FROM THE DIRECTOR
bancroft.berkeley.edu / The Bancroft Press
This past fall we devoted a great deal of attention to the upcoming renovation of the Doe Annex, Bancroft’s home, the Bancroft Centennial Campaign to fund the project (going very well, thank you; $14 million in pledges and gifts as we go to press, of a total of $20 million needed), and the plans for Bancroft’s ongoing operations, especially public services, while we are out of the building, from roughly June 2005 through December 2006.
As we begin to plan Bancroft’s operations during the renovation, however, it has become quite clear that it won’t be business as usual. Current arrangements are for Bancroft’s various units to be spread from one end of the campus to the other: The Mark Twain Papers and Project will be housed in the brand new building on the corner of Oxford Street and Hearst Avenue. The Regional Oral History Office, along with the offices of University Librarian Tom Leonard and the library’s information systems staff, will move to Evans Hall, the large and singularly graceless building just to the northeast of the Doe Annex. Bancroft’s technical services and administrative offices will move to a set of temporary metal buildings just west of the Hearst gymnasium.
Bancroft’s reading room and other public services—what most people think of as Bancroft—will relocate, perhaps to the space now occupied by the Music Library on the second floor of Morrison Hall before the latter’s move into the new Jean Hargrove Music Library building.
All of this is simply to say that while the renovation project is going on, physical access to Bancroft’s collections will of necessity be limited. Fortunately, since the late 1980s Bancroft has been engaged in a systematic effort to provide electronic access to its holdings, first by converting the card file to machine-readable form (Bancroft was the first special collections library in the world to do this), then by making its finding aids or inventories of manuscript and archival collections available on the Web (Bancroft and Main Library staff developed the Encoded Archival Description standard, since adopted by the Library of Congress, specifically for this purpose), and finally by digitizing significant portions of our collections for web publication.
All of these electronic resources are available to researchers, students, and the general public through the Online Archive of California (OAC) via Bancroft’s website, bancroft.berkeley.edu. The earliest of the virtual collections (1994–1997) was CalHeritage, a proofof- concept pilot project that selected almost 30,000 images from 200 different Bancroft collections. Since then we have focused more narrowly on specific collections or themes. Thus the “Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive” offers more than 7,000 images from the various relocation camps during World War II, while the “Chinese in California 1850–1925” website provides access to a rich collection of texts and images drawn from the collections of Bancroft, Cal’s Ethnic Studies Library, and the California Historical Society.
Bancroft also has a long history of making its collections available in print, and the recent past has seen a revitalization of our traditional publication program. The Mark Twain Project has just released three volumes, including the new scholarly edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, volume 6 of Mark Twain’s Letters (1874–1875), and Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts, an unpublished play headed for a Broadway tryout. Scheduled for fall 2004 is the Project’s first book designed for a nonscholarly audience, Mark Twain’s Helpful Hints for Good Living: A Handbook for the Damned Human Race. Recent oral histories include those of artists David Ireland and Stanley Galli, Bakersfield rancher George Nickel, Asian Art Museum founder Marjorie Bissinger, and San Francisco lawyer and former chair of the UC Board of Regents William Coblentz. The Friends themselves continue to produce annual Keepsakes, most recently Mark Twain Press Critic, a set of three unpublished pieces with notes by University Librarian and Professor of Journalism Tom Leonard.
Bancroft has also begun to forge innovative partnerships with other publishers. Thus Bear in Mind, edited by Susan Snyder, Bancroft’s Head of Public Services, was co-published with Berkeley’s Heyday Press; and Bancroft’s manuscript of unpublished poetry of classic Mexican author José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, edited by Nancy Vogeley (U. of San Francisco), came out in a co-edition with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Finally, a long-sought goal to provide high-quality reproductions of Bancroft’s prints, posters, paintings, and other pictorial materials has been met through the collaboration with online retailer zazzle.com.
In short, Bancroft will be gone from its accustomed location in the center of campus for a while, but thanks to the vitality of our digitization and publishing programs we shall continue to provide access to the marvelous riches entrusted to our care.
Volume 124
Spring 2004
Table of Contents
From the Director: bancroft.berkeley.edu/The Bancroft Press
Journal of a Trip to California
Bear in Mind: The California Grizzly
The Legacy of Edward Oscar Heinrich
Students Practice History in Bancroft
Regional Oral History Office: Richmond Migration: The World War II Experience
Mark Twain Papers: The Curators' Chickens Come Home to Roost
Gifts Benefitting The Bancroft Library
