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UC Berkeley’s Support for Open Access Book Publishing, January 2026

Posted on by Timothy Vollmer
Four academic book covers displayed side by side: 'Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI' by Nina Begus with a golden mask image; 'Movable Londons: Performance & The Modern City' by Julia H. Fawcett featuring a classical painting of a theater performance; 'The Values of the Vernacular: Essays in Medieval Romance Languages and Literatures in Dialogue with Simon Gaunt' edited by Hannah Morcos and others, showing a medieval manuscript illustration; and 'Understanding Child Welfare' by Richard P. Barth and others from the Elgar Understanding Series, with a gradient blue and green cover design.
Recent books published open access by UC Berkeley authors with support from the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative

UC Berkeley Library continues to support a variety of ways our authors can participate in open access (OA) publishing to contribute to UC’s research and teaching mission. This mission includes the practice of “transmitting advanced knowledge” by helping faculty, researchers, and students create and share their scholarship with peers, and the world.

While the system of scholarly publishing includes traditional publications such as peer-reviewed academic articles, conference proceedings, data sets, and more, read on below for some updates on how UC Berkeley Library—and the broader University of California system—is supporting authors in publishing open access books.

Berkeley’s Support for Open Access Books

While many UC authors create academic journal articles as an output of their research, others focus on producing a scholarly book. Book authors can realize a variety of benefits with open access publishing, including increasing the reach of their scholarship, building relationships within their academic community, garnering more citations, making their scholarly books more affordable for students, improving accessibility for print-disabled users, and more.

UC Berkeley is supporting authors who wish to publish their books open access. The library provides funding assistance and access to publishing platforms and tools for UCB authors to make their books OA.

Berkeley Research Impact Initiative

The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) is a program to foster broad public access to the work of UCB scholars by encouraging the Berkeley community to take advantage of open access publishing opportunities—including books and journal articles. BRII is the local open access fund that helps defray the costs associated with publishing open access books and research articles. For books, BRII can contribute up to $10,000 per book for it to be published open access. Below are recent UCB-authored books published with the assistance of BRII.

  • Understanding Child Welfare, by Jill Duerr Berrick, Richard P. Barth, Melissa Jonson-Reid, Antonio R. Garcia, Johanna K.P. Greeson, John Gyourko, and Brett Drake

Springer Open Access books

Since 2021, the UC Berkeley Library has had an institutional open access book agreement with Springer Nature. The partnership provides open access funding to UC Berkeley affiliated authors who have books accepted for publication in Springer, Palgrave, and Apress imprints. This means that these authors can publish their books open access at no direct cost to them. The agreement covers all disciplines published by Springer. All the books are published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license for free access and downloading.

Pressbooks platform & workshops

The UC Berkeley Library hosts an instance of Pressbooks (https://berkeley.pressbooks.pub/), an online platform through which the UC Berkeley community can create open access books, open educational resources (OER), and other types of digital scholarship.

To learn more about how to create and publish your own eBooks on Pressbooks, join our upcoming demo and workshop on February 19, 2026. RSVP

An event flyer for the Berkeley Library titled "Publish Digital Books and Open Educational Resources with Pressbooks." The workshop is scheduled for February 19, 2026, from 11am to 12pm via Zoom. The design features a maroon background and a colorful "Open Access" lock logo.

Broader UC efforts for OA book publishing

A current goal of the UC Libraries is to strategically extend its support for OA book publishing. The UC is contributing to several open access book publishing ventures within the monograph publishing community, including Opening the Future, MIT’s Direct to Open, the University of Michigan Press’ Fund to Mission, the Open Book Collective, and more. These models secure investments from libraries and other stakeholders, and agree to publish some or all of their frontlist books open access, with limited or zero direct cost to the authors. The backlist books are made accessible to participating institutions.

The UC is also pursuing three OA book publishing pilot projects with University of California Press, Duke University Press, and Oxford University Press. The efforts “will enable UC authors publishing books with select university presses to choose open access at no cost to them, and will also begin opening previously published books by UC authors.”

