The UCR Library is pleased to announce that Sandy Enriquez has joined our team as the Special Collections Public Services, Outreach & Community Engagement Librarian.

She will be reporting to Cherry Williams, Director of Distinctive Collections.

Sandy earned her MA in Latin American Studies at New York University and her MLIS from Long Island University.

Most recently, Sandy served as a Collections Assistant at New York University’s Bobst Library.

Please join us in welcoming Sandy to the library!

Camille Mahant joined the UCR Library team on Monday, July 18, 2016, as a Financial and Administrative Analyst.

Camille's key responsibilities are to provide financial, budgetary, analytical and administrative support to the Administration of the University Library. Camille brings five years of experience as a financial analyst within the University of California-Riverside’s Business and Administrative Services unit. Her prior background includes public agency finance and healthcare planning and finance.

Camille earned her BS in cell biology from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, and her MBA from California State University - Fullerton.

First Klein Librarian raising profile of Eaton Collection

Though only in her first month at the UCR Library, JJ Jacobson is already filled with ideas, energy, and ambition. As the inaugural Jay Kay and Doris Klein Science Fiction Librarian, she manages and curates the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy – the largest publicly-accessible collection of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and utopian literature in the world.

Jacobson brings a broad range of experience to the Eaton Collection. Once a restaurant owner, chef, baker, and then sourdough consultant, the California native was drawn to library and information school by her interest in how people talk about and engage with what they cook and eat.

University of Michigan provided Jacobson with her foundational education in library and information science, and sparked a passion in her to make the world a better place by bringing together people, information, and technology.

Growing up at Renaissance Faires, her interest in the “history of everyday life” stimulated Jacobson’s personal passion for living history — similar to historical re-enactment, but with less focus on combat and more on the daily activities of a certain period — and alternate history, a genre of fiction in which history unfolds differently from reality. This led her to experiment with virtual worlds. Specifically, Jacobson became deeply involved in Second Life in a unique way that mirrored, and later reinforced, her career: she became a librarian.
 
With sponsorship from another Second Life Resident, Jacobson built Caledon Library, pictured above. It has since grown into an entire system of virtual library branches. "Residents moved to Caledon because of the library," she boasted. Jacobson would later develop kits for others to build and manage their own libraries in Second Life. Real-life libraries also established presences in Second Life.

Reading, Jacobson says, is a prevalent hobby in her family. Her father was a fan of science fiction in its golden age, and she and her brother were both avid readers, constantly marveling at the 8-foot shelf of paperbacks in her father’s personal collection.

Jacobson’s goal is to leverage the ever-broadening interest in the “Eatonverse” genres to build a deeper understanding of the collection. By drawing on the UCR community’s enthusiasm for these genres across formats and uses, she aims to maintain Eaton’s international prestige while positioning it as a leader in the developing ecosystem of similar collections across the world.

The UCR Library offers the Kanopy video streaming service to support the research and teaching needs of UC Riverside faculty and students.

Kanopy has thousands of films and educational videos available for research or classroom use.

Previously, listings for individual films were available in the UCR catalog. Those listings have now been moved entirely to the Kanopy platform so that library users will have access to the most up-to-date menu of films.

While it now takes one more click to complete a search, the results should yield a more extensive collection, increasing efficiency for library users. In the past, the library would receive catalog updates only once per quarter, whereas Kanopy updates their own website database each week.

The easiest way to use Kanopy now is to visit: ucr.kanopystreaming.com. 

On campus, that link will allow UCR Library users to search and begin watching films right away. Patrons who access Kanopy from an off-campus location will first need to sign in through the VPN.

“This is a huge improvement because now our patrons will be able to know everything that’s available,” explained Carla Arbagey, UCR Library’s Collection Strategist for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM).

“Kanopy is a wonderful resource for using streaming video in the classroom because the videos all have non-profit screening rights, so you can screen them and show them to a large class without worrying about paying for performance fees,” Arbagey added. “It supports different styles of learning because of the films’ visual and auditory nature, and the wide variety of films offered means that you can find something for every discipline.”

Our Jay Kay and Doris Klein Librarian for Science Fiction, JJ Jacobson recently contributed a chapter to a book titled, Teaching and Learning in Virtual Environments: Archives, Museums, and Libraries.

JJ’s chapter, Crowdsourcing the Fictive Experience: Virtual-World Emergent Narrative from a Collections Perspective, is about the practice of Immersive Interactive Improvisatory Narrative, or IIIN.

“It’s a very common feature of virtual worlds of all kinds,” JJ explained. “IIIN is a modality of storytelling. There’s role-play, sometimes recreational, sometimes tied to history, as well as re-enactment and historical interpretation. It’s connected to speculative literature because many of these narrative interactions exist in a context that is speculative – alternate history, for instance – or occasions for this kind of narrative are in a context that is related to or is directly the speculative or fantastical imagination.”

IIIN can be traced to modern improvisatory theater forms, JJ explained, such as the Renaissance Faire; and it is often found in Civil War and similar reenactments, which exist to explore history and educate participants as well as audiences. “It’s an interesting question to compare those to the evolution of community theater, too” she continued. “All of these things exist in the real world, but with some specific entertainment or educational mission. One of the questions we barely touched on was: ‘When did IIIN start to become pure recreation?’”

JJ’s chapter is the result of three distinct discussions on the topic of IIIN. JJ spoke with an expert on living history in museums and places like Plimoth Plantation, a special collections librarian from a well-respected institution, and a professional historical interpreter who plays Mildred Cecil, Lady Burleigh, wife of Lord Burleigh, chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth I.

“These conversations opened up some questions worth thinking about, questions that nobody else seems to be writing about, but that people within the reenactment and historical recreation and virtual worlds talk about all the time,” JJ said. “We talked about the phenomenon and why someone might study it, what a research collection might look like.”

