Beginning Saturday, April 10th at 9pm through Sunday, April 11th at 2am Pacific Time, OCLC will be performing systems maintenance which may cause sporadic interruptions and delayed response times for online catalog services. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope this interruption will create minimal disruption to our users’ research.
Beginning Saturday, April 3rd at 11pm through Sunday, April 4th at 2am Pacific Time, OCLC will be performing systems maintenance which may cause sporadic interruptions and delayed response times for online catalog services. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope this interruption will create minimal disruption to our users’ research.
On Thursday, April 1st from 7am to 8am Pacific Time, OCLC will be performing systems maintenance which may cause sporadic interruptions and delayed response times for online catalog services. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope this interruption will create minimal disruption to our users’ research.
Photo: Courtesy of the Ernest Lowe Collection, UC Merced Library
Cesar Chavez Photographs Discovered In Ernest Lowe Collection
As part of the Ernest Lowe photography collection acquired by the UC Merced Library last year, in partnership with the UC Merced Center for the Humanities, over 2,700 photographs and 5,000 film negatives of migrant farm workers' experiences were cataloged and digitized. Of these photos, historical and important images of civil rights activist Cesar Chavez were discovered. Read the full article by UC Merced News.
Melvyl debuted in 1981, before most of our current students (and some of our faculty!) were born. Melvyl revolutionized the UC library system, allowing researchers to find books at other UC campuses through computer terminals on their own campuses.
Behind the scenes, however, Melvyl relied on a complex patchwork system that connected multiple catalogs and databases in order to coordinate interlibrary loans 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. Consequently, about four years ago, the project of making UC Library Search a reality commenced.
UC Library Search will vastly improve the user experience of faculty, students, and researchers worldwide who need to access collections across the University of California system. Rather than using Melvyl, which linked separate catalogs from different institutions, all of the University of California libraries will now be part of one unified discovery tool.
Here's a preview of the new logo for UC Library Search:
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: Effective April 1, UC will regain access to articles published in Elsevier journals the libraries subscribed to before, plus additional journals to which UC previously did not subscribe.
● Open access publishing in Elsevier journals: The agreement will also provide for open access publishing of UC research in more than 2,500 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.
The economics of the deal
As with UC’s other recent open access agreements, the Elsevier agreement integrates library and author payments into a single, cost-controlled contract. This shared funding model enables the campus libraries to reallocate a portion of our journals budget to help subsidize authors’ APCs — assistance that makes it easier and more affordable for authors to choose to publish open access.
Even with library support, authors’ research funds continue to play a critical role. This funding model only works if authors who do have funds pay their share of the APC.
In the other open access agreements UC has implemented, we are already seeing a significant proportion of authors paying their share of the APC. If this promising trend continues, UC can blaze a path to full open access that is sustainable across ever more publishers.
Partnering with publishers of all types and sizes
Meanwhile, the university continues to forge partnerships with publishers of all types and sizes. In addition to Elsevier, UC also signed open access agreements with three more not-for-profit and society publishers this month — The Company of Biologists, The Royal Society and Canadian Science Publishing. These agreements are in addition to those secured previously with Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press, society publisher ACM, and native open access publishers PLOS and JMIR.
Ultimately, UC’s goal is to make it possible for all authors to publish their work open access in whatever journal they choose — providing broad public access to the fruits of UC’s research. This month, we have made a tremendous stride in that direction. We know that this has been a lengthy process and we thank you for your patience and support as we worked to reach this outcome.
If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Jerrold Shiroma, jshiroma@ucmerced.edu, at any time.
Haipeng Li, University Librarian
Gregg Camfield, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
Robin DeLugan, Academic Senate Chair
Maria DePrano, Committee on Library and Scholarly Communications Chair
LibChat 24/7 Library Chat Service is Here!
Library chat has been recently revamped, and includes several new features to help students, faculty, staff, and visitors.
UC users now have the option to participate in Zoom screensharing with UC libraries, speeding up the process and allowing chat librarians to use visual aids to help patrons. In addition, users can now email themselves chat transcripts at any time. Chat is available to anyone on the Library's website, and can answer questions about finding articles, accessing articles, creating citations, using library services, and more.
Library chat moved from the QuestionPoint platform to LibChat in June, allowing for better, more streamlined service.
You can click here to try out chat, or find links on multiple Library webpages.
Last December, Emily Lin, Head of Digital Curation and Scholarship at UC Merced Library, announced an exciting new partnership between the Library and the Merced County 4-H Club. After the Library acquired the University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) archives, a key objective has been to share this incredible resource with the community. With this aim in mind, we developed the 4-H StoryMapping Project. The project seeks youth engagement with the digitized items of the UCCE archival records for Merced County, a vast collection that dates back to 1916 and includes primary source documents and photographs about irrigation, fires, home economics, crops, dairy, and much more. A large portion of the collection is 4-H material that highlights the extraordinary work the organization has done to create experiences for youth in which they “learn by doing.” Below are just a few of the photographs from the UCCE collection that document 4-H-ers in Merced County.
