United States

As COVID-19 upended our activities as librarians in unprecedented and unexpected ways, the LAUC-B conference committee was faced with the prospect of organizing a successful bi-annual virtual conference. The use of virtual technologies in conference planning during public health-mandated work from off-campus remains minimally documented. Several studies, such as Romano (2020); and Peters and Dickinson (2020), focus on in-person conference planning workflow, but none address the processes of organizing a virtual scenario. The organizing committee, led by Corliss Lee and Shannon Kealey, formed a distinct subcommittee, composed of Kristina Bush, Natalie Marquez, and Liladhar Pendse, to investigate virtual platforms. In this presentation, Natalie and Liladhar will narrate the story of the subcommittee’s work in choosing a virtual platform that would simulate and embody normal and important in-person conference activities and experiences. To establish a baseline, the subcommittee scanned LIS literature for clues regarding conference attendees and planning committee priorities in order to draft a list of salient features needed for a virtual conference. The committee used this list of features to select platforms to review fully and then presented these platforms to the larger committee for collective decision-making. This presentation will highlight the values of proactive collaboration and professional “thinking out loud” among the subcommittee members as well as reporting out to our committee peers.

UC Libraries Forum: Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration

Empowering the Virtual Conference: Ideas, Strategies and Choices in the Times of Corona;

library collaboration

remote working

virtual conference

The UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries.

UKSG Annual Conference 2024

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 presentation provides an overview of the work done by a cross-unit team at UC Merced to document and preserve the campus's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the campus was forced to abruptly shift its operational activities, a working group composed of librarians and records managers developed strategies to track, archive, and provide access to the scores of materials that illustrate the collective decision making activities of the various working groups that were created to confront the effects of the pandemic. Jordan Thaw, Records Analyst in the Office of Legal Affairs, and Jerrold Shiroma, University Archivist and Librarian for Special Collections will discuss the inception and goals of this project, and the across-campus collaborations that the project initiated. 


Responding to a Crisis: Archiving a Campus' Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic;

Blockeley University is the collaborative effort of hundreds of students who in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, sustained their community by building the UC Berkeley campus in Minecraft, a sandbox video game. Their extraordinary effort is being preserved by The Bancroft Library. This presentation will discuss the selection of the collection and the challenges and opportunities in preserving this unique project.

The Blockeley effort was recognized by the Chancellor’s Office and a virtual commencement ceremony was conducted in the Blockeley University Minecraft server. Other universities have built their campuses in Minecraft before but what was extraordinary about this build was that it was an innovative effort to specifically keep the UC Berkeley community together during the shelter-in-place period. The Bancroft Library felt this was an effort worth preserving.

In this presentation, Kathryn M. Neal, The Bancroft Library’s Associate University Archivist, will discuss how she identified components of this project that should be preserved as historical evidence and Christina Velazquez Fidler, The Bancroft Library’s Digital Archivist will address the technical challenges in preserving the Blockeley server and all of its modifications, and lastly, the solution of a single player world file bundled with the texture packs that enabled the many modifications made. This solution resolved many questions including concerns surrounding the maintenance of the Blockeley server.

Together the world file, the promotional videos, the website, planning documents among other materials collectively make up the Blockeley University collection. The Blockeley University collection is a forward thinking collection, recording the work of hundreds of students and their efforts to maintain community during the Covid-19 pandemic.


One block at a time: selecting and preserving Blockeley University, a sandbox video game and community response to the COVID-19 pandemic;

This presentation will share how members of the UC San Diego Library Special Collections & Archives staff responded to California’s sudden work from home order due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including remote project development, management tools, and collaborator involvement. Presenters will provide a brief timeline of events leading up to the work from home order, the development of a list of remote projects, and the assignment of priorities and responsibilities. They will describe examples of these projects and discuss how they progressed from ideation to execution, including workflow development and management tools. They will also examine the opportunities and obstacles of rapid project development, as well as training and managing the work of staff and student employees from other library units who volunteered to assist in archives-related tasks.

Presenters will further discuss reopening, highlighting the need for flexibility and acknowledging seemingly competing priorities as they balanced remote and onsite projects. Presenters will celebrate accomplishments, and address the challenges they faced while transitioning between remote and onsite priorities.

Every Wall Is A Door: Turning Challenges Into Shared Opportunities;

Through the COVID-19 Community Response Oral History Project, UC Berkeley's Oral History Center (OHC) is documenting the regional response to the global pandemic, and evaluating its effectiveness as it relates to public health, health equity, community, and politics. OHC interviewers Shanna Farrell and Amanda Tewes will discuss the importance of establishing partnerships on and off UC campuses, cultural competency when approaching narrators in BIPOC and immigrant communities, documenting the effectiveness of the regional response to COVID-19, and increasing community engagement with the OHC's collections.

