United States

Academic librarians have increasingly gone public with their experiences of low morale and burnout, yet less attention has been paid to the workplace experiences of library staff. As Kaetrena Davis Kendrick notes in her work on the persistent harm of low morale among librarians, “the cost of silence can be high.” 

We decided to examine that gap in the research. In exploring the landscape of library staff morale, we hypothesized that the nature of the academic library’s hierarchies, and staff roles within them, would be major factors in levels of morale. We also sought to investigate questions of organizational culture, opportunities for professional development, and management style.

Our research team, including library staff, former library staff, a recent MLS grad and MLIS student, and librarians, conducted 34 structured interviews with academic library staff nationwide (purposefully excluding UC staff). The interviews took place during a three-week period in May-June 2020, and provide perhaps the final snapshot of library staff life in the pre-COVID era. Interviews were transcribed by a student who was trained by a member of our team, and de-identified transcripts were analyzed using the qualitative data analysis software MAXDQA.

In this talk, we present our findings, some of which surprised us. Among other things, the findings establish that efforts to address equity in compensation, provide professional growth opportunities, and create more collegial work environments, in particular addressing the librarian-staff divide and the need for manager advocacy, can all improve staff morale. In addition, we suggest concrete ways to make changes in libraries in order to assess and improve morale across staff hierarchies, and we offer resources for workplace development and support for staff.


UC Libraries Forum: Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration

Library Staff Morale in the Academic Hierarchy;

morale

library staff

qualitative research

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. This theme also touches upon people's expectations and perceptions of robots, as well as other social, cognitive and cultural factors that will influence human-robot interactions. We will have a special session/track on this topic, invite targeted submissions and include plenary speakers who are specialist in this area. We sincerely hope that this focus will help enlighten the design-thinking of all of us as we fabricate and program our own various systems.

To access RO-MAN Virtual 2021, [please register here.](https://ro-man2021.org/registration/)

IEEE RO-MAN 2021

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. 

technical paper

This  conference will explore the intersection of technology and service, the lessons learned through the past extraordinary year, and the value of change management. In light of the challenging times, we are coming together virtually to share our work under the theme 'Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration'.

The UC Libraries Forum will serve as an opportunity for UC library colleagues to meet virtually, share, learn and find opportunities for new collaborations and projects across the UC system. Presentations and conversation will note existing collaborations and spark ideas for new ones. This forum builds on and extends the scope of UC DLFx 2018 and 2019 beyond digital initiatives to all library employees to include themes such as research data, scholarly communications, the current-COVID academic library and others.




This event requires a registration to attend. To register, please click [here](https://ucl2021registration.paperform.co/) if you have not aleady done so.

Please register for UCLF 2021 to be able to enter the conference on Underline.io. Attendance is free, but registration is required.  We will contact you when the complete information about the conference and schedule becomes available. You would then need to login to Underline.io to be able to see the full content and build out your schedule. In case you do not have an Underline account, please create one. Thank you. 


This  conference will explore the intersection of technology and service, the lessons learned through the past extraordinary year, and the value of change management. In light of the challenging times, we are coming together virtually to share our work under the theme 'Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration'.

The UC Libraries Forum will serve as an opportunity for UC library colleagues to meet virtually, share, learn and find opportunities for new collaborations and projects across the UC system. Presentations and conversation will note existing collaborations and spark ideas for new ones. This forum builds on and extends the scope of UC DLFx 2018 and 2019 beyond digital initiatives to all library employees to include themes such as research data, scholarly communications, the current-COVID academic library and others.

This highly-interactive workshop will focus on ways to embed learner-centered design in library spaces and services. Participants will engage in activities around active learning, design thinking, and service design. The presentation will include a mix of theory and practice and participants will leave with concrete strategies to bring learner-centered design to their institutions. 

This workshop came about when two Berkeley librarians who coordinate the Undergraduate Library Fellows (ULF) program connected with librarians from WI+RE, UCLA Library’s learner-led design team. The Berkeley ULF program was in the process of being redesigned to incorporate service design and design thinking and took inspiration from the WI+RE Way and their Foundations in Learner-Centered Design course. Cross-campus synergies grew around harnessing student creativity, fostering a spirit of experimentation, and injecting reflection into peer-to-peer education. Our collaboration was energizing during the difficult days of the pandemic. Together, we found ways to respond to campus closures, adapt our activities to the remote learning environment, and empower our students to value process over product. The result of our conversations was a renewed excitement for learner-centered design approaches for UCLA and at Berkeley, a new effort to train our fellows in learner-centered design. These values-driven programs center the student voice by engaging with empathy and reflection over digital skills and tools. 

Participants will experience the interactive training that students in the ULF and WI+RE programs complete to make them service design superstars. Participants will be asked to share their experiences, and arrive with writing utensils and paper.