Finally, the UC Libraries has released a new report called Advancing Open Monograph Opportunities at UC. It outlines a “values-based framework, key recommendations, and practical strategies for advancing OA monograph publishing” across the UC system. Four recommendations presented in the report include:

  1. Strategic investment in BPC-based OA monograph initiatives that directly support authors and publishing programs aligned with UC research and teaching.
  2. Support for Diamond OA and free-to-read models that remove both author- and reader-facing fees while advancing bibliodiversity, multilingual scholarship, and community-led publishing.
  3. Strengthened partnerships with university presses, recognizing their central role as trusted stewards of peer-reviewed scholarship and their importance in the transition to open models.
  4. Investment in open, community-owned infrastructure and high-standards OA initiatives that support discoverability, metadata quality, preservation, and long-term sustainability.

Read the full report in eScholarship (UC’s institutional repository).

If you’re a UC Berkeley community member and interested to learn more about how you can create and publish an open access book, visit our website or send an email to [email protected].

Oral History Center’s 2026 Oral History Summer Institute in Art History

Posted on by Shanna Farrell

The Oral History Center (OHC) is hosting a two-week Summer Institute in Art History program from June 8 – 21, 2026. The program is for scholars and professionals studying art history and visual culture to foster an in-depth understanding of oral history. This program will be held on UC Berkeley’s campus and participants must have the ability to commit to a two-week stay. The OHC is accepting applications from February 1 through March 1, 2026.

Applications are open to professors, curators, post-doctoral researchers and fellows, museum professionals, and artists at any stage of their career. Applicants must not be currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program. They must work in art history or a related field and have an interest in integrating oral history into their work, whether it be conducting interviews, incorporating archival interviews into an exhibition, or teaching students how to design and implement oral history projects.

The goal of the program is to provide scholars with current best practices in oral history methodology and theory; practical skills to conduct their own oral history projects; opportunities to practice interviewing; insights from art historians and visual arts professionals who use oral history in multiple capacities; and dedicated time and space to reflect on the role of oral history in their work.

The Summer Institute in Art History features a mix of instruction from seasoned OHC staff, professors and curators who specialize in art history and visual culture, and guest speakers, including Bridget Cooks, Elaine Yau, Shannon Jackson, Anneka Lenssen, and more. Instruction will be blended with small workshop groups, one-on-one advising, individual work time, and field visits around the San Francisco Bay Area.

The program will be at no cost to selected fellows, as this Summer Institute was made possible with support from Getty through its Connecting Art Histories initiative. There is a $5 application fee. We will accept up to 20 fellows currently residing in the United States at the time of the Summer Institute.

Getty
Getty

The OHC was founded in 1953 and one of the oldest oral history programs in the United States. Over the decades, we have conducted several thousands of interviews on myriad topics, including on the lived experiences and history of artists, art institutions, and philanthropy. Today, the OHC produces carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed oral histories and interpretive materials for the widest possible use, resulting in an archive of over 25,000 hours of interview recordings and transcripts. The vast majority of these interview transcripts have been digitized and made available online for public access via the UC Berkeley Library Digital Collections. The OHC has undertaken numerous projects on art museums, foundations, and visual artists, including with the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Getty Research Institute, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Asian Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, and the San Francisco Opera.

Graphic with timeline of application process
Oral History Summer Institute in Art History Application Timeline

Publisher Highlight: Angel City Press

Posted on by Bee Lehman
Collage of Angel City Press covers

Founded in 1992 in Los Angeles by Scott McAuley and Paddy Calistro, Angel City Press (https://acp.lapl.org/) focuses on non-fiction with an emphasis on Southern California’s space, history, art, and music.[1] Under their leadership, the press published more than 100 volumes including Hollywood du Jour (1993, link to UC Library Search).

In 2023, the co-founders decided to retire and donated the press and its catalog to the Los Angeles Public Library.[2] Under the LAPL, the press publishes seven books a year on diverse topics, but each focused on the LA area. Between the volumes, the books offer not only an exploration of the LA area, but an amazing look into some of the LAPL’s collections, drawing on images, illustrations, and more.

