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Thu, February 6, 2025 6:00 AM
Feb 6, 2025: My ILL Requests users may be encountering a login error. UCM patrons should change their home campus to 'xCDL' to access their account while the issue is being resolved.
Feb 6, 2025: My ILL Requests users may be encountering a login error. UCM patrons should change their home campus to 'xCDL' to access their account while the issue is being resolved.
Please join us for an author talk featuring Assistant Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Kit Myers.
In this talk, Dr. Myers will discuss his new book, The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States. The book examines narratives surrounding adoption, and challenges the idea that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents – a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions.
Event Time: 10:30am -- Noon
Event Date: Wednesday, February 5, 2025
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.
UC Merced librarians offer instruction sessions to support undergraduate and graduate students in their completion of course assignments requiring library and information/data research skills. We offer sessions in-person and online options depending on your course delivery mode.
Please submit Spring 2025 requests through the online instruction request form. We appreciate receiving requests by Friday, January 24th for planning our semester. We are also happy to consult prior to your instruction request regarding desired learning objectives.
Visit the Library Instruction Services landing page for more resources including:
We look forward to working with you to increase students’ ability to strategically navigate, critically evaluate, and ethically use information!
Email us with any questions library@ucmerced.edu or contact your Library Liaison with questions.
UC Merced Library is pleased to announce the appointment of Paulina Allende to the position of Learning Services Coordinator in the Research & Learning Services unit. She is an alum of UC Merced where she earned a bachelor’s in English literature and cultures with a minor in writing.
Paulina brings several years of teaching experience in local Merced and Atwater schools and abroad. She has a master’s degree in comparative literature and a post graduate certificate in education. In addition, she has diverse work and leadership experience. Her wide skillset will be valuable across all the areas of responsibility of the LSC position.
In this new role, Paulina will be working closely with the instruction librarians to support student success and foster information literacy and research skills, while also managing instructional materials and supporting the Library’s assessment and communication efforts around instruction, reference, and outreach services.
Amidst the end-of-semester events and onboarding, Paulina took some time to share with us:
I was drawn to this position because it offers a unique blend of instruction, learning support, creativity, and analysis, all of which align with my skill set and professional interests. The opportunity to collaborate closely with colleagues in the Research & Learning Services (R&LS) unit is particularly appealing to me as well. I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to enhancing students’ information literacy and supporting their academic success. It is rewarding to know that my work could have a direct impact on improving library services for students, and I appreciate the opportunity to be part of an organization that values continuous improvement.
I am particularly interested in exploring innovative ways to deliver library instruction both in-person and online. I am excited to oversee online tools like Springshare LibApps and other instructional platforms. I hope to be able to improve user experience all around by working with the team to maximize their potential. One of my goals is to aid in the promotion of library services, and events, ensuring that students, faculty, and the community are aware of the full range of library services available to them. Overall, I am looking forward to continuing learning from my colleagues while contributing to the Library’s success.
UC Merced provided me with a wonderful foundation to grow both professionally and personally. My professors and advisors supported me and guided me to a path that has led to many wonderful places that were beyond my aspirations. I was always so inspired by those around me, and as an immigrant, the supportive environment on campus really fostered my academic growth and made me feel like I belonged.
One of my favorite things about Merced is the unique and vibrant community that makes it such a wonderful place to live. Maybe not one of the best kept secrets, but something that is surprising is how Merced has managed to keep a small-town feel even as it has grown and expanded. I really enjoy seeing familiar faces around town, and one of my favorite things about meeting new people in town is that eventually you find out how you are already connected through a mutual friend, acquaintance, or relative.
Travel has had the most significant impact on my life. From being an immigrant to this country to studying and living abroad, travel and the privilege of meeting new people and exploring unfamiliar places is something that has allowed me to view the world with a completely unique perspective. I have lived and studied in five countries, traveled to 32 countries across five continents, and I look forward to continuing to travel and be humbled by the beauty of all that the world has to offer.
With the Journal Open Access Lookup Tool (JOLT), UC authors can search for a journal title to determine if there is full open access fee coverage or a discount. JOLT is intended to make open access publishing support for UC authors easier to surface. To date, Open Access Publishing Agreements and Discounts information has been available at the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC).
The California Digital Library (CDL) is actively seeking feedback on JOLT to increase its usefulness to authors. Email openaccessinquiries@ucop.edu with your suggestions.
UC Merced Newsroom highlights an event sponsored by the UC Merced Library, Department of Political Science, Center for Analytic Political Engagement (CAPE) and Health Promotion.
A group of experts highlighted their research to help make sense of the current political environment and offer strategies for managing stress and coping with emotions, evaluating political rhetoric, navigating polarization, and sifting through the information landscape.
Read the full article (01 Nov. 2024).
Beginning Saturday, November 30th at 8pm through Sunday, December 1st at 5am, the Fulcrum platform will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance. The outage 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. 
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.
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