On Saturday, February 4th at 9pm to Sunday, February 5th at 5am PST, OCLC will be performing systems maintenance which will 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.
Beginning Saturday, January 28th at 11pm through Sunday, January 29th at 5:30am PST, OCLC will be performing systems maintenance. During some or all of this time frame, online catalog services may be unavailable to our patrons. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope this interruption will create minimal disruption to our users’ research.
My name is Lisa Vallen, I am the UC Cooperative Extension Project Archivist. I realize that not everyone is familiar with Cooperative Extension, so for this first post I’m going fill everyone in on the who, what, when, where and why of this special project!
In 2015, the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the UC Merced campus signed a memorandum of understanding to launch the first phase of a project to preserve the history of the UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE). The Library’s Digital Assets unit is leading the project and I began my job as the project archivist in August 2016.
I have my Masters of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a concentration in Special Collections and Archives. While at UIUC, I worked in both Preservation and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I graduated from Lake Forest College with a BA in Art History and Politics.
The UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE) was established in 1914 by the passage of the Smith-Lever Act with the purpose to develop and provide science-based information around agriculture, youth development and natural resources to local audiences. This was done by establishing a Cooperative Extension office in almost every county in California! UCCE is still active today, with 57 local offices throughout California. Their goal to serve as a “bridge between local issues and the power of UC research” has not changed. If you are interested in a more in-depth look at the history of UCCE, these articles by Rose Hayden-Smith here and here are a great place to start.
Cooperative Extension has been active in California for over 100 years and our belief is that these county offices hold a cache of information that can be extremely useful to researchers and the public. Currently, these materials are not very accessible to researchers and the public, as there is no inventory or organizational scheme. In this first year, while we are in our pilot program stage, we are focusing on three county offices: Merced, Ventura, and Humboldt. Our goal for this year is to create an inventory for the three offices, assess and identify materials of historical value, preserve and organize historical materials, and make these materials accessible to researchers and the public.
The county offices hold valuable materials that highlight the work and research done by the farm advisors. These materials run the gamut from annual reports between 1915-1970, research reports and trial data, to 4-H scrapbooks and photographs. These materials also cover a wide range of subjects from water rights and the development of irrigation districts, climate data, pest management, a wide variety of information about crops and trees, to youth development and nutrition. Our job is to ensure that the information contained within these offices will not be lost and will be preserved for future generations of researchers.
The first half of this year we will finish our inventory at the Ventura County Cooperative Extension office and begin organizing and re-housing materials from the Merced and Ventura county offices. I will also be making a trip up to the Humboldt County office to begin inventorying their materials.
I’ll be posting a new blog post once a month with updates on the project progress. You may learn about my trip to one of the county offices, get behind-the-scenes glimpses into our work and progress, or the 4-1-1 on interesting material that we have uncovered.
Thanks to the contributions UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Los Angeles, UC Merced, and UC Santa Cruz, the earliest part of the Tōyō Keizai Digital Archives is now available to users of all ten campuses and UCOP through JapanKnowledge.
Tōyō Keizai Shinpō (1895-1960)/Shūkan Tōyō Keizai (1961-present) is a Japanese economic journal, and Toyo Keizai Digital Archives: Unit One offers online access to this journal from 1895 to 1945, including annual publication of Tōyō Keizai Shinpō Keizai Nenkan (1917-1944; with 1936 and 1939-1940 issues missing) as well. The combined contents cover nearly 2,300 volumes in 170,000 pages in original print.
More information can be found at http://japanknowledge.com/contents/toyokeizai/index.html. Please note there is a limit of 4 simultaneous users; if denied access, try again later.
On Saturday, January 28th, ProQuest will be upgrading its systems infrastructure. The maintenance window is scheduled to begin at 7:00 PM Pacific Time and will last for eight (8) hours. This may impact some databases on the ProQuest platform, such as RefWorks and ProQuest Congressional, which may not be available during this time. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope this interruption will create minimal disruption to our users’ research.
Taylor & Francis Online will be unavailable Wednesday, January 25th from 3pm to 7pm PST due to scheduled database maintenance. Access to T&F journals may be unavailable during this time. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope this interruption will create minimal disruption to our users’ research.
On Wednesday, January 18th from 6pm to 7:30pm PST, OCLC will be performing systems maintenance which may briefly 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.
Deputy University Librarian, Donald Barclay, notes that libraries are not new to teaching students how to navigate information but highlights that the information environment is increasingly complex due to factors such as fake journals and “the hyper partisan noise of social media”. Information literacy is nuanced and the information literacy challenge requires the collaboration of librarians, faculty and administrators. Read the full article at The Conversation.
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