More News February 01, 2019

Last January, University Librarian Steven Mandeville-Gamble donated a full set of signed, first editions of the acclaimed Mark Manning novels by Michael Craft from his personal collection to the UCR Library’s Special Collections.

Upon so doing, he saw that the library needed an ongoing way to support the research and teaching efforts of UCR faculty such as Distinguished Professor George Haggerty and others who are exploring the LGBT experience in the United States.

In June 2018, he and the library’s Associate Director of Development Megan De Leon worked together to establish the Steven Lee Mandeville-Gamble Book Fund for Queer Literature.

“UCR was the first university in North America to establish an LGBT minor program," Mandeville-Gamble said. "The university has a rich history of the study of the LGBT experience through literature, the arts, social sciences, and beyond. By establishing this endowment, I am trying to do my small part to ensure that the university will have the resources to continue building a teaching and research collection that supports the faculty and students research, teaching, writing, and creating in this area.”

This endowed fund will support the UCR Library’s acquisition of literature and literary materials with gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer-identified protagonists or major characters, or that fit within the larger genre of queer studies. It also leaves discretionary decisions for how to use the funds up to the collection strategists.

"University Librarian Steven Mandeville-Gamble has had tremendous foresight when setting up this fund," De Leon said. "This collection will support multiple faculty, is parallel with the research mission of the university, and provides flexibility for the library to acquire relevant materials. We are very lucky that this will be a collection on our campus."

To learn how you could support this endowment, please contact Jernine McBride.

More News March 14, 2022

Wiley and the University of California announced a one-year pilot agreement that makes it more affordable for UC authors to publish open access in Wiley journals, making their articles freely available for anyone to read. 

Corresponding authors at all ten UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who publish open access articles in Wiley journals from January 1, 2022 through December 31, 2022 will receive a 15 percent discount on the open access fee (also known as an article processing charge, or APC). 

For authors at five campuses, including UC Riverside, open access will be the default option, and the UC libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the discounted open access fee. As with most of UC’s other open access agreements, these authors will be asked to pay the remainder of the open access fee if they have research funds available to do so; those who do not have research funds available for this purpose can request full funding of the APC from the libraries. The limited scope of this one-year pilot will allow Wiley to develop and test the multi-payer system before exploring the potential for a broader agreement in the future including all 10 campuses.

The agreement covers articles published in all Wiley journals, including both hybrid (subscription-based) and fully open access journals.

Authors who published an article earlier in 2022 will be contacted by Wiley and offered the opportunity to take advantage of the open access options offered under the pilot agreement.  

The agreement also provides UC students, faculty, researchers, and healthcare professionals with unlimited reading access to the full portfolio of Wiley journals.

For more detail about the agreement please see the overview of the Wiley open access agreement on the UC Office of Scholarly Communication website.

More News June 03, 2019

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!

More News December 02, 2019

Recently, the UCR Library’s Cyberinfrastructure team updated the public Zeta book scanners with new software and upgraded touchscreens.

Now, library users will find that making scans is faster and easier than ever before. The new touchscreens have a larger display area and clearer controls, making navigation more efficient.

The updated Scannx software provides a powerful, easy-to-use solution for patrons to scan books, documents, and photos. It can scan, store, and send digitized content as searchable PDF files to Dropbox, Google Drive, email, smartphones, and tablets, as well as to local USB drives or printers.

There is also a new Scan-to-MP3 feature that lets users convert text documents into audio files, so students can listen to the text of the document. The Zeta scanner performs optical character recognition (ocr) on written text and then produces an MP3 file of a voice reading the document. This feature not only improves the accessibility of scanned documents, but makes them more portable so students can listen to them “on the go.” Additionally, this new output format upholds the library’s core value of inclusion by creating equitable access to resources for all patrons.

More News July 28, 2017

Due to the staffing challenges in Special Collections and University Archives, service hours will be changing effective Monday, July 31, 2017.

Summer Hours July 31– September 22, 2017

Monday - Friday 9:00 am – 11:00 am: By appointment only to current UCR faculty, staff, and enrolled students* 11:00 am – 4:00 pm: Open to the general public

Academic Year Hours September 25, 2017 – June 15, 2018

Monday - Friday 9:00 am – 11:00 am: By appointment only to current UCR faculty, staff, and enrolled students* 11:00 am – 4:00 pm: Open to the general public

*Appointments are pending staff and space availability. To request an appointment, email specialcollections@ucr.edu

Please reach out to the public services team (specialcollections@ucr.edu) with any questions. 

More News September 06, 2016

Cherry Williams joined the UCR Library on September 6, 2016, as Director of Distinctive Collections.

