New Memoir Published on eScholarship by Prominent Sio Emeritus Faculty

We’re thrilled to announce the publication of Charles Kennel’s autobiography, From the Cold War to Global Warming: A Scientific Odyssey.

Charles F. Kennel, between 1970 and 1985. SIO Photographic Laboratory Collection. SAC 44. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego. https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb66222247 . Photograph used with permission.

In November of 2021, a colleague in the library, Peter Mueller, had a chance to visit with Ellen and Charles Kennel and learned that during the Covid “lockdown,” Professor Kennel had taken the opportunity to write his memoirs. Peter suggested that he work with the UC San Diego Library’s Scholarly Communication to publish the autobiography on the UC’s open access institutional repository and publication platform, eScholarship. It was important to partner with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s embedded librarian and Subject Specialist for Earth and Marine Sciences, Amy Butros. Amy works tirelessly to build the OA collection of SIO research on eScholarship and has a deep knowledge of SIO’s history and the impact of its former director.

We guided the publication through image rights review and publication metadata best practices. Given the time-consuming nature of rights review, we hired a student, Xinbei Li, to help track down rights holders and locate openly licensed alternatives. Eight months into the project, Amy recommended that Dr. Kennel hire Tim DeBold, who had recently worked at SIO as Instructional Scheduling Coordinator and had begun to freelance in editorial services. Tim came on board to finalize the manuscript as a proofreader and copyeditor. In a little over a year after the introduction of the project, Amy did the final review and posted the final manuscript on eScholarship January 23, 2023!

Charles F. Kennel is an American plasma physicist who served as the Executive Vice Chancellor of UCLA, the Associate Administrator of NASA, the Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and is the inaugural Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge. This volume contains his autobiography, which not only covers Dr. Kennel’s own life but also offers perspectives on the history of science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the author’s work in space research, plasma physics, astrophysics, climate change science, and sustainability.

Description written by Timothy DeBold for Kennel, C. F. (2023). From the Cold War to Global Warming: A Scientific Odyssey. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6pj6c3rf

For more information on Dr. Kennel’s illustrious career and personal papers see the catalog of his archives in the UC San Diego Library Special Collections, Charles F. Kennel Papers, 1989-2012 (SMC 9).

Charlie Kennel and Ellen Lehman at Charlie Fest. Photos from the August 28-29, 2014 celebration of Charlie Kennel at Scripps Seaside Forum. Scripps Institution of Oceanography on Flickr.

UCSD OER on East Asian History

Schneewind, S. “An Outline History of East Asia to 1200” (2020). Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d699767 

  • Interview: Allegra swift
  • Interview transcript: Anna Gabrielle F. Isorena
  • Interview recording editing and textbook final formatting: Haneen Mohamed

A demon from The Chʼu SilkManuscript:TranslationandCommentary(Canberra: Department of Far Eastern History,Australian National University, 1973).

Professor Sarah Schneewind approached the library in the spring of 2019 seeking options for self-publishing a textbook for the UC San Diego undergraduate course HILD 10 East Asia: The Great Tradition: Early History and Cultures of China, Korea, and Japan. She felt that the textbook she had been using was not meeting her needs and students were upset about the high cost of the book. As the Scholarly Communication Librarian focused on supporting the dissemination and sustainability of the scholarship and research produced at UC San Diego, I was excited to be able to work with Sarah to find the best publishing solution to both meet her needs and produce a textbook that could be used by others, without cost or barriers to access. I met with Sarah and consulted with the Digital Scholarship Librarian, Erin Glass, and the subject specialist librarian, Xi Chen. We looked at options such as Lever Press/Manifold, GitBooks, Scalar, Pressbooks, and, eScholarship, the UC’s open access repository and publishing platform. 

UC scholar publications:

Ultimately, eScholarship won out. The platform presents a low-barrier to entry as far as technicality and cost. The only restriction to uploading a publication to eScholarship is that authors need to be employed by the UC. Journals published on the platform are an exception – there must be some connection to a UC campus, while authors submitting manuscripts can be from outside the UC. While it is simple to post a pdf, some textbooks produced on eScholarship, such as the climate science OA textbook – Bending the Curve, have a high production value and an entire team to produce the work. Sarah was creating this resource herself without technical support and her only criteria being complete creative control, no book publishing charge (BPC), and provided at no cost to her students.

The work was not without cost to produce however, and this is an important consideration if libraries are going to support the production of open educational resources (OER). Sarah successfully petitioned for course release to work on the book but it only covered a portion needed. She was able to pay a graduate student to work with me on locating images that were Creative Commons licensed or in the public domain. I also helped the student with template requests for getting permission from rights holders. I was able to employ an undergraduate to format the final pdf. I spent a lot of time giving guidance on discoverability and rights best practices. Sarah good-naturedly called my methods “bullying,” but I would describe myself as persistent 😉 . At any rate we’d agree that the effort was successful. As of this posting, the metrics are pretty impressive for only being online a couple of months. As Sarah said in the interview that I recorded (interview recording and transcript).

“Of course, my colleagues, just like me, have students who have no money, so they’re very happy to have an open access textbook that they can use. On my eScholarship statistics, I had 2,111 views or something on this textbook in the last month since you posted it. Again, I’m never going to attain that on anything that I write just based on my own actual research. I would say, overall, the response numerically has been very good.”

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d699767#metrics

Unlatching @KUnlatched

10 title(s) have now been unlatched over the last 7 days, please see below the breakdown by collection. The following titles are now available on the Open Research Library (search titles here).

  • KU Open Services
    • Biomaterialbanken – Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen
  • KU Select 2019: HSS Backlist Books
    • Becoming a European Homegrown Jihadist
    • Francophonie and the Orient
    • Heritage and Romantic Consumption in China
    • Medieval Saints and Modern Screens
    • Nazism and Neo-Nazism in Film and Media
    • Women in the Silent Cinema
  • KU Select 2019: HSS Frontlist Books
    • Frontier Tibet
    • Independent Filmmaking across borders in Contemporary Asia
    • Women and Power at the French Court, 1480-1565

In other KU news:

@ucsdlibrary contributes to @KUnlatched. Read #oa chapters and editions in LSP pubs by #ucsd linguists @ryanlepic, @emily_clemily, & the Dean of UCSD Social Sciences, Carol Padden!

Chapter 23 of On looking into words (and beyond): Structures, Relations, Analyses by Ryan Lepic and Carol Padden.
Theory and description in African Linguistics: Selected papers from the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics co-edited UCSD’s Emiliy Clem.

UCSD Faculty Publication, Digital Collection & Librarians’ Contributions

Sent-down Youth Welcome CCAS Delegation from the UC San Diego Library Digital Collection, the Paul Pickowicz Collection. Used with permission from Dr. Pickowicz.

UC San Diego librarian and Subject Specialist for Chinese Studies, Xi Chen, wrote the preface for Professor Paul Pickowicz’s (UCSD History Dept.) new book titled A Sensational Encounter with High Socialist China. Published in October 2019 by City University of Hong Kong Press, this book incorporates around 100 photos from our Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars Digital Collection.

In the preface, Chen highlights the UC San Diego Library‘s role in contributing to this book project and several other library collections related to Prof Pickowicz’s research works. Huge thanks to UC San Diego Library colleagues (Cristela Garcia-Spitz, Rachel Lieu, Kirk Wang, Ryan Johnson, and Shi Deng) in the Digital Library Development Program and Metadata Services for making Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) collection live and known to scholars in the U.S. and around the world!