Magazines You Can Check Out

The Magazines & Newspapers Center literally has hundreds of magazines you can browse and peruse through in our Reading Room, but you can only read them while you are in the library. Are you aware, however, that we also have a Circulating Periodicals Collection? Instead of staying at the library, you can actually check magazines out as you normally do with other library items--up to 3 weeks!

At the Main Library, go to the 1st floor and there you'll find our Circulating Periodicals Collection. Or even better, visit your local branch library, and you'll find a wider selection of titles there. To see if your branch library carries a particular title, follow these steps:

1. Go to the SFPL home page and run a search for a title such as Vogue.

2. Next, you'll see a page of search results. Go ahead and select Vogue or just click on Show library holdings, and you'll pull up the full record:

3. Scroll down the record and look for a section that says "Library Has," and you'll find a list of branch libraries that carry back issues of Vogue.

The Magazines & Newspapers Center has many more titles that do not circulate, so you are more than welcome to drop by anytime to peruse our collection.

Power Googling: Searching Smarter and Faster

On Saturday, May 8, 2010 from 2-3:30 p.m., the Magazines & Newspapers Center will present a workshop--"Power Googling: Searching Smarter and Faster"--where you can sharpen your Web searching skills using Google.

When searching for information on the Web, many people simply "Google it," but rarely tap into Google's advanced search functions. In this workshop, prepare to explore and unlock some of Google's hidden features and resources, fine-tune your searches with prefix operators and "hacks," manipulate search results, and unleash the full power of this popular search engine.

-Address: 100 Larkin Street (at Grove)
-Location: Main Library, Fifth Floor Training Center
-Event Date & Time: Saturday, May 8, 2010 (2 to 3:30 p.m.)

137 years of Popular Science - now available online

Popular Science recently announced that 137 years of its back issue archive is now available online through Google Book Search. If you access the archive through Google Book Search, you can browse through the issues and covers all in one place.

While at the Google site you can also browse through other magazine archives, including Ebony, Men's Health, and Spin.

However, if you prefer to view the print version of Popular Science, come by the Magazines & Newspapers Center.

ABCs of Digital Scanning - Microfilm

The Magazines and Newspapers Center is hosting another hands-on, beginning workshop to introduce digital scanning techniques for 35mm microfilm and periodical microfiche found in our collection. Please plan to attend and participate as we work together to scan, capture, edit, and save archival text and images!

-Address: 100 Larkin Street (at Grove)

-Location: Main Library, Fifth Floor, Magazines & Newspapers Center, Microfilm Room

-Event Date and Time: Monday, April 26, 2010 (Noon to 1PM)

Underground Newspapers on Microfilm: San Francisco Oracle

The Underground Newspaper Microfilm Collection in the San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch, comprises a twentieth century revolution in graphic arts, journalism, politics, morality and culture. The reporters, editors, idealists, students, activists, crusaders and adventurers who created the alternative print culture of the 1960s were the original dreamers; precursors to the electronic architects of counter-culture Internet media today. In a time of growing social, political, and philosophical polemics, the San Francisco Oracle was born from the need to express a more visual and transcendent cultural radicalism.

Or, as co-founder Allen Cohen once said, "The Oracle was not planned, it was discovered."

Merging the Haight-Ashbury community it served with experimental graphics and journalism in tune with an acid-tinged Orientalia redolent of pacifism and generational promise, the Oracle was a triumph of both quixotic impracticality and newly-available offset printing. With the ability to bring 'camera ready' pages (heavy on the art and graphics, lighter on the text) to an offset print shop at drastically reduced rates (far less than the old letterpress costs of operation), the monthly Oracle was an immediate creative and countercultural citywide success by late Fall of 1966. Artistically peaking with original run issues #4 through #12, the Oracle embraced the talents of Steve Levine, Travis Rivers, Gabe Katz and many others who wrote and designed the paper on site in the Haight at Jay and Rod Thelin's Psychedelic Shop. This fleeting period of seventeen months coincided with San Francisco's 'flower-power' era, and the Oracle bled with illuminated rainbows of split fountain colors and blossomed with an almost utopian insistence . . . .

It was the San Francisco Oracle that called together, on New Year's Day, 1967, the youth enmasse Golden Gate Be-in . . . "a union of love and activism...will finally occur ecstatically when Berkeley's political activists and hip community and San Francisco's spiritual generation all over California meet for a gathering of tribes . . ."

Historically tied to the first generation of underground American newspapers as much by chronology as by a hopeful and sincere spirit of community, the Oracle reflected an inexplicable vision of artful, intricate, childlike fantasy and a genuine humanist affirmation predating the psychedelics of commodity and the sort of cynical, fast food, turned-on hippie paraphernalia designed for sale to tourists. The Oracle's mission was to be "a graphic expression of man's highest ideals: music, art, ideas, prophesy, poetry and the expansion of consciousness through drugs."

To view the San Francisco Oracle (and our entire collection of Underground Newspapers) on microfilm, visit the Magazine and Newspapers Center on the fifth floor of the San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch. See also our San Francisco History Center for related items of interest.

E-zine: Transitions Abroad

Anyone who has desires to travel, work, or learn in places far from "home" will find inspiring information at the Transitions Abroad Web site. What started first as a conventional paper magazine "transitioned" to only Web content after the Jan/Feb 2008 issue.

Here are a few examples of the types of articles one will find in each e-zine issue:

• "Volunteering in Africa: Top Tips and Volunteer Sending Organizations"

• "Laid Off? How to Make the Transition Abroad From a Career Tragedy"
  

• "Around the World by Sailboat"

Transitions Abroad, an "alternative travel magazine for international travelers seeking work, study, living and special interest travel abroad" includes "extensive listings and up-to-date articles for independent and low-budget travel."

The Magazines & Newspapers Center has a selection of older paper issues of this periodical; the Web site has a more sizable archive of 10 years of these issues dating back to 1999.