Strategies for Learner-Centered Design and Peer-to-Peer Learning

In this panel, presenters from Santa Barbara, Berkeley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Davis will describe their efforts to foster collaboration within their campus libraries as well as across campuses and the whole UC system, to address research data management, data science training, and education in data literacy. We will discuss approaches, activities, successes and challenges, and identify how others can participate in these activities. 
Speakers include: Santa Barbara: Greg Janée, Renata Curty, and Torin White; Berkeley: Anna Sackmann and Erin Foster and Amy Neeser; San Francisco: Ariel Deardorff; Los Angeles: Ibraheem Ali and Leigh Phan; Davis: Pamela Reynolds.



Fostering collaboration to address research data management and education

This roundtable discussion will convene a community conversation to ask questions and share ideas about reparative re-description priorities and projects that are occurring at the campus libraries, discuss the variety of challenges we have encountered, and identify opportunities to coalesce around resources, strategies, and lessons learned. 

This discussion will follow the main points and considerations presented in Jessica Tai’s “Cultural Humility as a Framework for Anti-Oppressive Archival Description” (https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/120). 

Cataloging records, metadata, and other descriptive resources such as finding aids are fundamental to researchers for discovery and interpretation. However, these items sometimes contain outdated subject headings and cataloging terms, as well as legacy descriptions that may include culturally insensitive terminology because of the way an item was originally sourced, created, described, or cataloged. These resources may reflect the original creator or collector’s biases -- harmful language, inaccurate representation, euphemistic terminology, etc. -- which may also be carried into the descriptive record by catalogers and collection processing staff, sometimes absent of historical context.

Reparative re-description is important and necessary, as terminology present in descriptive resources can propagate and legitimize historical or ongoing biases. This is challenging work--particularly in efforts to describe resources that depict evidence of racist or biased actions. Efforts to review terminology and publish revised records requires an investment in staff resources, including knowledge, awareness, time, and care.

Guided by Tai’s paper, this conversation will be an opportunity to discuss where ideas and initiatives overlap, share innovative strategies to remediate problematic and harmful terms, and consider how we might collaborate as a UC community to adapt a framework of cultural humility.

We recommend reading Tai’s paper in advance of this session. We will also provide a brief amount of time to refresh on the article as we move into the discussion.

Community Conversation: Collaborating Towards Inclusive Descriptive Practices

What is Misinformation and where does it come from? How can librarians evolve their instruction to teach students to evaluate and verify sources of online information? What are others doing to combat Misinformation? How do we make all this information relatable and palatable for students, librarians, and instructors? These questions and more drove the project with the intention to provide students, librarians, and instructors with analytical tools to combat misinformation. 
The creation of the Misinformation research guide stemmed from patron inquiries. As information professionals, we tried to fully understand concepts surrounding misinformation in order to be able to pass the knowledge onto our university community. We picked through an information overload of misinformation resources that assisted in our understanding and is partially reflective of the authors’ research and learning that is ongoing. 
The guide collects initial concepts to jumpstart critical thinking and asks readers to reevaluate sources, news, and their environment around them. We strive to engage students in more analytical thinking, to delve deeper, and use some of the tools we’ve provided to discern for themselves what is misinformation and what is true.
This presentation will also cover what goes into creating a misinformation research guide, including both the easy and challenging parts, how we focused on the topic of misinformation, and what learning outcomes we wanted.

Misinformation – Creating a Quick Reference Guide on Information Consumption;

This presentation will discuss the development, implementation, and value of a cross-University of California campus workshop model that breaks down institutional silos and increases open education training for both instructors and learners. During the Fall 2020 Quarter, a team of instructors consisting of librarians, staff, and researchers from UC San Diego, UC Los Angeles, and UC Berkeley, planned and taught a virtual suite of foundational computational programming workshops over the course of three weeks to a diverse group of learners from all three UC campuses. This remote, distributed open educational workshop approach combined and leveraged the instructional strengths of each campus to reach significantly more learners while using less staff time than would be possible with individual, campus-focused workshops. This approach to online instruction also enabled the team of instructors to teach to a scale that maximized enrollment by allowing everyone waitlisted for the workshop to attend through expanded enrollment and concurrent sessions without sacrificing an instructor/helper-to-student ratio. From a pedagogical perspective, this model was particularly effective for teaching technical topics to a large group of novice learners, and given the success of this initial collaborative UC workshop, we are planning a second iteration of this workshop series for the beginning of the 2021 Fall quarter/semester that will include additional UC campuses. Ultimately, our goal is to turn this online collaborative workshop model into an effective and efficient instructional template that could potentially be used by not just the UC system, but by all institutions that may need to collaborate with others to meet the computational research training needs for their various communities. 



