EXPANDING ACCESS to UC scholarship is the idea a new service by the UC Office of Scholarly Communication. Using the new seminar series feature of the eScholarship Repository (http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship), UC faculty can publish seminar papers, lectures and colloquia, giving them a highly visible presence on the Internet….

THE FIRST GRADUATE STUDENTS at UC Merced -- 11 of them -- began coursework this fall, even without a completed physical campus to call home. The grad students and their faculty advisers will work at the university's facility at Castle Aviation and Economic Center, where labs and offices have been established over the last several years. They'll move to the new Merced campus as space becomes available, beginning next year….

SANDY BARBOUR was recently named the first female athletic director in the history of UC Berkeley. Barbour spent the past five years as the deputy director of athletics at the University of Notre Dame. She replaces Steve Gladstone, who is stepping down as athletic director after three years. Barbour will head a Division I intercollegiate athletic program that fields 27 sports with an annual budget of about $40 million….

CALIFORNIA HIGHER EDUCATION received a "B" from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in its third biennial report card on America's colleges, reported The Sacramento Bee. California's affordability factor is down from an "A" two years ago. The lower score stems largely from steep fee increases enacted during the 2002-03 school year that hit students in all three segments of the state's public higher education system….

LITERARY READING is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature, reported the National Endowment for the Arts in August. The NEA study, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, reports drops in all groups studied, with the steepest rate of decline -- 28 percent -- occurring in the youngest age groups….

UC RIVERSIDE historian Clifford Trafzer co-edited Native Universe, a book published for the Sept. 21 opening of the National Museum in Washington, D.C. Located between the Air and Space Museum and the nation's Capitol, this will be the last of the Smithsonian museums dotted along the National Mall in Washington D.C....

NORTHERN CALIFORNIANS will now have an opportunity to participate in more medical research that could lead to better treatments for everything from Alzheimer's disease and cancer to obesity, strokes and HIV/AIDS. The Sacramento Veterans Affairs Medical Center, in partnership with the UC Davis School of Medicine, has been officially designated as a "General Clinical Research Center" by the National Center for Research Resources, part of the federal National Institutes of Health….

UC SANTA BARBARA will house the music archives of the late Don Tosti, "the godfather of Latin rhythm and blues." Tosti, who passed away in August, donated his personal papers and other memorabilia from his career to the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at UC Santa Barbara's Davidson Library….

THE BIRTH OF THE INTERNET took place 35 years ago -- and it began at UCLA. On Oct. 29, UCLA will celebrate this historic event with a daylong forum on Internet issues. UCLA became the first node of what was then known as the ARPANET on Sept. 2, 1969. That was when a team of engineers established the first network connection between two computers, ushering in a new method of global communication. A month later another connection was set up at Stanford.

-- By Clifton B. Parker