Readers can find information about their new releases and book talks on Angel City Press’ Instagram page. The press also posts phenomenal historical photographs and other LA-related ephemera from LA Public Library’s special collections (About the collections). For more digitized material, check out TESSA, the digital collections of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Titles About the Literary Scene

More Titles at the UCs

UC Berkeley’s Doe and Bancroft Libraries as well as UC Los Angeles collect heavily from across Angel City Press’ topical coverage. You can find most of their catalog through the UC Library Search.

Notes

[1] Angel City Press at Los Angeles Public Library. “Our Story.” Accessed January 28, 2026. https://acp.lapl.org/about-us/.

[2] “Our Story,” Angel City Press at Los Angeles Public Library, accessed January 28, 2026, https://acp.lapl.org/about-us/; Jim Ruland, “The L.A. Public Library Is Getting into Book Publishing. Why It Makes Total Sense,” Books, Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2024, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2024-01-08/the-l-a-public-library-is-getting-into-book-publishing-why-it-makes-total-sense.

International Collaboration (VŠE Prague, UT Austin, UC Berkeley) Builds Agentic AI System for CIA FOIA Archives

Posted on by Liladhar

International Collaboration (VŠE Prague, UT Austin, UC Berkeley) Builds Agentic AI System for CIA FOIA Archives

Prague / Austin / Berkeley — A new international research collaboration has developed and tested a multi-stage “agentic AI” system capable of extracting structured historical knowledge from large, unstructured digital archives. Using declassified CIA documents as a case study, the research demonstrates how artificial intelligence can help transform thousands of pages of scanned archival material into a coherent, time-resolved narrative, making Cold War-era intelligence reporting significantly more accessible for the wider public.

The study, published in The Electronic Library, focuses on one of the most dramatic turning points in modern European history: the Prague Spring reforms and the subsequent Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. By applying AI-driven processing to the CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room, the team shows how today’s large language models (LLMs) can support the systematic reconstruction of historical reporting, while also highlighting the continued need for expert human oversight to preserve nuance, accuracy, and interpretive integrity.

This makes the research immediately useful not only for historians, but also for institutions deciding how to deploy AI responsibly at scale: libraries, archives, universities, and even public sector organizations managing large document collections.

A Collaboration Across Three Institutions and Disciplines

The project brings together expertise from three leading academic environments:

Prague University of Economics and Business contributed primarily to the design of the agentic workflow, the methodological framing of the solution, and the evaluation of the models, including the comparison of metrics, the analysis of the CIA FOIA Reading Room entity data structure, and the resulting information-ethical questions.

The University of Texas at Austin provided expert context in geopolitical and historical studies, which enabled grounding the case study and interpreting the results within the history of the Cold War.

UC Berkeley contributed a perspective from information science and librarianship, including work with digital collections and archival processing practice, which strengthened the applicability of the workflow for digital archives, libraries, and research organizations focused on history.

This cross-disciplinary cooperation reflects a growing reality: solving “big archive” challenges requires not only technical innovation, but also domain expertise and information science know-how.

From 2,122 Pages to Usable Knowledge: What the System Achieved

The research introduces an eight-agent workflow designed to mirror the real tasks historians and intelligence researchers face when working with archival material. The system was applied to 201 President’s Daily Brief documents, spanning January 1968 to January 1969, totaling 2,122 pages from the CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room.

The AI pipeline produced three key outputs:

  1. A month-by-month narrative summary of intelligence reporting on Czechoslovakia
  2. A structured list of key named entities (people, organizations, events) organized chronologically
  3. A thematic quantification of reporting, measuring how much attention was given to political, societal, economic, and tactical military topics

To reduce noise and improve relevance, the system used OCR (optical character recognition) and automated filtering. Out of more than 1.37 million characters extracted via OCR, the pipeline isolated 265,550 characters of relevant intelligence content, achieving an extraction rate of 19.3%—meaning over 80% of raw text was correctly removed as irrelevant metadata or unrelated content.

Why This Matters for Society

This research tackles a quiet but serious societal problem: massive collections of historically valuable documents exist but remain effectively “locked away” because they are not machine-readable or searchable in meaningful ways.

