Library News

April 30, 2017

The month of April is nationally recognized as Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and in collaboration with the CARE office the Library has dedicated its 2nd floor book display to help educate and bring awareness to issues surrounding sexual assault. 

As early as the late 1970s, "women...held protests against the violence they encountered as they walked the streets at night; they called them "Take Back the Night Marches.' Over time, sexual assault awareness activities grew to include the issues of sexual violence against men and men's roles in ending sexual violence. On April 1, 2001, the U.S. first observed Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) nationally. Since then, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center promotes national unity for SAAM activities. This year, the SAAM campaign is Engaging New Voices, [hoping] to help new voices begin to talk about preventing sexual assault." - www.nsvrc.org

April 21, 2017

The 2017 American Library Association (ALA) Equality Award is awarded to Haipeng Li, University Librarian at UC Merced. This annual award honors an individual or group for their outstanding contributions toward promoting equality in the library profession.

The 2017 Equality Award jury commented that “that throughout his career, Mr. Li has championed equality within the profession, to library users, and on a global level as well.” The jury highlights Li’s work as co-chair of the second National Joint Conference of Librarians of Color (JCLC), and past presidency of the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA). They also note his leadership in global initiatives such as the US-China library collaboration program, “Think Globally, Act Globally.”

A nominator said of Li, “… I have seen his engagement and passion for opening the world of libraries and librarianship to people from diverse backgrounds, through his “day jobs” as well as his activities at national and...

April 17, 2017

In 2012, Columbian mammoth bones and more than 1,500 other fossils from the Pleistocene epoch were discovered by Caltrans workers in Merced County. Under the direction of Professor Mark Aldenderfer, the former dean of the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, UC Merced accepted the fossils, which are now part of a permanent display to ensure they remained local and accessible to researchers and the public.

The exhibit, on the second floor of the UC Merced Library near the services desk, features a juvenile mammoth skull and the skull, femur and tusk of a mammoth estimated to be 49 years old at the time of death.

Read the full story in Panorama.

April 17, 2017

The Archives and Special Collections department of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Library, in collaboration with the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society, has been awarded a $315,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In collaboration, UC Merced Library’s Digital Assets Unit, which has established a reputation for digitizing information resources, will be responsible for digitizing the 49 archival collections related to the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the San Francisco Bay Area, making them available to the public online.
“The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic: Digitizing, Reuniting, and Providing Universal Access to Historical AIDS Records” project will begin on July 1, 2017. The materials to be digitized range from handwritten correspondence and notebooks to typed reports and agency records and printed magazines, as well as photographic...