This spring Cairn, an aggregator of French-language journals, added about 35 new titles from many different disciplines to its collection. Though these do not yet appear in OskiCat or in the E-Journal Titles A-Z list, they can be accessed directly via Cairn's website or by clicking on the links below:

• L'Année psychanalytique internationale (psychology/psychoanalysis)
• L'Autre (interdisciplinary/psychology/sociology)
• Cahiers du Centre Canguilhem (history of science)
• Cahiers philosophiques (philosophy)
• Chimères (psychology/psychoanalysis)
• Comptabilité - Contrôle - Audit (business)
• Contraste (medicine/sociology/child studies)
• Développements (psychology/child studies)
• Esprit (literature)
• L'Expansion Management Review (business)
• Histoire, monde et cultures religieuses (history/religious studies)
• Histoire de la justice (history of law)
• Idées économiques et sociales (economics)
• L'Information psychiatrique (psychology)
• Journal de la psychanalyse de l'enfant (psychology/psychoanalysis)
• Journal du droit des jeunes (law/sociology)
• Laennec (medicine/ethics)
• Littératures classiques (literature)
• Marché et organisations (business)
• Médium (cultural studies)
• Monde(s) (history)
• Nouvelle revue d'esthétique (aesthetics)
• Pardès (Judaica)
• Politique africaine (political science/Africa)
• Politique américaine (political science/North America)
• Pratiques et Organisation des Soins (public health)
• Présence africaine (African studies)
• PSN: Psychiatrie, Sciences humaines, Neurosciences (psychiatry)
• Quaderni (communications)
• Repères, cahiers de la danse (dance)
• Revue de gestion des ressources humaines (business)
• Revue du Nord (history)
• Revue interdisciplinaire d'études juridiques (law)
• Sciences de l'éducation pour l'ère nouvelle (education)
• Sciences sociales et santé (health)
• Sciences sociales et sport (sports)
• Sciences, Eaux, Territoires (water resources)
• Sociologie de l'art (art/sociology)
• Transversalités (religious studies)

The entire list of 370 journal titles are available through the Library's subscription to Cairn.

Through May 16, the Library will have trial access to the Corpus Montaigne - a new digital corpus brought online by Classiques Garnier Numérique. Available on the same platform as the Godefroy, dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue francaise (IXe-XVe siecle) and the Grand Corpus des grammaires francaises, des remarques et des traites sur la langue XIVe-XVIIe siecle, the Corpus Montaigne  is the result of twenty years of dedicated research. It contains all the different editions of the works of Montaigne in the 16th and 17th centuries, published from the manuscripts and the printed originals. It also includes all of the works published in Montaigne?s lifetime and after his death by his "daughter-in-law" Marie de Gournay, all the editions published from the 16th to the 20th century, their annotation and critical apparatus, and also the best editions of the complete works in Italian, English, German and Spanish.

For a full description, see the presentation on Classique Garnier Numérique's website. To access the corpus, click here.

With the ease of Wikipedia, printed biographical reference works such as the new Diccionario Biografíco Español (DBE) once central to academic libraries appear to be losing their relevance, and shelf space. Judging by how few copies there are in U.S. libraries (seven at the moment according to WorldCat) this certainly seems to be the case with the DBE. It was first published in 2009 by Spain's Real Academia de la Historia (RAH) with sponsorship of King Juan Carlos I and with support from the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports. Not actually for sale until 2011, Berkeley is currently the only library west of the Mississippi River with the first 25 volumes (up to the letter H) in its collection. Comparable to other ambitious national biographies like the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) and the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani - begun in 1960 and still not yet complete, the DBE will have more than 40,000 entries for individuals from all periods of Spanish history. The prologue states that the project was first conceived by the RAH between 1735 and 1738 to "reunir, en un Diccionario biografíco, a los 'hombres de mérito' de la distintas tierras de España." An online database of those included as well as those who could potentially be added is available on the RAH web site.

The DBE differs from many national biographies in that it includes living people such as filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, former Prime Minister José María Aznar, and even Emilío Botin who is the head of Banco Santander and largely financed the project through his charitable foundation. While the RAH has been criticized for under-representing women, there are detailed entries for leading Spanish feminists of the past such as Concepción Arenal and Clara Campoamor, cubist María Blanchard, and anarcho-syndicalist Teresa Claramunt. Catalan concrete poet and visual artist Joan Brossa even gets a multi-page entry. Coverage in the arena of literature is a bit thin and overlooks some major twentieth-century writers such as Lidia Falcón, Miguel Hernández, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna just to name a few. British author and literary critic Jeremy Treglown observes that "the contributors are the best that could have been found" and that "full coverage of figures from Spain's long Islamic era is one of the dictionary's triumphs."

