Rest assured that the UC collections remain intact and the new system continues our tradition of making accessible a broad array of materials through innovative practices and technologies. 

The Library will communicate UC Library Search updates and progress. In the meantime, read more about this project on the University of California Libraries website. 

Curious about what movies you can watch for free?
The library has a new feature to browse or search films.

Find documentaries, foreign films, and more!

• All streaming videos
• Swank licensed streaming videos
• Kanopy licensed streaming videos
• UCSC owned streaming videos
• Academic Video Online (AVON) licensed streaming videos

You will need to sign in with your CruzID for access.

"movie-clapper-icon_500x500" by Shmector is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The University Library is pleased to share the recently released Statement on Equity in Special Collections, Archives, and Distinctive Collections in the University of California Libraries. The Heads of Special Collections of the UC System worked collaboratively to develop this statement. The group of leaders of Special Collections at each UC campus recognized their role and agency in addressing historic wrongs and worked to conceive an actionable statement about how they intend to effect change within the institution by "develop[ing] practices that counteract a paradigm of racist, sexist, and white-centered collecting, description, instruction, and access." The statement is a first small step meant to signal the beginning of a true reflection on and reassessment of this work. The work and all activities of Special Collections & Archives at UCSC are guided by the Statement.
 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

ProQuest, one of our eBook and database providers, will be down for maintenance beginning Saturday, January 30 at 7:00 PM PST through Sunday, January 31 at 5:00 AM PST.  This means that some ebooks, databases, and streaming video content will be temporarily unavailable.

If you encounter difficulties with access after this timeframe, check to make sure you are logged into the campus VPN first and if the resource is still not working for you, contact the library.

We are very excited to offer a fantastic opportunity now open to UCSC undergraduates interested in doing a digital research project.

Up to 6 Undergraduate Digital Research Fellows will be selected to participate in a two-quarter training and mentorship program meant to launch digitally-focused independent research projects.

The Fellowship includes:

• Methodological training which combines critical theory, critical making, and creativity
• Digital skill-building around text analysis, visualization, 3D Animation, mapping, etc. as needed in order to enable fellows to build a research project of their unique design
• Ongoing mentorship to support project development by a Digital Scholarship Librarian
• A $500 award to support the development or public presentation of their work
• Presentation experience at the Digital Research Symposium in spring 2021

Applications are due by Thursday, January 21, 2021!

For more details about how to apply and Fellowship requirements, please visit our application page.

Thank you for your interest, but the sessions are now filled.

Stay tuned for future opportunities.

As of January 4, 2021, Phase I of the University of California and Springer Nature’s Transformative Agreement is live. Phase I of the agreement supports UC authors whose articles are accepted by journals in the Springer portion of the Springer Nature portfolio, including Springer, Adis, and Palgrave Macmillan titles, as well as academic journals on nature.com.  

Learn more about the agreement and how it provides funding for UC authors to publish open access with Springer.  

Check out some of the journals included in this agreement!  
(Images courtesy of Springer Nature)

Check out the campus history collections recently published on the library's Digital Collections site.

The collections include photographs, maps, and scrapbooks covering the founding of UCSC through the present.

Stories from the Epicenter is a ten-part documentary podcast that explores the experience and memory of the Loma Prieta Earthquake through oral history records and interviews with current residents of Santa Cruz and Watsonville. It was produced by the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in partnership with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and Santa Cruz Public Libraries.

See the full list of episodes and visual companion to the podcast on the Digital Scholarship page.

Read the Fall 2020 Library Newsletter.

Subscribe to the newsletter to have it delivered directly to your email inbox!

The Library is pleased to announce the completion of a music preservation project, Digitizing the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music: Putting Experimental Music in Conversation with Classical Tradition. Founded in 1963, the Cabrillo Festival is distinctive in its focus on contemporary symphonic music by living composers. This project preserves and makes available over 670 recordings of live Festival performances from 1964-1990, and features works by experimental artists such as Annea Lockwood, John Cage, Lou Harrison, and many others.

These recordings document the "critical role the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music played in shaping local culture and national practices surrounding classical and contemporary music,” notes Madison Heying, Ph.D. (Cultural Musicology, UC Santa Cruz), who co-wrote the grant with the Library. Recordings were drawn from two collections held by UCSC Special Collections: the Cabrillo Festival records and the Other Minds records.

The recordings are now discoverable on the UC Santa Cruz University Library Digital Collections site.* Due to copyright restrictions, immediate streaming access is limited to UCSC affiliates. All other interested users, including researchers and the general public, may search and browse performance descriptions and request access from Special Collections. (Note: Recordings from Festival seasons 1991-2003 were also digitized with the support of this grant, and are available upon request.)

This project was supported by a Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

*UC Santa Cruz University Library Digital Collections Site is currently in beta. Feedback is welcome.