UC Davis has morphed into a gigantic book club, thanks to the Campus Community Book Project. The sponsors of this unique program (the Campus Council of Community & Diversity, the Office of Campus Community Relations and the Office of the Provost) have selected the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman.

Fadiman's book is a nonfiction volume that explores the clash of cultures between the modern American medical establishment and a family of immigrants from Southeast Asia. By choosing this book for the project, the sponsors hope to spark thoughtful and broad-based dialogue at UC Davis about cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary communication.

The idea behind the book project is that UC Davis students, faculty, and staff will read this book and participate in some of the many planned community events that will provide opportunities to explore and discuss the book. To facilitate campus involvement, the Office of Campus Community Relations has created a Web site for the project that provides plenty of orientation materials about the book and also serves as a key learning tool for eager readers.

On this Web site, you can read various in-depth articles that have been published about the communal reading project by local newspapers (California Aggie, Dateline, and the Sacramento Bee). There's also a section devoted to the author, Anne Fadiman, in which you can view her bio, read interviews she has given, and browse reviews of the book.

To gain some additional insight and help guide your own reading of the book, there are discussion questions posed on the site. These range from questions about specific events chronicled in the book, to more general questions about Hmong culture and history. There is even a lively, colorful timeline outlining the historical events important to the context of Fadiman's book.

Involved readers will find a useful calendar of campus events for the book project. The events surrounding this communal book-reading suggest the great potential this endeavor has for enriching our community. There will be lectures on many topics related to the book, and even a panel discussion on November 19 that will include members of the Lee family. The entire program culminates on December 2 with a visit to the campus by the author herself.

A new site was launched this summer to help you create and manage your UC Davis computing account. At this site you will be able to:

• Create a UC Davis Computing Accounts (for people new to the University)
• Check the status of your account
• Add or remove account services
• Test or change your Kerberos password
• Register your Ethernet card so you can get high-speed access on campus
• Change your listing information in the UC Davis online directory
• Redirect your UC Davis mail to another email account

The former version of this site (http://mothra.ucdavis.edu/) now redirects users directly to this new site. If you have questions about any of the services available on the Computing Accounts site, contact the IT Express Computing Help Desk at 754-4357(754-HELP), 182 Shields Library (for hours, see http://itexpress.ucdavis.edu/about/#contact), or ithelp@ucdavis.edu.

The UC Davis General Library presents the new Harvest Library Catalog. When you visit the new and improved Library home page you'll see this new research tool expands upon the powers of the Melvyl catalog (which is also still available for use.) Much like Melvyl, the Harvest Catalog allows you to search for books and journals in the library's vast collections. Unlike Melvyl, the Harvest Catalog allows you to

• see when the library is in the process of ordering that book you can't yet find on the shelves;
• restrict your search to Davis materials only, or to particular Library buildings on this campus;
• view languages that use non-Roman characters (Chinese, Korean, etc.) if you access the catalog Internet Explorer;
• take advantage of "UC e-links"-a button which offers an array of information about the book or journal you are looking up;
• search by call number

The Harvest Catalog is located on the main library home page, which doubles as the new Harvest Portal. This new portal continues to grow and expand in its capabilities, but right now you can already use it to search, simultaneously, the Harvest Catalog, the Melvyl catalog database of books, and the Melvyl catalog database of periodicals.

For more information and instructional sessions related to the Harvest Library Catalog, feel free to contact your subject specialists, or the Library's Instruction Services coordinator, Sandra Vella.

Send us your comments on this story.