The Library staff wishes all students good luck on final exams and projects. We invite you to stop by for coffee, hot chocolate, and cookies!
We’ll be serving up excellent noms on both Tuesday, December 10 at 4:00 pm and Wednesday, December 11 at 1:00pm across from our Services Desk on the Library’s 2nd floor. See you there!
The Library hosted a program last week with Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel’s biographer, Betty Blanks. A close friend and “surrogate daughter” of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Ms. Blanks shared a history with the poet as a child of Dust Bowl migrants.
“Wilma and I were like family. When I first met her, the sound of her voice was so familiar to me. I recognized the people in her poems. She spoke about back home with the same longing that I had always heard from the elders in my own family,” said Blanks. “I was born right here in the Valley, in Visalia. But I recognized Wilma’s longing for that old ‘home,’ because I always heard that same deep longing expressed by my own family.”
Her recent work, Pick Up Your Name and Write: The Life of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, begins with McDaniel’s move from Oklahoma to escape starvation during the Great Depression, and describes the “affliction” by which the poet felt compelled to express her acute observations and appreciation of life—writing almost daily. “She devoted her life to telling the story of her people,” said Blanks. “And I believe she thought their story was just as important to the world as Homer’s Odyssey.”
Ms. Blanks began working on McDaniel’s biography in 2019, after retiring from law practice. “When I began the research for this book, I was delighted to find that that van load of boxes we had had carted over from Wilma’s place in Tulare had been magically arranged into a very logical and accessible collection of information.”
UC Merced Library became the custodian of McDaniel’s literary archive in 2009, largely through the advocacy of the late Professor Jan Goggans, a member of UC Merced’s founding faculty.
“I have spent a lot of time in law libraries, but I had never before had any contact with a literary archive,” Blanks said. “Over the next four years, that would change drastically, and I came to have the greatest respect for literary archives and the people who run them.”
According to Blanks, McDaniel “chose UC Merced as the home of her official archive” because “she felt a real connection to this land.” Upon moving to California, McDaniel first lived in the Livingston area, in Merced County. Her new life in the San Joaquin Valley became the subject of her writing as much as she is honored and remembered as the “Okie Poet.”
Students, faculty, and members of the community attended the talk and also heard remarks from Lillian Vallee, a poet and local educator who served as trustee of McDaniel’s literary estate. The program concluded with a screening of the short film, Down an Old Road: the Poetic Life of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, by documentary filmmaker Chris Simon.
Author Betty Blanks (center), with University Librarian Haipeng Li (left) and Emily Lin, head of Archives & Special Collections (right)
We are kicking off the Carter Joseph Abrescy and Larry Kranich Library Award for Student Research Excellence for 2024-2025 with a call for applications.
The award recognizes undergraduate students who demonstrate effective use of UC Merced Library and information resources, as well as an understanding of the research process and growth in research practices.
Submissions are accepted through January 31, 2025 [UPDATE: the new deadline for submission is February 7, 2025]. Successful awardees with be recognized at a spring 2025 reception and will each receive a $500 award. Their work will also be featured in eScholarship.
Full application details, including eligibility criteria, are available at our award page.
Before the 2024 fall semester, we reported a 20% decrease in Library’s open hours from fall 2023 to fall 2024 due to a Library budget deficit for student employment.
We are happy to announce that Library hours will be fully restored to 2023-2024 levels in spring 2025 with funding from the Provost’s Office.
This return to 101 open hours per week has started with a restoration of Saturday hours from 10am to 6pm.
Our Library Hours for the remainder of the fall 2024 semester are as follows:
Monday, 7am to 10pm
Tuesday, 7am to 10pm
Wednesday, 7am to 10pm
Thursday, 7am to 10pm
Friday, 7am to 6pm
Saturdays, 10am to 6pm
Sundays, 12pm to 10pm
Exceptions: Closed for Holidays
The 1st floor Kolligian Library Lantern continues to be available to students 24/7.
