While, sadly, we cannot take advantage of the many books available in UCLA Libraries and the IS Lab collection during this period of online instruction, many Information Studies materials are actually available as e-books. You can search for these materials in the catalog the same way you would normally search for items. Use the filtering links on the right side of the results page in the online catalog to select “Online.” That way, your results will only include materials available online as e-books through UCLA. (Follow this link for instructions on how to search for e-books in the UCLA catalog.)
Today, I am excited to highlight a handful of e-books that I have found particularly useful for my coursework in the MLIS program. My hope is that this introduction will help you get familiar with the breadth of resources we still have access to even though the libraries are currently closed.
For starters, I would be remiss not to mention the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, edited by UCLA IS professors emeriti Marcia J. Bates and Mary Niles Maack. This serves as a great go-to for current LIS concepts and theory.
Media archival studies students are particularly in luck due to the numerous books on media preservation that are available online. From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition by Giovanna Fossati is a crucial guidebook for any media archival studies student or anyone interested in the transition from film to digital in an archival and preservation context. Also dealing with film preservation is Caroline Frick’s Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation, which covers the historical development of the film preservation movement, offering a national and international scope and calling for increased inclusivity in our preserved film heritage. A more generalized film preservation guide can be found in the National Film Preservation Foundation’s The Film Preservation Guide: The Basics for Archives, Libraries, and Museums.
A personal favorite that I originally encountered in IS431—Archives, Records, Memory and have found myself continually consulting for papers in other classes is Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century co-edited by Lyz Bly and Kelly Wooten. The essays in this collection cover a lot of ground including community archives, LGBT archives, archive activism, electronic records, and zine collections, to name a few. Also in the specialization of archival studies, let us not forget a must-read for contemporary archival theory edited by our own professor Anne Gilliland, plus Sue McKemmish and Andrew J. Lau, Research in the Archival Multiverse. This collection features over a thousand pages of writing by many essential archival studies scholars and researchers including the editors themselves, Luciana Duranti, Eric Ketelaar, Amelia Acker, Jonathan Furner, Karen F. Gracy and Michelle Caswell.
For those interested in digital preservation, the Library catalog has a wealth of e-books available on this topic. One of those titles that I have found particularly useful is Building Trust in Information: Perspectives on the Frontiers of Provenance edited by Victoria L. Lemieux, which covers themes relevant to digital preservation such as provenance, cloud-based storage, preservation metadata, digital libraries, knowledge organization, and so much more. MLIS students across all specializations will likely find this e-book useful in considering how digital concerns interface with their own professional interests.
If you are hoping to explore topics in digital humanities, The Routledge Companion to Spatial History, edited by Ian Gregory, Don DeBats, and Don Lafreniere, offers some really interesting insights into LIS studies and geographic information systems (GIS) for spatial research, analysis, and display. While not available through the UCLA Library, 3D/VR in the Academic Library: Emerging Practices and Trends, edited by Jennifer Grayburn, Zack Lischer-Katz, Kristina Golubiewski-Davis, and Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati, is available directly from the Council on Library and Information Science Resources (CLIR) website. The reports in this volume are wide ranging, dealing with emergent issues in the use of 3D and VR technologies for teaching and the role of libraries in supporting this work.
Of course, these examples only represent a small sampling of the e-books available through UCLA. If nothing here piques your interest or relates to your current coursework, you can always check out the online catalog directly or browse the subject headings for these e-books to find related material. Also, many university presses have opted to make their e-resources open source during the COVID-19 outbreak. I will close with a list of open access university presses (some are always open access, while others are making special accommodations for our current situation) for you to explore on your own.
Open Access Presses
University of North Texas Press
Resources from multiple presses available through Project MUSE
Resources for multiple presses available through ProQuest
Image Credits
From Grain to Pixel book cover (2018), https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463725002/from-grain-to-pixel.
Make Your Own History book cover (2012), https://litwinbooks.com/books/make-your-own-history/.
The Routledge Companion to Spatial History (2018), https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315099781.