Library News for the Faculty

Recent Acquisitions Throughout the Library

Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library

The online tool DynaMed summarizes evidence for health care professionals and can help guide clinical decisions. Nearly two thousand topics are covered, each organized into clinically relevant sections. Five hundred journals and reviewing sources are monitored, and new evidence is integrated into the summaries daily.

In response to faculty requests, the Biomedical and Science and Engineering libraries has purchased a subscription to EcoSal. This comprehensive online resource is a continually updated version of the classic title Escherichia coli and Salmonella: Cellular and Molecular Biology. An archive of the entire corpus of knowledge on the enteric bacterial cell, EcoSal contains several hundred modules of information and interpretation, including extensive tabular and pictorial presentations and links to active databases of primary research information.

Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History and Special Collections

In conjunction with an exhibit for the recent conference "The Architecture of Healing," History and Special Collections purchased New Kochbüch, für die Krancken: wie mann krancker Personen, in mancherley Fehl un[d] Gebrechen des Leibs pflegen, mit Zürichtung und Kochung viler nützlicher gesunder Speisz, Getränck, und allen eusserlichen dingen warten sol ... (Franckfurt am Meyn, 1545) by Walther Hermann Ryff (d. 1548), a noted physician and surgeon in Strasbourg.

A first edition of a valuable treatise on the proper diet for invalids, it is one of the first books about cooking for the sick and an important early source about beneficial as well as harmful food and drink for the infirm. Printed in red and black, the elaborate woodcut depicts a hospital kitchen with cooking area, patients in sick rooms, and a table being set.

Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library

2005 nian 1% ren kou chou yang diao cha zi liao [The One Percent Population Sample Survey Data of 2005] (Beijing: Guo jia tong ji ju, 2007) covers all provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in mainland China as of midnight on November 1, 2005. This multivolume set provides essential primary research data for scholars in Chinese demographic and socio-economic studies and social sciences.

2004 nian jing ji pu cha nian jian [The Yearbooks of 2004 Economic Census] (Beijing: Zhongguo tong ji chu ban she, 2007) summarize the first national economic census ordered by the China's State Council. The contents cover 2004 and are based on provinces and cities. The multivolume set will be useful to students of Chinese economics and social sciences.

The donation of the Miriam Silverberg Collection adds more than twelve hundred volumes of Japanese books that originally belonged to Professor Silverberg. Silverberg retired from the UCLA Department of History in 2006; her collection reflects her wide range of reading from ephemeral to canonical sources, with a concentration on Japanese feminism, colonialism, popular and media cultures, and modern literature.

Charles E. Young Research Library

The Research Library purchased the first four volumes of the projected twelve-volume Eighteenth-Century British Midwifery (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007). The set contains facsimiles of primary texts on eighteenth-century midwifery and childbirth, including pamphlets, treatises, lectures for midwifery students, texts on the establishment of lying-in hospitals, and catalogues of obstetrical apparatuses collected by male-midwives.

Works from popular culture include advertisements for midwives' services, medicinal cures, and monster births; texts on murderous female midwives and lewd male midwives; and the 1726-27 correspondence on the 'rabbit-breeder' Mary Toft. The interdisciplinary resource will be of interest to scholars of history, history of medicine, women's studies, and the eighteenth century.

Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections

The department received a remarkable set of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts from the collection of Farley P. Katz and M. Carolyn Fuentes; it represents the first part of a larger collection they intend to give over the next several years. The documents primarily relate to financial transactions and include several letters from Cosimo de Medici.

The department purchased three illuminated manuscripts. Noted Offices for Franciscan Nuns (North Germany, c. 1550) is a hybrid, Latin-and-German manuscript that contains pasted-in, hand-colored engravings, which present an iconography of female Franciscans. Carmen in laudem Petri Mocenigi (Veneto, c. 1474-76) by Bartolomeo Pagello, which exists in only one other copy, is a versified panegyric about Doge Pietro Mocenigo dedicated to the doge's ten-year-old son. Soliloquium animae ad Deum... (Veneto, c. 1450-60) by Pseudo-Augustinus is an illuminated manuscript of the author's Soliloquies, the last of which exists in only one other manuscript.

The department also acquired a number of major rare books. The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608: A Facsimile of Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.232 (Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007) reproduces Thomas Trevelyon's manuscript miscellany of images, verse, mottoes, and prognostications from 1608, which provide a window into everyday life England in the Elizabethan and Stuart eras.

Joining the department's noted Aldine collection is Universales Institutiones ad Hominum Perfectionem; Quatenus Industria Parari Potest (Venice, 1581). Containing a hand-painted frontispiece in a contemporary hand, this volume is the first edition of a philosophical treatise on the human mind and reason by Filippo Mocenigo, the Archbishop of Nicosia, Cyprus. Mocenigo discusses logic and dialectics as well as philology, education, human relationships, the senses, odors, and colors.

Science and Engineering Library

In addition to EcoSal, described in the Biomedical Library section, the Science and Engineering Library has acquired two major, multi-volume works.

Geophysics, or the physics of the Earth, is an interdisciplinary science that builds on physics, mathematics, geology, astronomy, and other disciplines to study the Earth by measuring the physical consequences of its presence and activity. The ten-volume Treatise on Geophysics discusses the atmosphere, ocean, and plasmasphere of the Earth and their effects on the solid planet; the set also contains a volume on the solar system's terrestrial planets.

The primary purpose of sol-gel science and technology is to produce active and non-active optical, electronic, chemical, sensor, bio- and structural materials, making sol-gel science and technology relevant to a range of manufacturing industries. Volume one of the three-part Handbook of Sol-Gel Science and Technology is devoted to general aspects of processing, including newly developed materials. The second volume considers such topics as determination of structure by NMR, determination of microstructure of oxide gels, measurements of rheological properties, and the role of characterization in nanotechnologies. Volume three covers subjects including planar waveguides prepared by sol-gel method; films with micropatterns and two-dimensional photonic crystals; and the application of sol-gel method to the formation of ferroelectric, photocatalytic, and bioactive coating films.