For spring 2025, Sunday through Thursday hours will be extended to midnight.
Visit our Library Hours for each week’s schedule.
We're recruiting for a Technical Services Coordinator who will acquire, catalog, and process print and media and ensure that these materials are accessible in our online discovery tool.
The first review of applications starts November 15, 2024. For full details, view the job posting at UC Merced's Job Search.
We celebrated International Open Access Week with a reception co-sponsored with UC Merced’s Academic Personnel Office (APO) on Wednesday, October 23, 2024. Faculty and librarians attended and examples of local contributions to open scholarship were featured.
Prior to the event, 40+ individuals submitted over 50 examples of their open scholarship. These examples included open access articles, code/software, and projects. All open scholarship examples are viewable as a slidedeck or bibliography.
Many thanks to APO for highlighting faculty’s contributions to the advancement of open scholarship and partnering with the Library to host this event.
Elections are stressful and confusing. Before an election, people in the U.S. are bombarded by campaign ads and messages. We have to sift through tons of information daily and manage our emotions along the way. We may feel anxious about the possibility of our preferred candidate losing. We may feel confusion about what messages to trust or where to find reliable information. We may just feel overwhelmed by it all.
This panel highlights faculty research that can help us make sense of the current political environment. It will provide strategies for managing stress and coping with emotions, evaluating political rhetoric, navigating puzzling polarization, and sifting through the information landscape. We may not be able to eliminate negative feelings entirely, but this panel will give us some tools for staying well and keep the stress from taking over our everyday life.
Moderator: Sara Davidson Squibb - Associate University Librarian for Research & Engagement
Beginning at 5am Pacific Time on Saturday, October 12th, the Fulcrum platform will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance. The outage is expected to last approximately 8 hours and may affect access to ACLS Humanities Ebooks and University of Michigan Ebook collections. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope this interruption will create minimal disruption to our users’ research.
Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Tulare Poet Laureate, was the first woman in California to be honored with a Literary Landmark. Join us for a talk and reading by McDaniel’s longtime friend and biographer, Betty Blanks, in celebration of American Archives Month.
Known as “The Okie Poet,” Wilma McDaniel moved to the San Joaquin Valley in the 1930s Dust Bowl migration. She was a prolific writer who captured the migrant experience and the everyday lives of working people through her poetry. Betty's recent work, Pick Up Your Name and Write: The Life of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel is a deeply researched narrative of the poet’s life that incorporates collected memories from Wilma's circle of friends as well as reflections on her own family history, which in many ways mirrored Wilma's. She will read selections of Wilma's poetry, consider the role of small presses in the Valley, and discuss her literary legacy. UC Merced Library Archives & Special Collections holds the Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel papers.
Betty Blanks was born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley and practiced law in Visalia, California for over thirty years. Her relationship with Wilma during the last 14 years of the poet's life was deeply personal. After retiring from her law practice, she was encouraged by others close to Wilma to tell her story. She hopes new readers will find the same inspiration she found in Wilma's writing.
We will have a raffle during the event to give away copies of the book.
Event Time: 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Event Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Event Location: Kolligian Library Building, KL 232
Registration is encouraged as seating is limited. Light refreshments provided. Visitor parking is in the Bellevue Lot.
Please join us for an author talk featuring Associate Teaching Professor in Global Arts, Media & Writing Studies Samantha Tetangco Ocena.
This talk will discuss and share poems from Samantha Tetangco Ocena’s recent book, Hope You Blend In: Studies in Color & Light. In her powerful debut collection, Tetangco Ocena writes from the perspective of a “queer person of color” where the hope of her title is hope of survival, “for the promise / of home” despite knowing that like an invasive plant species, “certain visitors are not welcome here.” Tetangco Ocena’s poems explore life in America and how we might care for one another enough to become whole.
Event Time: Noon - 1pm
Event Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Event Location: Kolligian Library Building, KL 232
Registration is encouraged as seating is limited. Light refreshments provided. We will have a giveaway of a few copies of the book during the event.
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