Many declassified archives—especially scanned collections—are technically accessible but practically unusable without months (or years) of manual work. By introducing a replicable agentic workflow, the study shows how AI can:

  • expand access to historical primary sources
  • reduce routine work (searching, cleaning, extracting, organizing)
  • support transparency and democratic access to government records
  • enable deeper analysis of geopolitical crises through time-resolved narratives

The research is grounded in the democratic logic behind the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): that an informed public is essential for a functioning democracy. In this context, AI becomes more than a productivity tool—it becomes a method for scaling public understanding of complex historical events.

A Key Message: AI Helps, But Experts Still Matter

A central conclusion is clear and responsible: fully automated historical analysis is not yet feasible without risk. OCR errors, model instability, and interpretive ambiguity remain real challenges.

The authors emphasize the need for human-in-the-loop workflows, where AI accelerates extraction and structuring, while experts validate, interpret, and preserve historical nuance.

In other words: AI can carry the heavy boxes—but humans still need to read the labels.

Main Takeaways

This research offers a practical and forward-looking message for archives, universities, and society:

  • Agentic AI can turn unstructured archives into structured knowledge
  • Large language models can support digital humanities at scale
  • Model selection must be based on measurable trade-offs (quality, cost, speed, stability)
  • Human oversight remains essential for credibility
  • The approach is replicable beyond Cold War history, and can be extended to other FOIA collections and geopolitical contexts

About the Publication

The study was published in The Electronic Library under the title:
“A multi-stage agentic AI system for extracting information from large digital archives: case study on the Czechoslovak year 1968 in CIA’s FOIA collection.”

Reference: Černý J, Avramov K, Pendse LR (2026;), “A multi-stage agentic AI system for extracting information from large digital archives: case study on the Czechoslovak year 1968 in CIA’s FOIA collection”. The Electronic Library, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-06-2025-0272

New Book by Debarati Sanyal

Posted on by Claude Potts

cover

Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges investigates the consequences of unfolding catastrophes across the world and the displacement they continue to produce. Through recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, it tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them at borders, the racialized and colonial histories that inform these technologies, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear witness to displacement. The book reorients us toward the creativity and movement of migrants themselves– their “arts of the border”—as well as toward the political force of the arts that represent them, whether in literature, documentary film, or art installations.

Sanyal proposes kino-aesthetics as a framework for capture and fugitivity at borders. From kino—to set in motion—and aesthetics— relating to sensory perception—kino-aesthetics conveys the force of bodies in motion and the image in its circulation. The book examines the simultaneity of capture and escape at thresholds of illegalization, from airport detention zones to Calais’s “jungle” and the Euro-African border at Ceuta and Melilla. What emerges throughout these case studies is a portrayal of border violence in its racial and colonial forms as well as an archive of refusal, fugitivity, and un-bordered imagining.

[from publisher’s site]

Debarati Sanyal is Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry and Professor of French (affiliated with Critical Theory, The Center for Race and Gender, and European Studies). Debarati’s research and teaching interests range from 19th-century French literature to contemporary critical refugee studies. Her first book, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), reclaimed Baudelaire’s aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Her second book, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), addressed the transnational circulations of memory and complicity in the aftermath of the Shoah, from post-WWII to the present. It was translated in French as Mémoire et complicité: Au Prisme de la Shoah (PUV, 2018) with a preface by Éric Fassin. A Guggenheim Fellow (2021-2022), she  is completing a book on migrant resistance, biopolitics and aesthetics in Europe’s current refugee “crisis.”

Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges. New York: Fordham University Press, 2025.

Publisher Highlight: Omnidawn Publishing

Posted on by Bee Lehman
Banner for Omnidawn

Founded in 2001, Omnidawn Publishing Inc. (https://www.omnidawn.com/) is a nonprofit, independent press based in Richmond, CA. Ken Keegan & Rusty Morrison founded the press to support their belief in the value of literature and stance that it would be a privilege to participate in the development and release of “lively, culturally pertinent, emotionally and intellectually engaging” material. The House focuses on poetry, both original and in translation.