It is partially because of its selection criteria but more likely because of the sympathies of some of the contributors to the dictatorship of Francisco Franco that immediately sparked a national controversy. Public calls to revise many of the entries before the second tranche of volumes are printed has led to the RAH announcing that it will publish an addendum along with the forthcoming volumes. The most recent resolution to this dispute was announced in an article from El País last week titled "El Diccionario Biográfico Español, revisado una vez que se termine" and an eloquent review was published in the Times Literary Supplement last March titled "Franco's Friends." Treglown, who wrote the latter review, assesses this monumental work for what it is: "So it's important to acknowledge, first, that the DBE is a very valuable resource, conservative in methodology but wide-ranging and undoctrinaire in its choices of both subjects and contributions, and ambitious in its associated aims."

For a full account of El País' coverage of the controversies surrounding the DBE back to 1999, see: http://elpais.com/tag/diccionario_biografico_espanol.

Through its membership in the Center for Research Libraries and more specifically CIFNAL, the  Library has trial access to L'Harmathèque - a large collection of French language ebooks, articles, films and audio files - through Wednesday, May 1.

Collection Content
L'Harmathèque's multimedia platform offers ebooks, articles, videos, and audio recordings on many subjects in the humanities and social sciences. The content of the ebooks comes from a variety of French publishing imprints, including L'Harmattan, Pagala, Odin, IXE, etc.  A full list of included titles can be downloaded in excel.

Currently the platform contains more than 26,000 ebooks, 17,000 articles, 400 films, and 600 audio files available. At least 2,300 new titles are added to the collection annually (the publishers estimate that around 230 ebook titles are added monthly). This impressive number of ebooks covers a wide range of subject areas in the humanities and social sciences, novels, and children's books.

According to the description provided on the web site, article content is from journals and book chapters, although no further selection criteria are given. The videos are primarily documentaries and theatrical productions. The audio collection includes many audiobooks, in a variety of languages.

Delivery
The interface is in French. In the portals, ebooks are divided by subject into browsable bouquets. An advanced search option allows the user to narrow down the large amount of content.

Ebooks can be read either on the platform's online reader (which requires Flash), or downloaded and read using the free Adobe Digital Editions reader.  Viewing the videos requires the use of DivX and  the audio content is also available through Flash.

New books arrive each day in the library. One way of keeping on top of the imprints from or about Southern Europe is to periodically check the new acquisitions lists for French, Italian, and Spanish & Portuguese.  These lists can be easily accessed from OskiCat by clicking on the  "new acquisiions" link just beneath the yellow search button, or from every library subject guide.

Giulia Calvi, professor at The European University Institute, has been invited to become the 58th holder of the Chair of Italian Culture at the University of California, Berkeley for the fall semester of 2012 for her work on early modern Italian cultural and social history from the perspective of gender.

Chair of Italian Culture in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley was established in 1928. It annually calls one of the ablest and most eminent citizens of Italy in order to lecture and teach in illustration and interpretation of Italian culture, as well as for the periodic presentation of international symposia. Past holders of this prestigious Chair have included literary critic Gianfranco Contini, historian Gaetano Salvemini, literary critic Ezio Raimondi, art historian Leo Steinberg, novelist Giorgio Bassani, philosopher Giorgio Agamben, historian Luisa Passerini, political philosopher Adriana Cavarero, paleographers Armando Petrucci and Franca Nardelli and, in fall 2008 historian Paul Ginsborg and essayist and novelist Tim Parks.

Calvi will give a public lecture titled "Across Three Empires (Venetian; Ottoman; Hapsburg): Clothing the Balkans in XVI Century Europe" on Tuesday, November 27 at 6pm in 370 Dwinelle Hall. The invitational flyer can be downloaded from the Department of Italian Studies events calendar.

↑↔↓ This post is reposted in part from The European University Institute's web site. (7/12/12)

Online since last week, Jean Cocteau unique et multiple makes available the life, works, and universe of twentieth century French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist, composer, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (1889-1963). Drawing primarily from the Fonds patrimonial Jean Cocteau conserved in the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Montpellier, it is theresult of a collaboration between Rirra21 (Montpellier III) / Nova Média Production / éditions L?Entretemps, with the support of the Région Languedoc-Roussillon, Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier III), Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Montpellier, Comité Jean Cocteau, and the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent.

To date, the Berkeley Library has more than 423 works by Jean Cocteau in its physical collections, including videos and DVDs in the MRC, unique first editions in the Bancroft, and musical scores in the Jean Hargrove Music Library.

In the wake of last week's international Open Acccess Week and especially the Library-sponsored faculty conversation with UCSF Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery Rich Schneider, I'd like to call everyone's attention to the new ebook by Peter Suber titled Open Access (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012) which answers most of the questions regarding OA. Called the "indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers," it will become OA in June 2013, one year from the date of publication but is now available to the UC Berkeley community through ebrary.

Other recent library aquisitions are continously updated through OskiCat and also through the library subject pages for French, Italian, and Iberian Studies (Spanish & Portuguese).

Enjoy!