Never miss a library workshop or event by signing up for our mailing list distributed monthly.
Brian Quigley
Head, EPS Division;
Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science
Kristen Greenland
Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Physics, and Astronomy
Lisa Ngo
Engineering
Susan Powell
Maps, GIS, and Geography
Samantha Teplitzky
Earth Science and Open Science
steplitz@berkeley.edu
Please see Library Services and Resources During COVID-19 for the latest information on services during the pandemic.
Starting on August 25th:
Having been closed for a year and a half, many of our student employees have graduated or moved on to other jobs. We are having to rebuild and retrain our student workforce. As a result, we will open with shorter hours on August 25, then expand to our full Fall hours on September 22. We have amazing student employees, but they are still learning. Thanks for your patience!
UC Library Search is here!
UC Library Search is your all-in-one platform for your library account and search and discovery, replacing OskiCat, Melvyl, and Start Your Search. Using UC Library Search, you can explore the UC Berkeley Library collections and, at the same time, the collections of libraries across the state of California and the world. You’ll be able to access materials from all 10 UC libraries, UC’s two off-campus storage complexes (the Northern Regional Library Facility, NRLF, and the Southern Regional Library Facility, SRLF), and collections worldwide.
Expanded standards access
Response from faculty and researchers to our BSI Standards Pilot was overwhelmingly positive, and we are happy to announce this expanded access as a regular service to our faculty, researchers and graduate students. BSI (British Standards Institute) adopts approximately 75% of ISO standards as well as some IEC standards, providing an affordable way to obtain the documents you need for your work, and are made available through the Techstreet platform. Requests can be made through the Engineering Library or by contacting Lisa Ngo (lngo@berkeley.edu). Information on accessing standards on other platforms can be found on our library guide to standards.
ASCE legacy journal archive
We now have online access to the complete archive of American Society of Civil Engineers journals from 1872-1996 trough the ASCE Library.
IEEE English for Technical Professionals
Replacing IEEE English for Engineers, this online interactive course helps students to advance their technical communication skills when speaking, reading, and writing English.
Purchase Recommendation - we welcome your suggestions! Please contact your librarian or fill out the purchase recommendation form if you would like to suggest that we purchase a journal or book for the collection.
During the Spring semester, we conducted a survey of graduate students, faculty, postdocs, and other academic staff across the sciences to learn about their use of citation management and writing tools. We received 375 responses -- thank you to all who completed it!
While there was some variation among departments, the most preferred tools for managing citations in the sciences in order of popularity were Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, and BibTeX. Respondents valued citation management tools most for the following features: generating citations and bibliographies in a variety of styles, organizing references in folders, and storing PDF files. For collaborative writing, most respondents preferred Google Docs followed by Overleaf and Microsoft Word.
The libraries continue to provide support for tools such as Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, and Overleaf through workshops and consultations. We also maintain subscriptions to Mendeley, Overleaf, and RefWorks to provide access to premium features. Check out our workshops, guides, and vOLT for more information and reach out to your subject librarian or epslibs@berkeley.edu if you have questions.
To help meet the needs of researchers and students in a primarily remote environment, we built a Jupyter book that includes virtual tutorials on our most requested course materials. Check out the virtual Online Library Tutorials (vOLT) Jupyter book to learn more about searching, organizing, and writing tools.
Find the materials from our Fall LaTeX workshops here:
https://eps-libraries-berkeley.github.io/volt/LaTeX/latex_workshop.html
| Date | Time | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thu. 8/26 | 4 PM | Introduction to LaTeX | Zoom; Register |
| 9/15, 10/6, 11/3, 12/1 | 4 PM | ReproducibiliTea |
Zoom; Register |
| Wed. 9/1 | 11 AM - Noon | GIS & Mapping: Where to Start |
Zoom; Register |
| Wed. 9/8 | 4 PM | Introduction to LaTeX | Zoom; Register |
| Tues. 9/14 | 11 AM - Noon | GIS & Mapping: Where to Start |
Zoom; Register |
| Wed. 9/29 | 11 AM - 12:30 PM | Creating Web Maps with ArcGIS Online |
Zoom; Register |
Please visit the Library Workshops Calendar to register and view additional workshops.
Our second annual Student Mapmaking Contest will take place this Spring. Submissions open on March 1! Check out last year's winners, include UC Berkeley's Kenji A. at https://exhibits.lib.berkeley.edu/spotlight/mapthebay/feature/map-contest-2021
The Inclusive Excellence Collection at the Engineering Library is a collaboration between the College of Engineering and the Kresge Engineering Library. The collection consists of physical books as well as electronic books and other electronic resources. Although some books are housed in the engineering library, this resource is for the entire campus. The collection is meant to be dynamic and will grow over time.
This collection was created by the College of Engineering's Director of Community Engagement & Inclusive Practices Fatima Alleyne, Head of Engineering & Physical Sciences collections Brian Quigley and Engineering Librarian Lisa Ngo.