A quarter century old, Omnidawn has a history of supporting and expanding the community of writers. Now headed by Rusty Morrison & Laura Joakimson, the two have renewed that commitment with an added focus on “becoming a more modernized, resilient and sustainable press.”[1] Part of that includes celebrating authors from different backgrounds, socio-economic status, sexuality, and physicality. Another aspect focuses on providing a yearly writing prize for first-time poets or poets with only one book already published.[2]

Omnidawn holds book readings, participates in festivals, and hosts poetry month events. You can find out more about their community events through their Instagram (link) and other social media accounts. This is also one of the many publishers that include works by our own, UNC Berkeley community members – so make sure to keep an eye on them!

Select Titles at UC Berkeley

Additional Titles

Not only does UC Berkeley’s Doe and Bancroft Libraries heavily collect from Omnidawn, but UCLA and UC Davis do as well. You can find the hundred-plus titles and their locations through our UC Library Search with a publisher limitation. Be aware that Omnidawn works with the University of Chicago Press for distribution (U of Chicago page).

Notes

[1] “Our Mission,” Omnidawn, accessed January 5, 2026, https://www.omnidawn.com/our-mission/.

[2] John Maher, “Fresh Off a National Book Award Win, Omnidawn Looks Toward the Holidays,” Publishers Weekly, December 4, 2023, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/93821-fresh-off-a-national-book-award-win-omnidawn-looks-toward-the-holidays.html.

Check-Out Art From The Graphic Arts Loan Collection At The Morrison Library

Posted on by Jennifer Osgood

The Graphic Arts Loan Collection (GALC) at the Morrison Library has been checking out art to UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty since 1958. We had a very successful Fall event, and now we’re back for two weeks this January to offer more prints to the campus community.

The purpose of the GALC since its inception has been to put art in the hands of UC Berkeley students (and the best way to appreciate art is to live with it!), so for two weeks starting on January 20th, our website will reopen to online reservations. We will fill requests on a first come, first served basis. While a majority of our collection was checked out last Fall, we still have some prints available, including 12 new pieces by artists such as Pavel Acevedo, Ansel Adams, Sharon Jue, and Leo Krikorian. We are also pleased to offer two prints from our 2025 Art Practice & Library Printmaking Award winner, Maxine Eschger.

If you already have two prints checked out and would like to switch your artwork, remember that you need to return one print in order to check out another.

 

 

A Semester at the Library Makerspace

Posted on by Oliver Murray

By Minh Nguyen, Undergraduate Library Making Fellow, 2025-2026

Looking back on my first semester as a Makerspace Fellow, I’ve realized that the Makerspace gradually became one of the places where I felt most at ease. What started as a job evolved into a space for exploration, quiet learning, and growth. Some days were spent troubleshooting 3D prints or helping prepare workshops; others were slower, tucked away in the Fiber Arts Room, picking up new skills one small step at a time. These came to be some of my highlights from working at the Makerspace. 

Rather than being marked by a single defining project, this experience was shaped by consistent, hands-on practice and the confidence to try unfamiliar tools simply for the sake of learning. This is what makes the Makerspace so special to me. As a student whose work is constantly assigned a grade, it was truly special to find a place where success isn’t quantified by a letter grade or even completion, but simply for the process of learning new things. 

A lot of my learning came from the people around me. I worked less directly with students than I expected, but I learned so much from Makerspace staff and other fellows through quick demos, casual troubleshooting sessions, and those moments where someone shows you a better way to do something and it immediately clicks. In fiber arts, that looked like experimenting with different stitches, starting embroidery, and picking up the basics of crocheting. In the fabrication side of the Makerspace, it meant figuring out how to diagnose common 3D printer issues, from first-layer problems to settings that quietly make or break a print, and learning to stay calm when the solution isn’t obvious yet.