To date, JJ has not seen much scholarly writing on this topic, especially not with the same emphasis.

According to JJ, some questions that could inspire scholarly research on the subject of IIIN might include:

• What kind of activity is it, exactly?
• If we trace it back to various kinds of plays or theater, is that sufficient?
• What are we doing in an historical enactment, with its factual constraints?
• If a library were to collect examples of it, what kinds of research might that support?
• What kind of researchers might use them?
• What would a collection surround them with as secondary source material?

“The Eaton Collection is largely a collection of texts and other narrative forms, but stories that are already done and finished are not the only occasion for the fantastical imagination to work,” JJ explained. “So here is a very interesting way of creating something that could easily be subject matter in the Eaton Collection. If people have made up their own country and they act the story together and build it up as they go, that’s still the kind of thing we collect. Those kinds of worlds, those kinds of subjects are intensely interesting to me. Even though you won’t find those exact worlds in the Eaton Collection, you’ll find many like them in motivation, structure, and so on.”

The book was published by Libraries Unlimited in 2016 and is now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other retailers.

UCR Library is delighted to announce that Raul Aguilera has joined the UCR Library team effective today, March 6, 2017 as our Access Services Desk Assistant - Rivera.

Raul will be located in Circulation/Course Reserves on the first floor of the Rivera Library, reporting to Leslie Settle, Circulation Services Desk Supervisor.

Raul earned his BA in English from UC Riverside.

Most recently, Raul served as the Library Assistant 3 at the University of California, Irvine. Raul also has experience working with the UCR Library in his role as an Affiliate - Library Assistant 3 at the Orbach Science Library.   

UCR Library is pleased to inform you that Juancarlos Moran has joined the Library as a Financial Services Analyst 2.

He is assigned to the Planning and Budget Office in Library Administration.

Juancarlos has worked on campus as an affiliate in various departments over the past several months. He is a UCR graduate and earned a BS in Business with a finance concentration.

His duties and responsibilities include purchasing/eBuy, contracts & grants and statistics data gathering/reporting.

An exhibition with selections from The Breck Collection of Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson is now on display at the UCR Library.

Free and open to the public, the exhibition, “Picturing the World: The Work of Henri Cartier-Bresson” is open in the Reading Room of the Special Collections and University Archives Department, located on the fourth floor of the Tomás Rivera Library. Visitors can attend Monday to Friday from 10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. from Monday, Oct. 18 through December 17, 2021.

In November 2019, Special Collections received a generous donation from Dennis and Pamela Beck of thirty eight vintage prints created by the renowned French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson. The COVID-19 campuswide closure forced SCUA to delay the launch of this exhibition until campus reopened in fall 2021.

“UCR Special Collections & University Archives was privileged to receive the Beck Collection of Photographs,” said Cherry Williams, Director of Distinctive Collections. “Chronicling decisive moments of human life around the world, Cartier Bresson’s work epitomizes a clarity of vision and intellectual rigor that few can rival. We are delighted to be able to share these wonderful photographs in this exhibition.”

Cartier-Bresson, an early pioneer of wartime photojournalism in the 1940s, was also a seminal figure in the establishment of humane, spontaneous photojournalism as an art form. About his work, Cartier-Bresson wrote: “The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box… To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

All members of the UC Riverside community are invited to explore the work of this masterful photographer on the fourth floor of the Rivera Library.

The UCR Library is pleased to welcome Kevin Comerford as our Associate University Librarian for the Digital Library, effective June 3, 2019.

Comerford comes to UC Riverside from the University of New Mexico, where he served as the University Libraries Director of Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication and Director of IT Services.

“The fact that Kevin Comerford is joining the staff of the UCR Library promises to be a game-changer for the UCR community,” said University Librarian Steven Mandeville-Gamble. “Mr. Comerford comes to UCR with great accolades from the University Librarian at the University of New Mexico, who has shared with me that he provided transformational leadership in digital librarianship and digital scholarship for not only that campus but the entire State of New Mexico.”

At UNM, Comerford's work included planning and implementation of the DISC digital initiatives department and a program to provide graduate students with opportunities to work on digital scholarship projects.

Two major initiatives that he managed were the Tony Hillerman Portal and the Rudolfo Anaya Digital Archive. These online resources honor two of New Mexico’s most significant authors and provide access to digitized copies of their manuscripts and papers.

Comerford also taught in the UNM Organizational, Information and Learning Sciences (OI&LS) Program and was the Primary Investigator on numerous grant-funded projects.

Prior to UNM, Comerford was the Group Manager for Media Content Management at Microsoft Corporation, and the Visual Resources Librarian and IT Manager at the Dallas Museum of Art.

His office will be located in the Administration Suite (room 141) of the Tomás Rivera Library.

Please join us in welcoming Kevin to the UCR Library!

Finding and borrowing resources from libraries across the UC system is about to get easier!

On July 27, 2021, the libraries on all 10 University of California campuses will be connected through UC Library Search, a unified discovery and borrowing system.

The enhanced features of UC Library Search will replace Melvyl as the UC-wide library catalog search tool. As a single, interconnected system, UC Library Search offers powerful features to help the UC libraries make data-informed decisions around collections development and new services for library users.

Enhancements available through UC Library Search will include:

• Search UC Riverside local library collection as well as the collections of all 10 UC libraries in the same system;
• Single sign-on: Borrow and renew materials from any library in the UC system without retyping your library card number;
• Access via the catalog to millions of subscribed and Open Access online books, journal articles, and other digital content

Stay tuned to find out more information about UC Library Search in the coming months. In the meantime, check out this page for additional information about the project, including the project timeline for this new release.

Have questions? Please contact​ Tiffany Moxham, Associate University Librarian for Content and Discovery.