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On Monday, Sept. 28, the UCR Library will launch Ask a Student, a chat service to help new and returning UC Riverside students navigate campus and get timely assistance from fellow UCR students.

Ask a Student will be available Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.; students can submit questions by email outside of those hours. Starting on Sept. 28, students will have three ways to access Ask a Student: via chat widgets on the library's Ask Us page, the new Ask UCR webpage, and the Keep Learning website.

Jointly managed by the library's Teaching & Learning and Research Services departments, Ask a Student will provide a place for students to connect with peers to get to the resources they need to be successful in the remote learning environment.

“One aim of this program is to support the Dean of Students’ initiative to build connections and feelings of belonging among the student body, despite our physical distance,” explained Dani Cook, the library's Director of Teaching and Learning.

Returning library student employees will staff Ask a Student, under the supervision of Teaching and Learning Services Coordinator Christopher Martone and Research Services Department Assistant Margarita Yonezawa.

“We still have Ask a Librarian for in-depth research questions,” Cook added. “And the student staff will be able to transfer questions between the services if needed.”

“The UCR Library looks forward to launching this new service to support our students. We hope it will be a useful complement to the ScottyBot, which focuses on financial aid and residential life, and help build a sense of connection for our students,” said Ann Frenkel, Deputy University Librarian. “We are grateful to our campus partners for helping us identify the need for this kind of service, and for taking the time to share details and scenarios with our student staff, so we can provide the best service possible.”

These partners include: the Dean of Students, Academic Resource Center, Basic Needs, CARE, CAPS, GSOE Academic Advising, the Ombuds, the Registrar, Residential Life, Student Life, the Student Disability Resource Center, Undergraduate Education, and The Well.

Fourth-year Comparative Literature PhD candidate and library student employee Sean Matharoo has a unique array of talents, experiences, and academic interests that should yield results during his Fulbright fellowship in Belgium later this year.

“The funding to pursue something like this is invaluable to me. It enables me to do something I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. I’m really honored and I’m excited,” Matharoo said. “I’ve been given the opportunity to work with Dr. Stef Craps in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. His research is focused on the same things that I want to study: memory studies, the Anthropocene, postcolonial literature, and climate change fiction.”

Matharoo added, “The Anthropocene has been theorized by scientists as a geological time period characterized by humankind’s adverse impact on the planet due to the exploitation of land, water, animals, and fossil fuels. I want to problematize the cosmopolitanism of the discourse, which tends to sideline the question of vulnerability.”

Matharoo has been passionate about engaging with environmental issues such as climate change since before he came to UCR. He devoted nearly a year to his Eagle Scout project of building a drought-tolerant garden in his hometown of Inverness, Florida.

After completing his Bachelor’s in English at University of Florida, Matharoo was drawn to UC Riverside for three reasons: the university’s science-fiction program, cultural diversity, and geographic location. “I have always wanted to move out west for social and political reasons, and to be near the Joshua Tree desert and the film cultures of LA.”

Matharoo’s advisor Dr. Sherryl Vint recommended that he apply for the Fulbright grant to study in Belgium, knowing that he feels passionate about bridging cultural and linguistic borders while striving toward solidarity across those gaps.

“What’s really important to me is bringing into the classroom an emphasis on communicating across differences while upholding those differences at the same time,” Matharoo stated. “A lot of students – especially students who don’t come from families that are intimately familiar with the education system in this country – children of immigrants, first generation college students, and so on – they don’t always know that they don’t have to assimilate into one way of doing research.”

Sean credits his collaborative approach to research to his time spent working in Special Collections at Rivera Library with JJ Jacobson, UCR Library’s Jay Kay and Doris Klein Librarian for Science Fiction. “Working in the library taught me that starting with a hypothesis, an idea, a problem or a question, and then thinking about it in a much more improvisational and flexible way, it ends up opening interesting new tangents that are actually really productive for engaging the question,” he explained. “It encouraged me to think of research not in terms of solo-authored projects but instead as collaborative projects.”

