On Saturday, May 20th at 7pm to Sunday, May 21st at 4am PDT, OCLC will be performing systems maintenance which may make online catalog services unavailable to our patrons. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope this interruption will create minimal disruption to our users’ research.
Melvyl is currently experiencing slow load times and service disruptions. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope this issue will soon be resolved and access restored.
On Wednesday, May 10th from 1am to 5am PDT, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research will be performing systems maintenance which may make online iPOLL searches and dataset downloads unavailable to our patrons. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope this interruption will create minimal disruption to our users’ research.
The American Library Association’s Library Instruction Round Table (LIRT) has selected an article authored by Sara Davidson Squibb, UC Merced Library’s Head of Research & Learning Services and Susan Mikkelson, former UC Merced Instruction & Scholarly Communications Librarian and current Librarian of Merced High as one of the Top 20 Library Instruction Articles for 2016. Published in the March edition of College & Research Libraries, “Assessing the Value of Course-Embedded Information Literacy on Student Learning and Achievement” reviewed the impact of a curriculum developed by UC Merced librarians and Writing faculty that integrated information literacy into introductory composition courses to improve academic performance. Read the full article here.
On Saturday, May 6th at 9pm to Sunday, May 7th at 12am PDT, OCLC will be performing systems maintenance which may make online catalog services unavailable to our patrons. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope this interruption will create minimal disruption to our users’ research.
The American Physical Society (APS) and The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), as the host organization of SCOAP³ (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), have entered into an agreement to publish high-energy physics (HEP) articles from the three top journals of the APS – Physical Review Letters, Physical Review D, and Physical Review C - as open access as of January 1, 2018. This will bring SCOAP³ to attaining near to 90% coverage of all high energy physics literature, allowing free and unrestricted sharing of scientific information within the global scientific community, for the advancement of science.
Managed by CERN, SCOAP³ is the largest global open access initiative ever created, a global consortium of 3,000 libraries and research institutes in 44 countries, with the added support of eight research funding agencies. Since its beginnings in 2014, it has made 15,000 articles by about 20,000 scientists from 100 countries accessible to anyone.
For further details, see these press releases from CERN, APS and SCOAP³.
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 international professional activities. In addition, his research, writings, and presentations have focused frequently on equity, diversity, and inclusion.”
Li, whose tenure at UC Merced began in June 2015, is full of gratitude and humility. He says “it is a real honor to be selected as the 2017 ALA Equality Award recipient by the American Library Association, the largest library association in the world. I am grateful for the recognition and would like to thank those who put forward my nomination. I am pleased to be in a position to make contributions around issues of diversity and equality that are important to my profession but also to society at large. I find these issues to be of the utmost importance, especially here at UC Merced where we are one of the most diverse campuses in the nation.”
The Equality Award, a framed citation of achievement and $1,000, will be presented to Li at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago on June 25, 2017.
Read the full press release here.
UC-eLinks has a new feature: the DirectLink sidebar. The sidebar appears on the right side of the screen while the full text appears on the left side of screen. CDL went live with the DirectLink sidebar on April 17, 2017.
The DirectLink sidebar includes new features for Library patrons. Users can directly link to articles more frequently, bypassing the full UC-eLinks menu, yet can return to the Full UC-eLinks through an included menu button. The sidebar can also be collapsed and re-expanded, dependent on the user’s preference. The DirectLink sidebar also is W3C AA compatible for accessibility.
For more information and screenshots of the new sidebar in both desktop and mobile formats, visit CDL’s News page.
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.
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 prints, negatives, transparencies, and posters. All items will be carefully examined to address any privacy concerns. The digital files created by this project will be disseminated widely through the California Digital Library through both Calisphere, operated by the University of California, and the Digital Public Library of America, which will have an AIDS history primary sources set.
Haipeng Li, UC Merced’s University Librarian has responded that "the UC Merced Library is very pleased to be partnering on this project, which builds upon our long-standing collaboration with UCSF Library to digitize rare and unique materials in the health sciences. Our students and researchers, especially those involved in UC Merced’s growing public health program, will benefit from wider access to the AIDS history materials and I am sure the experience and expertise of our staff will enable them to contribute significantly to the success of the project."
For more information on this important project, check out UCSF’s Archives and Special Collections blog.
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