United States

Research interests in African Studies range from anthropology to zoology, with source material produced in an array of languages -- indigenous, colonial European and Arabic. To support this research, the Library of Congress collects and catalogs material from 29 African countries, and both UCLA and UC Berkeley participate in their Cooperative Acquisiton Program. This year, for the first time, UCLA and UCB created a shared collection development approval plan, taking advantage of the new integrated library system and fulfillment network to provide a richer and more diverse information ecosystem to students, faculty and independent scholars.


UC Libraries Forum: Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration

Stronger Together: Shared Collection Development for Africa

african studies

shared collecting

collecton development

area studies

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.

lightning talk

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

Across the disciplines, from physical sciences to social sciences to digital humanities, researchers are pursuing new and innovative research with big data and data science methodologies. In response, libraries and other campus units have begun to implement instruction, consultation, and curation services to support researchers in planning, managing, sharing, and publishing their data. However, many libraries have not yet fully assessed the needs of big data researchers, much less developed services specifically tailored for researchers producing and working with big data. In order to provide a better understanding of the state of the big data research landscape in higher education, the Ithaka S+R Project on “Supporting Big Data Research” brought together twenty-one U.S. institutions to conduct and analyze interviews with big data researchers on their campuses. Teams at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego each assembled rosters of interviewees across domains and ranks to examine practices, challenges, and trends related to data collection, data analysis, research communication, and training. Themes emerged around such issues as data storage, computing infrastructure, data and code sharing, openness, collaboration, and training needs. UCB and UCSD team members will present their common findings, important differences between the two campuses, and potential opportunities for cross-campus collaboration.

Supporting Big Data Research: Recommendations from the Ithaka S+R Projects at UCB & UCSD;

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.


Library Staff Morale in the Academic Hierarchy;

This presentation shares the work at the UC Davis Library, Research and Learning Directorate to revamp our process for collecting research consultation metrics - to give us better insight into who our users are, and how they engage with our consultation services. 

We will share how we renovated our research consult metrics gathering process, including 1) identifying shortcomings of our previous processes, 2) gaining institutional buy-in to revamp the process, 3) forming a representative team and inclusive feedback process, 4) determining which metrics to gather, 5) working with IT to assemble a technological stack for data input, tiered data access and visualization, and 6) workforce training and rollout. 

We will also share the results of our informal survey of how research consult metrics are collected and used across the UC Libraries - including whether UC Libraries: 1) use a centrally organized or standardized process for collecting research consult metrics 2) What software (if any) is used to collect research consult metrics 3) what survey/form instruments are used and what metrics are collected, and 4) whether UC Librarians consider their metrics to be useful for improving how they deliver services.

Finally, we will discuss our ongoing work to establish an evidence-based practice of reviewing and acting on these data regularly. We will also touch on the tensions between use of this data for service improvement vs assessment of librarian performance. 


Research Consultation Metrics: Building Infrastructure for Evidence Based Improvement at the UC Davis Library;

Always Be Migrating : Processes, Products, and People

Since March 2021, the UCSB Library's Research Data Services (RDS) became the first UC campus to be part of Dryad's workflow and responsible for curating campus affiliates' deposits to the repository before public release. Our assistance ranges from data files and metadata inspection to more involved processes, including data transformation and documentation augmentation to maximize deposited data's reproducibility and potential reuses. This experience has allowed our department to establish a closer relationship with researchers and better understand their data-related needs while helping us promote data literacy and make our services more well-known on campus. This presentation will cover our internal workflow and curation steps; a debrief of the most common curatorial actions performed, the feedback we have received from depositors, and how we plan to move forward with our curation services.

Connecting with researchers via local data curation: the UCSB experience with Dryad deposits

Making Email Archives Discoverable through ePADD

Classifying Chinese pre-modern books by machine: a supervised machine learning approach

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.


Stronger Together: Shared Collection Development for Africa

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