Leveraging the Strengths of University of California Campus Communities to Reach More Learners Through Open Education

During the COVID-19 pandemic, libraries needed to abruptly and iteratively adjust operations to safeguard library employees while continuing to support the students, faculty, and researchers we serve. At the UC Davis Library (comprising the Peter J. Shields Library in Davis, the Carlson Health Sciences Library in Davis, and the Blaisdell Medical Library in Sacramento), our Library Response Team, a standing group focused on emergency preparedness and response, collaborated to redesign our spaces and services in order to remain available to UC Davis students and employees throughout the pandemic. 
This panel presentation will highlight lessons learned, including what we would have done differently and what went so well we plan to continue it into the coming year.
Specific aspects of this work include: 
● Alignment with rapidly changing and often ambiguous or conflicting national, state, local, and campus guidance regarding health and safety 
● Establishment of key principles that remain relevant as conditions change
● Iterative scenario planning and constant communication within the library and with campus
● Specific operational issues around entry-point access, rearranging study space, how to provide services and collections access, and how to communicate change through signage and digital channels
Panelists will also share perspectives on how strategies honed through the Library Response Team’s prior experience working together in other emergency response situations laid a foundation for success during the pandemic. The session will include time for Q&A with panelists, as well as to connect with colleagues interested in leading libraries through unforeseen future events.

Open Doors and Online Services: A Collaborative Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic;

COVID-19 has exposed fissures, frictions, and tensions in library resource sharing models. Will we convert this crisis into an opportunity for collectively determining international collections and their access? This panel examines new and old models for collaboration to ensure that the UC Libraries’ international collections responsibly retain their “distinctiveness”—and their excellence, as we head deeper into the future.

Post-Pandemic, Post-Paralysis: 21st-Century Cooperative Collecting and Access

UC graduate students write thousands of dissertations and theses every year, making unique contributions to scholarship. Newly authored works are submitted digitally and find global audiences online, but what about the older ones languishing in print and microformats in high density storage facilities? These materials are essentially unavailable to all but those who have the resources to travel to a library to read a physical copy or who can pay for digital scans. Because of the timeless and ongoing value of theses and dissertations, and to make these scholarly resources more equitably available, three UC campuses and CDL have been exploring paths to make these “vintage” works accessible worldwide via eScholarship and/or HathiTrust. Speakers on this panel from UCSF, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and CDL will describe the legal, technical, and logistical issues they faced when pursuing this goal. Different strategies were employed in each of these projects, resulting in different outcomes. Panelists will cover successes and obstacles--including those they were unable to surmount--and any new strategies that are currently being considered.

Working with Digitized, "Vintage" Theses and Dissertations (VTDs)

In today’s library settings, there is an increasing focus on data skills and data literacy. In fact, many library job seekers consider data skills a ticket to success, and many believe that data-related competencies are more central than ever for the activities of library workers (this term includes all: library staff, librarians, student workers, etc.)

Library leaders now encourage widespread acquisition of data skills in order to have a corps of data-savvy library workers. But what happens to the data-hesitant library worker in this scenario? While data literacy is seen as a universal good and universally attainable, data-related training often assumes competency levels that are above the “rank beginner” status advertised. This means that for any push towards data-savviness, there are both library workers who resist, whatever the reasons for their hesitation, and library workers who want to engage but have barriers/uncertainty around beginning. 

The questions included in this presentation will be: how to engage these library workers with data? Can we? Must we? Should we? An outline of critical data literacy will be followed by suggestions for how to engage “non-data” library workers with data training and activities in the library setting. The issues of how feasible/desirable it is to expect universal data-savviness, and how to empower library workers to choose their own approaches to the issue, both in the workplace and in their career planning, will be addressed. Finally we’ll discuss training approaches and resources. Attendees will leave with ideas for implementing data initiatives in their settings which are inclusive of all levels of data comfort.


Data Engagement for the Data-Hesitant Library Worker;

I will present information about the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Becoming Better Allies Group that I launched in 2020. Library staff who are interested meet on Zoom to collaborate on allyship for the BIPOC and LGBTQ population. This is an independent group that meets biweekly. We share, explore, and discuss various articles, books, and videos that call attention to marginalized communities and steps to make changes within ourselves and our communities and institutions. I will discuss the importance of creating a Statement of Intention (with examples) for folx who wish to start their own anti-racist library group. We will also look at how creating a bibliographic website helped us track and choose the anti-racism issues we wanted to work on. In addition, participants of this lightning talk will be able to access my slides and extra resources including our website: Becoming Better Allies: Committed to Equity in University Libraries.


Library Staff Morale in the Academic Hierarchy;

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Library Staff Morale in the Academic Hierarchy;

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