Access the collection here: https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/EngineeringLibraryDEI
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Following the Engineering Library's lead, a similar effort was created in partnership with the Earth & Planetary Science Department and the Earth Sciences and Map Library. This guide stems from a Call to Action by Earth & Planetary Science graduate students and was co-created by Bonita Dyess and Sam Teplitzky from the library, and Tyler Cadena and Michelle Devoe from the EPS department.
The guide can be found here: https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/geo_dei
Bay Area Open Science Group
Are you interested in making your research more openly available? Want to learn about open science tools and platforms that can make your research more effective and reproducible? The Bay Area Open Science Group is intended to bring together students, faculty, and staff from the Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF communities to learn about open science, discuss the application of open science practices in a research context, and meet other members of the community who are interested in (or already are) incorporating open science practices into their work.
Meetings:
We meet on the 4th Tuesday of the month from 2-3pm via Zoom. All are welcome to attend and join the conversation!
Dates for 2021-2022:
Open peer review is the least practiced aspect of open science. Yet it may teach us a lot about how manuscripts can change from their submitted version to their (peer-revied) published version of record. Mario Malicki will give an overview of 21 studies that analysed manuscript changes and his own study in which I analysed changes between 121 epidemiology preprints and
their subsequent published versions. Finally, he will present a call for declaring changes to manuscripts with each published paper.
Milo Johnson (https://miloswebsite.com/, starting a post-doc in the Koskella Lab at UC Berkeley this June)
The linear format of scientific papers is an entrenched, constrained result of history that holds back efficient and effective transmission of information between scientists. Science requires depth, but the reality is that the majority of readers don’t care about the majority of things in a paper. And we know it! At conferences, scientists give 5-minute talks at poster sessions that effectively communicate their work to 95% of their audience, and the other 5% can ask follow-up questions about the details. Can we design a way to write scientific content in a similar way, such that the details are accessible behind a concise narrative? I'll present this idea along with some preliminary technical explorations, and I'll invite y'all to brainstorm with me about how we can make tools to improve communication between scientists!
April 26, 2022
Gather around virtually with colleagues at Stanford and Berkeley for a presentation on The COVID Tracking Project by Kevin Miller, a former team lead with the project who is archiving the project's data and collections for the UCSF Archives & Special Collections. The project was a volunteer-run, community-science program that became a critical source of national pandemic data accidentally and overnight. He will discuss how it was built, and the challenges of archiving such a massive, born-digital collection.
May 24, 2022
Join us in May as we get together virtually with colleagues at UCSF and Stanford to hear from the fledgling Open Source Science at Berkeley student organization. They will be introducing their group and seeking feedback for a planned 1-unit course on developing open-source scientific software. Rachel Clune, Orion Cohen, Tarini Hardikar, and Connie Robinson are chemistry graduate students at UC Berkeley. They share an interest in improving the scientific software ecosystem and teaching computational skills to the Berkeley community
Check out our website (https://bayareaopensciencegroup.github.io/) to get on our mailing list, or let us know if you want to present!
Susan co-authored an article with UC Berkeley Map Metadata & Curatorial Specialist Heiko Mühr that explores the provenance of maps within the Library's German World War II Captured Maps collection: Powell, S. & Mühr, H. (2020). Capturing the Complex Histories of German World War II Captured Maps. Journal of Map & Geography Libraries, 16(2), 166-193. https://doi.org/10.1080/15420353.2021.1922569 Additionally, a paper that Susan co-authored was selected as best paper of the year for Volume 15 of the Journal of Map & Geography Libraries: White, P. & Powell, S. (2019). Code-literacy for GIS librarians: a discussion of languages, use cases, and competencies. Journal of Map & Geography Libraries 15(1), 45–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/15420353.2019.1660754
Sam moderated the panel Open access investment at the local level: Sharing diverse tactics to improve access & affordability at ACRL in April 2021, along with Scholarly Communications and Copyright Librarian, Tim Vollmer; Sharla Lair, Senior Strategist, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Initiatives at LYRASIS;Tom Narock, Assistant Professor of Data Science at Goucher College; and Justin Gonder, Senior Product Manager, Publishing, California Digital Library. Sam also co-authored the article "Introducing Reproducibility to Citation Analysis: a Case Study in the Earth Sciences" in the Journal of eScience Librarianship (10.7191/jeslib.2021.1194).
As a member of the ACRL Research Planning & Review Committee, Brian contributed to the Association of College & Research Libraries' 2021 Environmental Scan. The report "provides a scan of higher education, detailing the current environment and its anticipated impact on libraries."
Kristen helped plan the first Being Human in STEM National Conference in June. This initiative started as a course at Amherst College, and has developed into a broad network of educators invested in diversity and inclusion in STEM. She also co-authored an article about the start of the initiative: Bunnell, S., Lyster, M., Greenland, K., Mayer, G., Gardner, K., Leise, T., Kristensen, T., Ryan, E. D., Ampiah-Bonney, R., & Jaswal, S. S. (2021). From protest to progress through partnership with students: Being human in STEM (HSTEM). International Journal for Students As Partners, 5(1), 26–56. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v5i1.4243 The Being Human in STEM course empowers students to investigate issues of diversity in STEM through academic inquiry and project-based community engagement, and the course has been implemented at over a dozen institutions.