New Title for David de Lorenzo

Farewell to Suzanne McMahon

Bancroft Library's Steven Black in Print

A Special Bow to Our Library

HR ALERT

START Reminder

Library Employment Opportunities

Courtesy Listings

New Title for David de Lorenzo

Over the past decade, the role and function of Bancroft Library Technical Services has changed and broadened. It has integrated many new and varied technologies into its work and absorbed many new responsibilities beyond those of traditional cataloging and archival description. In our new digital world, BTS has moved from traditional bibliographic description of Bancroft Library's collections to include now the creation and presentation of digital surrogates and electronic text.

Bancroft Technical Services is now responsible for the full life-cycle of the Library's collections. This runs the gamut from coordination of acquisitions and collection development, bibliographic control, archival collections cataloging and description, preservation efforts, application of advanced digital technologies, integration of metadata use and practices, as well as Web-based access for our various user constituencies. Much of this work has been accomplished with external grants, in whose authorship and management BTS has also taken a leading role.

These activities encompass much more than the responsibilities typically found in the traditional library technical services department; and it has seemed to me that official recognition of these broad-ranging responsibilities for overall collection management is appropriate. I am pleased therefore to announce, effective immediately, a change in title for David de Lorenzo, to Associate Director of The Bancroft Library.

Charles Faulhaber
The Bancroft Library

Farewell to Suzanne McMahon

I am thrilled, if a bit sad for the library, to announce that Suzanne McMahon resigned from the Library Dec. 31, 2004. She will begin her retirement Jan. 1, 2005.

Suzanne joined UCB library in 1994. She had previously been at Stanford for 10 years, as a Germanic cataloger, serials cataloger, and then head of serials.

A sample listing of her contributions at Berkeley would include the development of South Asia webpages, particularly diaspora resources, a unique resource. She completed a M.A. in Hindi while here, focusing on Hir Waris Shah (in Punjabi), a sufi romance in verse, and two popular exhibits, both available through the SSEAL site: A Hundred Harvests and Echoes of Freedom and Silicon Raj.

She was instrumental in forming the SACWest consortium (South Asia West), including UCB, UCLA, U of Hawaii, U of Washington and U of Texas, where participating libraries divided collecting responsibilities to try to manage to rising cost of the LC bills when Indian acquisitions were no longer subsidized by the U.S. government.

We will miss her skills and company.

If you have questions about the collection, please contact the South and South East Asian Library and speak with Rebecca Darby-Williams and Vanessa Tait concerning the South Asia Collection. Virginia Shih will continue to manage her collection in support of South East Asia.

Amy Kautzman
Research, Reference and Collections

Bancroft Library's Steven Black in Print

“Elections, war, urban hell, and transformational politics”

City Lights just published a volume titled Political Edge, which features the photographs of Bancroft Library’s Acquisitions head, Steven Black, or D.S. Black as he is known in print. Steven has had several books of poetry published, gives tours of the Mission District, where he lives, and writes for various publications, including Processed World, the SF Bay Guardian and the Philip K. Dick Society newsletter, and is up to serious culture jamming in various forms. From the City Lights web page:

In the wake of an astonishing popular mobilization on behalf of the underdog campaign to elect the Green Party’s Matt Gonzalez mayor of San Francisco, The Political Edge analyzes how politics must be understood as something more than elections and government, candidates and campaigns.

Cultural and political trends erupt in San Francisco, a city that thrives on dissent and new ideas. Revealing emergent political energies and a new dynamics that will reshape urban politics nationwide, 25 activists address such concerns as the failure of political representation and the electoral process, housing scams and displacement, urban ecology and transportation, the fate of the arts, insurgent subcultures, and utopian proposals for transformational politics.

Bonnie Bearden
The Bancroft Library

A Special Bow to Our Library

In acknowledgements to his recently published book, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, Adam Hochschild writes:

"A great library always seems a place that allows miracles of time travel, and so a special bow to the one I used most, at the University of California at Berkeley. Its copy of the 1808 edition of Thomas Clarkson's history of abolition, with pages almost the texture of linen, has sat on my desk these past four years. And what a pleasure it was to check out Moreau de Jonnès's memoirs from Berkeley and find that the due date stamped on the inside back cover for the previous borrower was exactly one week before I was born." p. 430

Phyllis Bischof