When working at Rivera Library, Matharoo cataloged the Jay Kay Klein photograph collection. “There are thousands and thousands of photos and slides in this collection,” he stated. “From the 1940s through the 1990s (Klein) was really active in going to science-fiction conventions and award ceremonies, taking photographs and meticulously documenting where he was, who was in the photograph. I worked on his collection, moving the analog negatives and slides over to digital metadata so that scholars, artists, or anybody who is interested could say, ‘I need a photo of Octavia Butler at this convention in this year,’ for instance, and they could easily find it.”

During his Fulbright fellowship, Sean plans to take classes at Ghent University, conduct research, and write the first few chapters of his PhD dissertation. “There are other PhD students at Ghent working on projects similar to my own. There’s a really incredible, thriving community there that I’ll be able to network with and learn from.”

He hopes to connect his Fulbright research with the Afro-Belgian community in Ghent through interviews and collaborative artistic projects. “I intend to superimpose interviews, field recordings, noise music, text, photography, and video into audiovisual sculptures,” he explained.

After completing his PhD, Matharoo plans to teach at a university. “I don’t want to treat my students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge,” he said, “but, rather, to create a space where we can do the work of education together, always experimenting to create alternative ways of thinking and being.”

• Read more about Maker Week

The UCR Library staff and African Student Programs collaborated to create a guide for the UCR community on the Black Lives Matter movement.

The guide provides general sources and research information about the Black Lives Matter movement and related social justice issues. It includes websites, books and e-books, streaming videos, podcasts, databases, and more. It is adapted from an openly-licensed guide created by librarians Lalitha Nataraj and Holly Hampton at CSU San Marcos.

The guide came into being when Jamal J. Myrick, Ed.D., Director of African Student Programs (ASP) at UC Riverside, contacted Leslie Settle, Access Services Desk Coordinator for the UCR Library, to ask whether the library could create a resource that focuses on anti-racism, Black History, and cultural movements. “I think that would be a great way for us to show up together,” Dr. Myrick wrote. The goal of the guide was to help the UCR community to learn and engage.

As Dr. Myrick states in the guide’s introduction, “In the last six months, we've reached a critical juncture in the history of the United States that will forever be etched in time. From grieving over cancelled milestone moments due to COVID-19, to remote learning interactions, to the numerous lynchings of Black bodies resulting in calls for justice, researchers will surely look back on this year with intrigue.”

Settle brought Dr. Myrick’s suggestion to the Director of Teaching and Learning, Dani Cook, and Deputy University Librarian, Ann Frenkel, who supported the idea.

Cook enlisted Kathy Tran, a student employee from the library's Teaching and Learning department, to adapt and expand the original online guide. The draft guide was then shared with Dr. Myrick and the ASP, library staff, and other members of the UCR community for additions and feedback.

Frenkel felt it was crucial for the UCR Library’s guide to include local resources and information relevant to Riverside and the surrounding region. “Kathy did an amazing job in updating the resources to reflect UCR’s holdings and services, as well as adding additional social media and other resources,” Cook said.

“Taking on this project has energized, empowered and educated me in so many ways,” Tran said. “Researching different resources helped me see what I can do to further educate myself in the different aspects of Black Lives Matter, but it has also helped me refer different resources to my friends, family, and fellow classmates.” She added that the guide can serve as an educational tool in all aspects of our community lives.

The finished guide can be found here.

As Dr. Myrick writes, “We invite you to immerse yourself in the videos, podcasts, and readings (many available at the library) and allow the information you learn to provide life-transforming ideas for your fight for justice and life.”

Library staff will consider suggestions from the UCR community (use this form) for additional resources that may be added to the guide.

The African American Collections Advisory Board held its second Annual Meeting at Raymond L. Orbach Science Library on Saturday, October 22, 2016

University Librarian Steven Mandeville-Gamble and Associate University Librarian for Collections & Scholarly Communication Alison Scott welcomed AACA Board members and special guests at the start of the meeting.