I also gained confidence in the behind-the-scenes work that makes a creative space feel welcoming. Organizing workshops taught me how much thought goes into a “simple” event: making a process approachable, setting up materials so people can jump in, and building enough structure that beginners feel supported while still leaving room for personal style. Seeing my peer fellows run workshops with patience and flexibility helped me understand that the goal isn’t perfection, it’s progress. If people leave feeling capable and curious, the workshop did its job.

Another highlight from the Makerspace was the Phantom Felting workshop, as I was involved in the setup and the actual event. It was really rewarding to see the result of my work when setting the workshop up. It was through this workshop that I also learned how to needle felt and made my first needle felting piece. And the actual event was super successful in my opinion, it was awesome to see participants interact and learn from one another to successfully make their art. 

What I’ll carry with me most is the Makerspace mindset: slow down, try the thing, learn from others, and iterate without turning creativity into a checklist. On a campus that can make productivity feel like the only measure of value, the Makerspace reminded me that making can be playful, imperfect, and still deeply meaningful. I’m grateful for the skills I picked up, but even more grateful for the community that taught me how to keep learning in a way that feels grounded, human, and joyful.

February 19 workshop: Publish Digital Books & Open Educational Resources with Pressbooks

Posted on by Timothy Vollmer
An event flyer for the Berkeley Library titled "Publish Digital Books and Open Educational Resources with Pressbooks." The workshop is scheduled for February 19, 2026, from 11am to 12pm via Zoom. The design features a maroon background and a colorful "Open Access" lock logo.

Date/Time: Thursday, February 19, 2026, 11:00am–12:00pm
Location: Zoom. RSVP.

If you’re looking to self-publish work of any length and want an easy-to-use tool that offers a high degree of customization, allows flexibility with publishing formats (EPUB, PDF), and provides web-hosting options, Pressbooks may be great for you. Pressbooks is often the tool of choice for academics creating digital books, open textbooks, and open educational resources, since you can license your materials for reuse however you desire. Learn the basics of how to use Pressbooks for publishing your original books or course materials. We’ll also highlight a new integrated tool to ensure that your materials are accessible to users with disabilities.

Curious about how UC Berkeley faculty, students, and staff have used Pressbooks? Check out some of the Berkeley-created digital books and resources below, or browse over 8,600 open access books on the Pressbooks Directory.

Sofia’s Makerspace Exploration

Posted on by Oliver Murray

By Sofia Stein, Undergraduate Library Making Fellow, 2025-2026

Beginning my journey as a Makerspace Fellow, I was quite unsure of what I would do in my role and how it would fit into my current UC Berkeley life. Even as an enjoyer of many school maker spaces, I was still a bit new to our UC Berkeley Library Makerspace. There was so much to learn, so much to do, so much to ideate.

One of my favorite things that I learned was how to make stamps. It was a skill I had been wanting to understand forever, but had never had the time or materials. Through the fellowship, all of a sudden, both were available to me. And so, I drew and drew and then carved until I had a perfect stamp to ink and use. Making this stamp was the perfect experience for me, as building this skill led me to be perfectly prepared for the Stylish Tile Stamps workshop later in the semester.

What was even more exciting than the skills I learned, was teaching them and interacting with Makerspace users! I provided a lot of demonstrations on how to rethread sewing machines and slice 3D prints. Yet, my favorite teaching moments were when someone would come in with an idea that they had no idea how to execute. In those moments, the project would become a product of shared knowledge, which I love. For example, one time someone came in wanting to tailor their shirt for a Halloween costume. While I can sew and follow sewing instructions well, tailoring is a bit out of my depth. Luckily I was working with another Maker Fellow, Hannah, and she offered a lot of helpful hints and thoughts to add darts to the shirt, and soon we were pinning and chalking away. I loved this experience because through the combination of our minds and a little instruction, at the end of the day a tailored shirt appeared.

Being a Makerspace fellow this semester has truly been a gift. I feel that I have learned how to make time for making and to just start creating based on the materials I have. It’s nice to have dedicated time that is restful and creative outside of the hubbub of academics. Along with that, I have learned how to communicate and understand how to build a space better. Through designing flyers and workshops as well as being a presence in the Makerspace, I’ve learned how to think critically into the small things that create a positive user experience.