Hello! Here's the latest from the Environmental Design and Moffitt Reference Desks, at UC Berkeley.

• I'm looking for books about gay people's relationships with their siblings. Not books about birth order or psychological theories, but about how adults and young adults relate with their gay siblings. (Melvyl)
• I need to know about development pressures all up and down the CA coastline. I.e., I want to know about what projects are being proposed, what opposition there is, what the trends are. I'm doing my undergraduate senior thesis on this topic. (Melvyl for gov docs, environmental impact statements. Web for organizations involved. ESPM & LN Academic for articles. Referred also to WRCA.)
• I'm looking for the book Graph Theory, 1736-1936.
• I'm looking for information about past plans to use the San Francisco bayshore. I'm particularly interested in a scheme to slice a chunk off the top of Mt. San Bruno and fill in part of the Bay with it, using giant conveyor belts overtop the city to move the fill. The firm proposing it was called WestBay Associates, and the proposal was in the late 1960s. I'm also interested in a scheme to build a bridge from Telegraph Hill to Marin, circa 1962. I'd really like to find visual images, particularly artists' renderings, of how these projects were supposed to look.
• How can I use the catalog to find books on San Francisco residential architecture?
• I'm looking for a copy of Thomas Schumacher's book on the Danteum project; if I can't find the book, I'd like to find some content from it online, and some substantive reviews.
• I need to find books about the impact of the Korean War on South Korea. (Melvyl.)
• I'm looking for a copy of Walter Benjamin's essay A Short History of Photography. I don't know which volume it was published in. (This was MUCH harder than it should have been. Pathfinder and Melvyl did nothing, Essay and General Literature Index did nothing, looking at the ToC of Illuminations and Reflections in Amazon did nothing. Finally found a reference in Google, to a translation published in Artforum in 1977.)

Hello! Here's the latest from the Moffitt Reference Desk, the Environmental Design desk, and the Doe/Moffitt chat reference pilot project:

• I'm looking for an issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies that seems like it should be on the shelf--but it isn't. Is it in remote storage? (Yup.)
  
• I'm looking for these proceedings from a conference about floodplains and riparian habitat. (Google, Melvyl.)
• I'm looking for statistical yearbooks for various Chinese cities. (Melvyl, at the Chinese Studies Library.)
• How do I get full text of this article I've located in the database?
• I'm looking for an overview of how the IMF rebuilt Vietnam's economy after WWII. (Subject encyclopedias for background and overview, particularly Encyclopedia of Modern Asia. Followed cites from those bibliographies into the stacks.)
• I'm looking for the original house plans sold by companies in books to homeowners--i.e., house plans (and sometimes building materials or even whole houses) sold from catalogs.
• I'm looking for maps of Rotterdam, both current and in the 19th century. I'd also like to find books about Rotterdam, because they're likely to have images and maps of the city. (Referred to Earth Sciences for maps, but also searched Pathfinder for books.)
• I'm looking for an editorial cartoon published in Judge magazine in the late 1880s. I don't know the exact date it was published, or the title of the article associated with it. I just saw it reproduced in a book, which said "Judge magazine, late 1880s." (Pathfinder for print issues of Judge owned by UCB. No digital versions in APS, Archive of Early Americana, American Memory, and no indexing in Readers' Guide Retrospective. Can find copies in Worldcat, but student needed within 2 days.)
• I'm looking for these articles and books that I found referenced in Index Islamicus. I can't figure out how to actually get them, although I know everything about them.

I have a feeling that I may be reposting some questions at intervals...my extremely scientific "cut and paste from a draft" method of distributing questions over time doesn't jibe well with the Blogger interface, it seems. Apologies for duplication.

Hello! Here's the latest from the Moffitt and Environmental Design Reference desks, as well as an occasional question from IM reference. Our meebo pilot has been running for about a week now, and while it's still pretty low to the ground, we're starting to get some business. (A few questions an hour is fine, because we can do other stuff in the meantime. Low-investment, low-risk.)

• I'm looking for several books on child soldiers in Africa, primarily in Uganda. (Pathfinder, Melvyl, public library catalogs.)
• I'm looking for information about a building/installation created in New York at PS1, called Dunescape. It was by a firm called SHOP. It was put up in the spring of 2005, and taken down that summer. Can you help me find articles or any other information--plans, photos, etc.--about it?
• I'm looking for dissertations about sound spaces (i.e., theory of acoustic design.) I want to see how past students have handled this topic.
• I'm looking for background information on Strawberry Creek. (UCB guides and planning docs.)
• I need to find out about American popular culture from the 1920s to the 1970s. I don't have a fixed topic yet, and I want to get a broad sense of consumer trends, amusements, hobbies, and other aspects of socia life during this period.
• I need to find a copy of a short story by Veronica Montes. It won the Ivy Terasaka short story award, but I'm not sure if it's been published in print.
• I need to look at some newspaper articles from Chicago papers that we don't have here at Berkeley. We do have access to them through CRL, but I'm not sure how to request them via ILL.
• I'm looking for information about the relationship of Chinese-American parents to their children, especially for information about tension, depression, and other negative aspects. (Sociological Abstracts, for full text articles--paper was due the next day.)
• How can I find out which are the best drama schools, for a BA in Theater/Performing Arts? (US World & News Report, Peterson's Guides.)
  

I'm pleased to announce (and link to) the Doe/Moffitt Chat Reference pilot project!

I and seven other librarians at UC Berkeley are offering live chat reference services for 16 hours a week, until December 19. We're just getting off the ground, but we're eager for business--come ask us your questions!