The full-day program included panels and discussions on topics related to best practices in collecting and preserving the history of the African American experience and methods of documenting issues ranging from local to international impact, including:

• Community-Based Approaches to Documenting People of Color, led by Catherine Gudis, Director of the Public History Program at UC Riverside, University & Political Papers Archivist Bergis Jules, and Rose Mayes, Executive Director of the Fair Housing Council of Riverside County
• Activism & Public Policy, led by Nemata Blyden, Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University, Meredith Evans, Director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, Alison Scott, and Alexander Wilson, Jr., Vice President of External Affairs for Black Student Union and African Student Programs Representative on UCR Diversity Council.
• Afro-Futurism / Post-Colonial Endeavors, led by JJ Jacobson, Jay Kay and Doris Klein Librarian for Science Fiction, and Cherry Williams, Director of Distinctive Collections

“Hosting a national-level conversation like this helps to make sure that these voices are present and heard in our research, teaching and learning,” explained Alison Scott, Associate University Librarian for Collections & Scholarly Communication. “This is how the library’s communities can help us ensure that we’re building the kinds of collections and programs that meet our community’s needs. It involves looking back to make sure we document history, understanding emerging needs, and being part of the community.”

The program concluded with closing thoughts and feedback from Bergis Jules, Steven Mandeville-Gamble, Alison Scott, and Cherry Williams.

Board members in attendance were Abdul Alkalimat, Hardy Brown, Tamar Evangelista-Dougherty, Ruth M. Jackson, Yolanda T. Moses, Kenneth E. Simons, Ralph W. Smith, and Patricia Smith-Hunt, in addition to the panelists named above.

Special guests included MJ Abraham from Riverside’s Center for Social Justice & Civil Liberties, Director of Development for Campus-wide Initiatives Samantha Lang, and Milagros Peña, Dean of UC Riverside’s College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS).

• Read more about Digital Collections

Special Collections & University Archives employees are constantly working to process recently acquired collections and make those materials ready for use by students, faculty, and researchers.

Each quarter, we will provide a list of the UCR Library's newly processed archival and primary source collections. Check out this list to see if there are any items that fit your research area, or share with a friend!

Below you'll find brief descriptions and links to the finding aids or collection guides for each new collection. To use any of these materials, simply click the "Request Items" button at the top to submit a request, and log in with our Special Collections Request System. For more on conducting research in Special Collections, see this page.

Per the County of Riverside Public Health mandate, SCUA will be closed until April 3, 2020, at least. Check here for updates throughout the COVID-19 closure.

For questions, email specialcollections@ucr.edu.

Newly Processed Collections - Spring 2020​

Kenneth Turner papers (WRCA 246)

Assorted materials and documents relating to water rights including Tahoe basin, Hetch-Hetchy, and Glen Canyon Dam.

Sierra Club El Dorado Project (WRCA 239)

Collection contains environmental impact statements, correspondence, and court pleadings relating to the El Dorado project (No. 184) of the American River in California.

Homer Aschmann papers (UA 123)

Homer Aschmann was a professor of geography and one of the founding faculty of UCR. This collection contains articles, biographical essays, slides, notes, and other materials pertaining to his academic tenure.

Martin Barnes papers (UA 278)

Martin Barnes was a professor of entomology and plant pathology and a member of the founding faculty at UCR. This collections contains articles, slides, newsletters, correspondence, and other materials related to his research.

James M. Wallace papers (UA 341)

James Wallace’s long academic career started at the Citrus Experiment Station and he continued on as a founding faculty member at UCR. He was a renowned expert in citrus virus diseases and this collection contains a variety of materials related to his research career.

University of California, Riverside, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) records (UA 380)

This collection contains reports, correspondence, minutes, and other materials documenting  the operations of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at UCR.

• Read more about UC Riverside eScholarship Report

Volunteers at Riverside National Cemetery’s annual “A Flag for Every Hero” event on Memorial Day weekend 2019 can now read biographies for many of the Veterans whose graves they adorn with flags, thanks in part to the work of two UCR Library employees.

When UC Riverside partnered with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration’s Veterans Legacy Program on a multi-year, federally-commissioned project called Along the Chaparral: Memorializing the Enshrined, Principal Investigator Allison Hedge Coke asked Data Librarian Kat Koziar to build the foundation for the project’s data management, and Special Research Projects Director David Rios to assist with local history and archival genealogical research.

