United States

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 However, these items sometimes contain outdated subject headings and cataloging terms, as well as legacy descriptions that may include culturally insensitive terminology because of the way an item was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.

UC Libraries Forum: Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration

Community Conversation: Collaborating Towards Inclusive Descriptive Practices

cultural humility

ethical description

redescription

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.

panel

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;

In the wake of a series of events, including the death of George Floyd last summer, the entire country yet again, started to discuss the challenges of racial justice in our communities. In response to this ongoing conversation was the decision by the UC Berkeley Library leadership to formally create a taskforce to look into the issue of racial justice in our Library environment, services and practices. The Task Force on Racial Justice is composed of 13 members of the UC Berkeley Library community, representing a wide range of departments, and inclusive of staff, librarians and a faculty member. 

The task force convenes this panel as an opportunity to share insights into the process, challenges and opportunities inherent in doing this sort of work in a Library organizational structure. We will provide staff and librarians to discuss the issues we identified in our work; the challenges we faced and the strategies we used in narrowing our focus with such a large and complicated topic. Given the novelty of returning to campus in-person and rebooting Library services, we will also discuss the impacts of general overcommitment to projects and the additional emotional labor of working on this sort of reform work amidst other competing obligations. We hope sharing our experiences can be educational to our fellow UC colleagues, and recommendations will inspire others to adopt similar approaches and continue the advance of racial justice work in their own communities; and/or partner with parallel efforts across campuses, and throughout the UC System.


Addressing Systemic Racism in the UC Berkeley Libraries: The formation and experiences of the Racial Justice Task Force

This panel presents the work of UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center (OHC) of The Bancroft Library in building up multimedia materials and assignments for Grades 11 and 12, and for lower-division college courses in California classrooms. Berkeley’s OHC has been collaborating with the UC’s California History-Social Science Project to further develop and refine the online content we already have. Following a brief description of collaborations and our development efforts in this area, we hope to generate interest in new partnerships across the UC libraries. The questions we'll explore include: How can we use digital oral histories and other UC Library materials to create multimedia curriculum content and assignments for California high school classrooms and lower-division college courses? What has already been done? And how can we collaborate further with other partners across the UC Library system and beyond?

Collaborating on Digital Oral History Curriculum Content and Building K-16 Student Engagement through UC Library Resources

In response to the need for real-world implementations of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data for Open Science, the FAIR Island Project offers an established, working field station as a controlled environment to experiment implementing FAIR data policies and workflows. Through a UC-focused, community-oriented, open approach, the FAIR Island Project explores, develops, and showcases generalized place-based tools and methods for FAIR data management. All researchers working on the Tetiaroa field station are required to create data management plans (DMPs) for their proposed projects to study the island, and said DMPs are updated as data collection advances. 

The FAIR Island Project builds interoperability between pieces of critical research infrastructure -- Data Management Plans (DMPs), research practice, DOIs, and publications contributing to the advancement and adoption of Open Science. The California Digital Library (CDL)’s leading work on transforming static data management plans into continuously updated, networked DMPs transforms the DMP into a living document that can guide the course of research by integrating data management activities and plans with related systems and workflows in the research lifecycle. 

As part of the FAIR Island Project, CDL is partnering with the University of California Natural Reserve System (UCNRS) to integrate their respective technologies for reservation management and the generation of data management plans to create an integrated system to manage research conducted at any UC field station. Moving forward, the project will advance social and technological infrastructure for place-based open science by rolling out project data policies and technologies to other UC-managed field stations. 

The Reserve Application Management System (RAMS) of the UCNRS is already in use by 56 field stations, primarily in California. By connecting the RAMS system with the DMPTool, the FAIR Island Project will create a unified workflow wherein researchers are required to submit a DMP that is then reviewed by the field station director/staff and a research data management specialist on the FAIR Island Project team. Upon approval of the DMP, a DOI is minted and can be connected with the DOI(s) assigned for each associated output. 

This short talk will review the FAIR Island Project’s work to promote Open Science practices at UC-managed field stations through technical integrations and optimal data policies. 


The FAIR Island Project: Advancing Optimal Open Data Policies and Practices;

Between the Fall of 2018, and the winter of 2020, the Direction and Oversight Committee (DOC) charged the Digital Preservation Strategy Working Group (DPS WG), consisting of representatives from a majority of the UC campuses, with tasks outlined across multiple phases representing approximately 12 months of work. The initial charge for Phase 1 was to develop a practical, shared vision of digital preservation for library content and outline a roadmap to guide the UC Libraries in advancing that shared vision. The first DPS WG report observed that: 

For the majority of UC libraries, there is no dedicated digital preservation unit or staff 
There is a lack of resources for digital preservation at most campuses
There is a need for defined digital preservation policies, workflows, guidance, training, and collaboration.

In 2019, the Digital Preservation Strategy Working Group (DPS WG) focused Phase Two activities on identifying the steps needed to build a community of practice around digital preservation in the UC Library system with the primary goal of preparing a path for collective action in the stewardship of the content types held in common by the ten campuses and CDL. 
During Phase Two, the DPS WG was charged with answering the questions “how much?” and “what kind?” of digital materials are stewarded by the UC libraries, and with identifying where it may be helpful to collaboratively steward particular content types. To answer the above questions, the initial tasks that the group tackled included developing a taxonomy of content types and a survey instrument, which was used to conduct 34 interviews with 44 data stewards across all ten campus libraries and CDL. 

Based on the outcome of the recommendations made during phase 2, the DPS WG focused their final round of activities in Phase 2.5 on outlining the specifics regarding the creation of a standing Digital Preservation Leadership group that would represent a more permanent and sustainable approach toward operationalizing the main recommendations of Phase 2. 

This presentation will discuss the results of the Phase 2 survey and the recommendations that were derived from those results. This includes presenting: (1) a summary of the digital assets held by the UC libraries, broken down by content type across all campus libraries; (2) the most significant practical, organizational and economic challenges of stewarding digital content; and (3) the specific areas where this digital preservation can be made easier through collective action, collaboration and shared expertise. A summary of Phase 2.5 will also be discussed, including the formation and creation of the inaugural standing Digital Preservation Leadership Group and a brief summary of its priorities and work plan.


Community Conversation: Collaborating Towards Inclusive Descriptive Practices

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