Cherry will be located in Special Collections & University Archives on the 4th floor of Rivera Library, and will report to Alison Scott, AUL for Collections & Scholarly Communication.

Cherry earned her BS in nursing and Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Certificate from the University of Colorado, MA in humanities (with a concentration in art history) from the University of Chicago, and MLIS from UCLA.

She comes to UCR from the Lilly Library at Indiana University, where she has been Curator of Manuscripts since 2009, following work as Archivist, Special Projects Librarian, and Special Collections Librarian for the Sciences at UCLA’s Darling Biomedical Library. Prior to becoming a librarian, Cherry had a successful career as a medical professional.

More News December 18, 2024

A Smith Acorn Press, a historic toggle-style printing press made in 1828, is now on display on the first floor of the Tomás Rivera Library 

Patented by Peter Smith in 1821, the Acorn Press is known for its acorn-shaped frame and precise printing capabilities. 

The press on display was discovered in Philadelphia in the 1930s by Jackson Burke, who used it in San Francisco to produce “Pocket Press” editions. In the 1950s, Burke gifted the press to Lewis and Dorothy Allen of the Allen Press, where it was used to create 12 titles, including Dialogues of Creatures Moralised.

In 1967, the press moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz. There, poet and printer William Everson used it at the Lime Kiln Press from 1968 to 1981, producing works like West to the Water and Granite and Cypress. After the Lime Kiln Press closed, UCSC’s McHenry Library donated the press to UCR in 2005.

Previously kept in the stacks of Special Collections & University Archives on the fourth floor of the Rivera Library, the press is now accessible to all visitors on the first floor, located to the right of the Library Support/IT Support Desk. 

Visit during the library's operating hours to get a glimpse into the history of printing and the craftsmanship that went into making printing presses.

More News January 20, 2016

A two-year, $517,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will fund a joint project called "Documenting the Now: Supporting Scholarly Use and Preservation of Social Media Content." The project — a collaboration between The University of California, Riverside, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland — responds to the public’s use of social media for chronicling historically significant events and demand from scholars and archivists seeking a user-friendly means of collecting and preserving this digital content.

The three institutions will develop DocNow – a cloud-ready, open-source application that will be used for collecting tweets and their associated metadata and Web content. The app will be specifically designed to help authenticated users tap into Twitter streams to identify web content that is of value for current and future research.

Bergis Jules, co-principal investigator and community lead at UC Riverside, hopes the DocNow project will be a catalyst for community building around the scholarly use and preservation of social media archives. "Community building will be vitally important as we continue to develop standards and effective practices around the collection and access to this rich content," said Jules. "I'm excited The Mellon Foundation is supporting this project as it will be an important contribution to scholarship on social media archiving."

The grant also supports the development of best practice recommendations for ethical, copyright, privacy, and access issues related to collection of social media content.

• Read more about Creat'R Lab Makerspace

More News January 12, 2021

On Jan. 21, UC Riverside professor Jennifer Doyle and internationally recognized artist Nao Bustamante will discuss the genesis of Bustamante’s multi-media exhibition, Soldadera.

This virtual presentation will be the fourth installment of the UCR Library’s series, Faculty Profiles in Research, Art and Innovation. Dr. Romina Robles Ruvalcaba, assistant professor of history at UC Merced, will serve as moderator.

Soldadera (Spanish for “female soldiers”) returns to southern California on Jan. 21, and will remain open through Mar. 28, 2021 at the S/A Exhibitions gallery in Santa Ana. The exhibition highlights a variety of Bustamante’s artwork inspired by the women who fought in the Mexican Revolution, including artistic transformations of several digitized photographs from UCR Library’s Special Collections. Since its debut in 2015 at the Vincent Price Art Museum in East Los Angeles, it has traveled to New York, Mexico City, San Diego, San Francisco, and Marfa.

In 2014, Bustamante turned to UCR's extensive collection of photography and other materials covering the Mexican Revolution, focused particularly on women's role in this segment of Mexican history. Doyle curated this exhibition and supported it by editing a series of essays published on KCET's website, exploring the artist's process and the historical context for this project, born from a 2015 meeting between Bustamante and Leandra Becerra Lumbreras in Guadalajara. During the Mexican Revolution, Lumbreras served as an Adelita, providing quartermaster support for revolutionary fighters. When they first met in 2015, Lumbreras was the oldest living person at age 127.

The exhibition opening at the S/A Exhibitions gallery is scheduled for 4:00 - 10:00 p.m. on the same date as the virtual presentation, Jan. 21. Due to COVID-related restrictions, the opening reception will be limited to eight guests at a time. Those interested in scheduling a viewing time must email the gallery in advance.