Project funding comes from contracts totaling nearly $700,000 over three years, beginning on Feb. 27, 2018.

“It’s important that we recognize that people who served in the military who are interred in RNC – that they had a life beyond the military – and that’s what we’re trying to capture,” Koziar said.

“It was a project that mattered to me,” Hedge Coke explained, because it blends creative writing, local history, archival research, digital media, geospatial resources, and more. “You don’t create a project to push your agenda into the community. You fashion a project to fit what already exists there.”

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Veteran population in California in 2016 was 1.74 million, the highest of all 50 states; and 131,000 Veterans resided in Riverside County. Those are among the reasons why Hedge Coke believed that the project’s aim and impact would be deeply meaningful to this community.

Hedge Coke’s project proposal intended to create an interactive GIS (geospatial information systems) application so that visitors or researchers could discover the life stories of the Veterans interred at RNC, which would be written by participating K-12 students. GIS consultant Mike Cohen developed the GIS application, which launched at the Closing Celebration on Nov. 29, 2018. The project also generated nine documentary films.

When Hedge Coke visited the RNC site with Koziar she was convinced that, with Koziar’s expertise and with UCR’s on-campus research libraries, they would be able to accomplish this colossal task.

“A lot of people have done work on this – but the base is the base, to give credit where it’s due,” Hedge Coke said. “Everything could not operate without the work that Kat put into it.”

Koziar created and runs the foundational hub of the project, on which everything else continues to expand, Hedge Coke explained. “Everything is semi-reliant – if not completely reliant – on that hub. We absolutely have to have that base to make a project of this breadth successful. It’s quite a bit of exemplary work from this brilliant woman.”

Koziar designed a filing and labeling system to allow the graduate fellows to claim particular people so they could divide up the work while avoiding duplicate efforts, and then to give K-12 students access to basic information about the interred for their research while writing the memorials. “The majority of the students working on this – they’re not data scientists, they’re in humanities,” she said. “I was able to teach some of these other skills because, even if they don’t think about it explicitly, they still have to use it. I enjoyed that.”

To assist with the project, Koziar recruited Rios for his expertise in local history, genealogical research, and his work with Inland Empire Memories -- a fledgling local cultural heritage collaboration; and Brian Geiger from the CHASS Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research.

Geiger helped tremendously because of his connection to the California Digital Newspaper Collection, which the students relied upon significantly while researching, Koziar said.

Hedge Coke acknowledged that Rios and Geiger have done a phenomenal job teaching the graduate fellows and K-12 students about local history, historical research, and where to find archives to learn more about the lives of the interred.

“The children are learning about some of the people who were little-known soldiers,” Rios said. “It gives them an idea of the sacrifices that people have made, and that it’s not just one particular group of people – it’s a wide variety. It’s great because this is Inland Empire Memories and that’s what our responsibilities are: to share resources about the history of people in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.”

The team dedicated to Along the Chaparral has included 75 adults and 2700 K-12 students to write the biographies – from Riverside Unified School District, Sherman Indian High School, Highland Academy in Beaumont, and other schools in Anza and Temecula. At times, up to one-third of the students in a class have discovered they were related to the person they were assigned to research, Hedge Coke said.

The Veterans Legacy program has created partnerships with nine universities across the country. “Our partnership with UC Riverside is one of our largest and our most dynamic,” said Bryce Carpenter, Program Manager for the Veterans Legacy Program. “I think it’s going to raise the bar for all future Veterans Legacy program partnerships.”

The Along the Chaparral team is developing a curriculum so that this project can be duplicated for other Veterans’ cemeteries with K-12 students nationwide, Koziar said.

To date, the students have published more than 500 life stories on the app. Considering the involvement with research, with story craft, with innovative digital platforms, and with K-12 students creating publishable work that heightens memorialization of these lives, the future impact of the project with K-12 students and teachers, UCR students and community, the city, county, Riverside National Cemetery and the greater region is truly immeasurable.

