News

Student Book Collection Competition Offers $2600+ in Prizes

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Robert B. and Blanche Campbell Student Book Collection Competition, among the oldest competitions of its kind in the country and one of the most distinguished. UCLA student book collectors, both graduate and undergraduate, are invited to submit their collections for judging and the chance to win awards ranging from $150 to $500.

Applications are due by April 23, 2008. Awards will be announced at a ceremony in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, May 7, 2008.

Further details are available on the Campbell Competition Web pages.

Library Moves to BruinCard System for Self-Service Copying and Printing

The UCLA Library has replaced the previous system used for self-service copying and printing with the UCLA BruinCard system.  UCLA students, faculty, and staff will now use their BruinCards to pay for these services, and all other library visitors can purchase a visitor BruinCard that also enables them to make purchases at other campus locations and at more than twenty businesses in Westwood.

Further details are available on the Library's self-service copying and printing Web pages and on an information sheet available in downloadable Adobe PDF format.

Library Receives NEH Grant for Near Eastern Manuscripts Project

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded the Library a grant for a project to catalog, digitize, and provide online access to the Caro Minasian Collection of Near Eastern manuscripts. The collection forms a rich repository of Islamic learning and contains more than fifteen hundred manuscripts in Arabic and Persian dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries on astronomy, government, history, language and grammar, law, literature, philosophy, religious practice, and science.

The grant, in the amount of $346,117, was awarded as part of the NEH Preservation and Access program, which supports efforts to preserve and provide intellectual access to humanities collections. These collections may include books, journals, newspapers, manuscript and archival materials, maps, still and moving images, sound recordings, and objects of art and material culture.

The project has four components, the first of which will involve creating metadata records for all works in the collection. These records will form the basis for traditional catalog records, facilitate sharing data and image files, and allow for annotation, transcription, and other scholarly activities.

The second component will entail digitizing more than three hundred of the most significant manuscripts in the collection, which, together with those digitized previously, will create a collection of 470 digitized manuscripts, totaling approximately 92,000 pages.

The third component will be to create a search-and-retrieval system that supports discovery, display, and navigation by users in English, as well as Arabic and Persian, the principal vernacular languages represented in the collection. Future plans include development of a virtual research environment in which scholars can manipulate, annotate, transcribe, and share manuscripts and information about the manuscripts in non-Roman scripts and which also would allow these scholarly activities to be captured, preserved, and made available for ongoing exchange.

For the final component, project managers will meet with scholars, archivists, and librarians from other institutions with major Near Eastern manuscript collections to plan a service to provide access to Near Eastern manuscript collections worldwide.

Collection of International AIDS Posters Available Online

The UCLA Library launched an online collection of more than six hundred AIDS posters from countries around the world on Friday, December 1, 2006, in conjunction with World AIDS Day.

The posters were issued by a variety of institutions and organizations to educate and warn people about AIDS and to offer advice and information in visual form. Some are more blunt and graphic than others, and they come in many styles.

The posters come from forty-four countries, including Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Costa Rica, France, Germany, India, Japan, Luxembourg, Martinique, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Tahiti, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The physical collection is held in the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History and Special Collections.

Video and Materials from Faculty Symposium Available Online

Streamed video and other materials from the November 2005 symposium  "Managing Intellectual Property: What Faculty Need to Know to Publish and Teach in the Digital Age" are now available online through the symposium Web site.  The videos include the keynote address, "Copyright Myths and Realities," by James Hilton and talks by Gary E. Strong and Daniel Greenstein.  Also available are PDF versions of Strong's remarks, Hilton's and Greenstein's PowerPoint presentations, and handouts on topics including authors' agreements, open-access journals, keeping and sharing course materials, and the California Digital Library's eScholarship Repository.