1. 4-H members in front of bus, 1959
3. Boys give presentation, c. 1957
The images show youth participating in a variety of activities that include gardening, livestock shows, rope courses, poster presentations and more. In the midst of the Covid-19 global pandemic, these types of experiences are on hold until it is safe again to gather collectively. So, the 4-H Storymapping Project comes at the perfect time. Project meetings are conducted on Zoom, and content providers from the UCM Library and the Spatial Analysis & Research Center (SpARC) conduct lessons through online tutorials, aimed to engage our youth participants in local historical research – just like historians!
As the Project Archivist for UC Merced’s California Agricultural Resources Archive (CARA), I have shared with our youth participants the ways that primary source documents can illuminate obscure and forgotten historical information and artifacts. After conducting searches in the digital collection, they have decided on research topics for their StoryMaps, a digital platform that allows users to integrate text, documents, audio-visual materials, and maps to construct historical narratives.
Youth participants use online teaching tools to think about research areas found in CARA.
UC Merced Library staff help 4-H youth to take broad themes found in the UCCE collection and develop research questions for their StoryMaps.
Participants will have the opportunity to present their final projects to 4-H leaders and community members through online venues. We are excited to see what they come up with. Stay tuned for updates!
The University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) Records for Merced County span well over one hundred boxes of documents and photographs and have a physical footprint of about 70 linear feet in the UC Merced Library. 
That’s several ranges of library shelves, and yes, they are stored in our “archives vault.” That’s one of the differences between a library collection, where anyone can pick up a book from a shelf, and an archive, where a researcher typically schedules an appointment and identifies specific boxes to look at ahead of time. So how do you know what you can find in the archives? And why would someone want to access the archives?
For starters, yes, you can always contact the UC Merced Library to learn more about our collections and discuss a research question you may have. The library even offers a 24/7 chat reference service as part of the larger network of UC Libraries. Let’s say you are a fourth- or fifth-generation Merced farmer and you’re wondering if there is any information about your family farm in the archives. While there may not be a direct path to answering that question, knowing what the archives contain can direct you to where to look.
The Merced County Cooperative Extension records, along with other UCCE county records archived at UC Merced Library, have what is called a “finding aid” published in the Online Archive of California. This online guide provides information about the scope and background of the collection as well as an outline of how it is organized. Since these are the organizational records for the county Cooperative Extension office, they reflect the work and activities of that organization.
As a general principle, archivists take care to respect the original order of files based on the theory that the original organization may reflect relationships and context that are important to retain. In other words, when we receive a collection, we do not simply begin to organize materials alphabetically, by chronology, or by subject. Whether they are the personal files of an individual or the files from an organization, we take into account their grouping and sequence. In an organization, for example, records may be created and organized by department or by key functions. These groupings can help a researcher understand the structure and development of that business or organization. Sometimes, however, materials end up boxed or stored away without much thought to organization. Imagine if someone dumped all of their photos randomly into a box. If later the box is given to an archives, it will be up to the archivist to try to make sense of the contents and arrange them in such a way that is useful to a researcher.
The Merced UCCE records contain administrative files of annual, monthly and weekly reports from 1917-1974, and trial reports from roughly that time period. They also contain the files of individual farm advisors, some of whom inherited or subsumed the files of previous advisors into their files. For the most part, these farm advisor files are organized by specialization or research topics—for example, fruit trials, pomology, soil—keeping their original groupings. Additionally, there are files that were not associated with a particular advisor, but are grouped by subject or format, such as crops, livestock, 4-H, and audiovisual materials.
Uncovering information about a particular farm would take digging: if you knew about specific activities such as participation in a project or crop trial, you could hone in on records by time period or crop. The historic narrative reports often mention the activities of specific members of the Farm Bureau, and especially in the early years it is interesting to note those who had a prominent role.
The 1921 narrative report of the county agent lists members of the Cottonwood center and their projects.
So what are some other reasons for accessing the archives? Perhaps you have an interest in a particular crop and the varieties that were tried in the region or the growing practices or treatments used. A researcher could also trace the historical development of a particular industry in the county, such as dairy, through the reports and research documented in these records.
The 1921 narrative report of the county agent is an example of one reason why archives can offer interesting and valuable information. While the earliest volumes of the Merced County Farm Bureau Monthly are available online, the published information does not disclose the political struggles and organizational challenges faced in those early years, which county agent J.F. Grass so frankly writes about in his report:
Three school fights, two church fights, and the differences existing at Delhi has caused a splitting up to some extent of these centers, some of these getting down to personal quarrels. It is therefore surprising that under all these things the unity of the Merced County Farm Bureau is as strong as it is.
Primary source documents in an archive can offer a different perspective on a subject, and often a more direct or personal point of view than what’s available in the public record.
Now digitized, however, these historical perspectives are available for anyone curious or interested in seeing the fuller picture.
For more information: cara.ucmerced.edu
Copyright @ The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