The UCR Library is pleased to announce the following recent resource acquisitions:

Civil War Primary Resource Documents

Civil War Primary Source Documents from The New-York Historical Society contains unique manuscript material chronicling all aspects of the American Civil War from warfare on land, at sea, in hospitals and prison camps, and reactions and impressions of the War from the home front. The collection, comprised of more than 110,000 pages, focuses on the War as it was fought from 1861 to 1865 and represents both Northern and Southern perspectives.

Revolutionary War Era Orderly Books

Revolutionary War Era Orderly Books from the New-York Historical Society is a collection of more than 30,000 pages of historically unique material from more than 200 orderly books spanning from 1748 to 1817. The collection includes both British and American orderly books, a form of manuscript journals kept by military units containing their orders from higher-ranking officers in addition to other information essential to military operations, dating from the French and Indian War through the War of 1812, with the bulk representing the activities of American forces during the Revolutionary War.

Cannabis NewsBank

Cannabis NewsBank: Research Edition is a powerful, multi-disciplinary resource for students and researchers seeking information related to the cannabis and hemp industries. Its searchable database features current and historical news and information from more than 12,000 sources, including over three million cannabis and hemp related reports, documents and articles. This one-of- a-kind research tool features content from prominent cannabis and hemp industry publications as well as in-depth local coverage from every state in the United States, Canada, and countries across the globe.

New Sections of JoVE: The Journal of Visualized Experiments

JoVE is a video journal platform featuring videos that teach fundamental concepts and techniques for the lab.  Via JoVE, researchers and students can view the intricate details of cutting-edge experiments rather than read them in text articles.  The UCR Library has added two collections to our JoVE offerings: JoVe Science Education Chemistry & Advanced Biology and JoVE Immunology and Infection.

Henry Stewart Talks: Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection

HSTalks provides specially prepared, animated, online, audio-visual lectures, seminar-style talks and case studies.  Editors and lecturers are leading world experts and practitioners, including Nobel Laureates, drawn from academia, research institutes, commerce, industry, the professions and government. 

UK National Archives, Collections CO1 and CO5

Colonial State Papers

This collection, available on the ProQuest platform, includes Collection CO 1 from The UK National Archives, officially titled Privy Council and related bodies: America and West Indies, Colonial Papers and the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies 1574-1739.

Colonial America: Complete CO5 Files from UK National Archives, 1600-1822

Colonial America, via the Adam Matthew Platform, makes available all 1,450 volumes of the CO 5 series from The National Archives, UK, covering the period 1606 to 1822. CO 5 consists of the original correspondence between the British government and the governments of the American colonies, making it a uniquely rich resource for all historians of the period.  The UCR Library has access to Module I: Early Settlement, Expansion and Rivalries, and Module II: Towards Revolution.  For more information on these modules, see http://www.colonialamerica.amdigital.co.uk/Introduction/NatureAndScope. 

Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings

This diverse and comprehensive collection focuses on the cultural study of music and explores content from across the globe.  Produced in collaboration with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the material in this collection includes thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational recordings, film footage, field notebooks, slides, correspondence and ephemera from over 60 fields of study. 

American Indian Newspapers

From historic pressings to contemporary periodicals, American Indian Newspapers contains nearly 200 years of Indigenous print journalism from the United States and Canada. With newspapers representing a huge variety in publisher, audience and era, this resource allows researchers to discover how events were reported by and for Indigenous communities.

American Indian Newspapers was developed with, and has only been made possible by, the permission and contribution of the newspaper publishers and Tribal Councils concerned. 

New Subjects from Oxford Bibliographies Online

The UCR Library has added six new topical areas to our Oxford Bibliographies Online collection: 

• African American Studies

• Atlantic History

• Buddhism

• Environmental Science

• Philosophy​

• Sociology

Oxford Bibliographies are developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, and offer exclusive, authoritative research guides across a variety of subject areas. The Oxford Bibliographies combine the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia and direct researchers to the best available scholarship in a given subject.  The UCR Library also has access to the following Oxford Bibliographies: Anthropology, Art History, Chinese Studies, Education, Evolutionary Biology, Latin American Studies, Latinx Studies, Music, Psychology, and Public Health.