Technology

UCSB Library is pleased to announce a new Presentation Practice Room available for reservation by UCSB students, faculty, and staff. Located on the 1st Floor Mountain Side (room 1506), the space allows you to practice, refine, and record oral and multimedia presentations for classes and seminars, conferences, teaching preparation, the Grad and Undergrad Slam, thesis defenses, and other events.

The Library Catalog is now UCSB Library Search. UCSB Library Search, an advanced discovery tool, searches across hundreds of catalogs, indexes, and databases to deliver the most relevant results from the Library’s increasingly diverse resources. UCSB Library Search is accessible from the Library’s website homepage. In addition to the new UCSB Library Search, users looking to sign-on to their My Library Account now need to use a UCSBnetID and password.

UCSB Library has selected a new, more modern online search tool to replace our 16-year old Library Catalog. The current Library Catalog is the entry point for locating books, journals, DVDs, and other materials held by UCSB Library. However, additional search tools are required for searching electronic journal articles and materials at other libraries.

Researchers who use the UCSB campus VPN (virtual private network) to access Library subscription resources from off-campus should be aware that Enterprise Technology Services (ETS) has upgraded the service.  The new VPN supports a wider variety of operating systems, including mobile clients for iOS, Android, and ChromeOS.  To use the new VPN, users must download and install new client software. 

The Library of Alexandria, ancient Egypt’s hallowed center of classical learning, was designed to be a universal research center that contained all the books—or scrolls—in the world. Fast-forward 2,300 years. UCSB Library’s contribution to today’s version of a universal library is the Alexandria Digital Research Library (ADRL), an online platform we built to store and deliver the Library’s distinctive collections of digital research materials.

The UCSB Library website (www.library.ucsb.edu) just got a major facelift--our first redesign of the site in more than five years. The redesigned website is mobile friendly and takes advantage of increased database-driven functionality to minimize duplicate content. A simplified navigational structure and reduced number of pages makes it easier for users to quickly find what they’re looking for.

You can’t actually try on Helen Keller’s bathing suit (and wouldn’t want to, because it’s cumbersome), but her old-fashioned way is one of more than 13 million items you can see online via the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). This online portal, available for free to the public at https://dp.la, offers digital access to photographs, manuscripts, maps, recordings, music scores, videos and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the U.S. Here are just a few examples of DPLA content:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded UCSB Library a $100,000 National Leadership Grant for "Always Already Computational: Library Collections as Data." The funds will be used for a series of meetings to develop strategies around library collections that support computationally-driven research and teaching. Of 85 submitted projects, only 15 were selected nationally for funding.