In December, the NISEE project at the Earthquake Engineering Library in Berkeley published its first ten eBooks using the XML Open eBook specification. These books, available from the project website at http://nisee.berkeley.edu/ebooks/ publish the work of several Berkeley professors of Structural Engineering including W. Godden, V.V. Bertero and J. Moehle. These publications were developed from original word documents, html files, or generated from existing databases by Debra Bartling, the NISEE project Programmer-Analyst. In the next months the NISEE project will add an original eBook dictionary of earthquake engineering and re-issue the Abstract Journal in Earthquake Engineering as a bi-annual eBook. Comments are welcome to cjames@peer.berkeley.edu or bartling@peer.berkeley.edu.

Charles D. James
National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering (NISEE)
University of California, Berkeley
1301 S 46th Street, RFS 453
Richmond, CA 94804
(510) 231-9401 / http://nisee.berkeley.edu/

After several years of writing and travelling around the country to examine archival materials and conduct interviews, Vanessa Tait completed her PhD in sociology this December at UC Santa Cruz. Her dissertation, titled "Poor Workers' Unions: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below," analyzes the phenomenon of social movement- and community-based labor organizing from the 1960s to the 90s, most of it outside of the AFL-CIO and within a transient workforce relying on low-wage jobs, unemployment and welfare benefits, and the underground economy. She plans to turn her dissertation into a book manuscript in the near future. Freed (at least temporarily) from academic demands, Vanessa is looking forward to reading novels, weeding her garden, and taking a vacation. Best of all, she doesn't have to drive Highway 17 to Santa Cruz anymore.

Congratulations, Vanessa!

Suzanne McMahon
South Asia Library

Exhibit: International Exchange and the Library

How does a library acquire materials that are not available by purchase, publications for which commercial vendors are unreliable, or collections that can be assembled only with the collaboration of another academic institution? How can commercially available publications of academic institutions be acquired at minimum cost? At Berkeley, these challenges have been successfully met for more than a century by means of the Library's Exchange Program. Established in 1884, the Program now counts more than 3,000 active exchange partners and accounts for the acquisition of 20% of the serials currently received by the University as well as more than 5,000 monographs every year. Exchange partners can be found in nearly every country of the world and supply publications in virtually every subject area collected by the Library.

Between January 16 and March 31, 2001, the Library's Exchange Program is the subject of an exhibit in the Bernice Layne Brown Exhibit Gallery of the Doe Library. Displays are organized both by country of origin and by subject matter. Publications displayed confirm the importance of Berkeley's Exchange Program in the development and maintenance of our outstanding scholarly and research collections.

Library staff who contributed to the exhibit include Elena Balashova, Phyllis Bischof, Simon Bockie, Frank Carothers, Yong Choo, John Creaser, Carlos Delgado, Katie Frohmberg, Jean Gibson, Jean Han, Yuki Ishimatsu, Ann Jensen, Shayee Khanaka, Norma Kobzina, Suzanne McMahon, AnnMarie Mitchell, Virginia Shih, Jim Spohrer, Allan Urbanic, Camille Wanat, Peter Zhou, and Kathleen Zvanovec-Higbee.

The exhibit was developed by Phyllis Bischof and Frank Carothers, and owes its striking final form to Phyllis and to Cathy Dinnean.