The COVID-19 Community Response Oral History Project: Building Access and Partnerships around Health Equity Collections;

This presentation will distill a book length study on this topic by the presenter that was published in 2020. The topic deals with library services for those with ID, a population whose case has large implications for the profession as a whole. ID is defined as a condition of intelligence quotient (IQ) of 70 or below together with significant difficulties in learning, communication, and self-care. Insofar as diversity, equity, and inclusion involve redressing disadvantages, no population is more deserving of attention than those with ID. However, they also represent almost insuperable challenges to serve. Notwithstanding technological change, the mission of libraries remains to provide textual information: reading. So how does one serve individuals who not only have limited or nonexistent reading skills but face large obstacles to acquiring those skills? Coupled with a lack of training in special education together with a pervasive strain imposed by reduced budgets, the difficulties facing the library are considerable. On the other hand, ignoring this population implies that diversity has a limit and that certain groups fall outside the library’s area of responsibility. This dilemma promises to define the profession’s capabilities and values.
After reviewing both the history of library services and the social and educational plight of those with ID, the presentation will summarize a case study of the first book club for those with ID at an academic library. This club has modeled itself on a grass-roots initiative in special education called The Next Chapter Book Club. Its rationale will appear familiar to librarians as a version of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a prominent topic of library conferences and literature, which promotes different learning styles. The talk will provide a detailed history, methodology, assessment methods, data, and best practices derived from the experience. These practices, spanning issues of collection, pedagogy, and research practice will appear surprisingly familiar to librarians. They underscore the conclusion that despite a history of underperformance in this area, librarians are well-equipped to serve this historically marginalized population and, in doing so, validate their core principles of service and their expanded commitment to instruction. 


Libraries and Reading: Services for Patrons with Intellectual Disability (ID);

In 2019 The ALA Racial Equity Task Force was formed and charged with developing a framework for libraries to implement. As part of this goal, a wide-reaching survey was designed and analyzed by a small research team in 2020. The goal of the study was to assess public and academic libraries racial equity efforts, employees’ perception of those efforts as well as their experiences with racial equity and inequity within their library. Utilizing an online survey, the data was used to identify areas of improvement in regard to racial equity efforts in public and academic libraries and seeks to answer the question: How are libraries moving towards transformation and justice in regard to racial equity? While the overwhelming majority of the 717 participants believe their institutions have a responsibility to address racial equity, the data also reveals that our practices are not aligned with our values. In this session, Caragher and Bryant will discuss the disaggregated results of the survey by racial identity, specific to job security, promotion, and retention. We invite the audience to discuss the blind spots in racial equity work in academic and public libraries.

Surveying Racial Equity in Libraries;

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committees do not have to be another box to check for diversity’s sake. In this presentation we will be looking at a case study of the UC Riverside Library’s Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In this presentation, we will look at how the committee’s own best practices evolved from its inception in 2017 and how collaboration became valuable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Best Practices for DEI Committees in Libraries

The collaborative effort between the UC San Diego Library and the UC Santa Barbara Library (called Project Surfliner, after the train that connects the two cities) to share development teams that work on common strategic products is still going strong after almost three years. In this panel, we will chat with the two campus project leads, as well as some of the product owners to discuss working within this model. Find out what’s changed after sharing resources and product development goals over the last year. What needs more work, where are we finding our strengths, and how haven’t we run out of train puns yet? If you’re looking to learn how to collaborate with another UC, this is the session for you. 
Panelists: 
Matt Critchlow, UC San Diego
Alexandra Dunn, UC Santa Barbara
Jessica Hilt, UC San Diego
Tim Marconi, UC San Diego
Chrissy Rissmeyer, UC Santa Barbara
Amy Work, UC San Diego

Riding the Rails- Successful Cross Campus Collaboration

Officially launched November 1, 2019, Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) is an international, multi-institutional, 3-year project that intends to transform Open Access (OA) monograph publishing by delivering significant improvements to the infrastructures used by publishers, and by developing the best practices for transitioning nonprofit, academic, independent and scholar-led publishers to OA. Funded for £3.5 million by Research England and the Arcadia Fund, the project has been designed to enable smaller non-profit publishers in the Humanities and Social Science to publish OA books and get them into the existing distribution channels and library systems. 

Towards that goal, COPIM pilots a range of interventions, from developing open, transparent, sustainable, and community-governed infrastructures for the curation, dissemination, discovery, and long-term preservation of open content and open data, to following the best practices for integrating open content into existing repository systems, as well as devising new revenue models for sustaining OA book publishing. 

The COPIM project uses the “Scaling Small’ approach as its main strategy for enabling presses in the Humanities and Social Science to transition to Open Access. This approach involves creating an environment in which a large number of nonprofit publishers of whatever size, with a variety of business models, can sustainably transition to Open Access at a manageable cost through a collaborative effort. 

As a founding partner, the UCSB Library has been participating in the COPIM project since its inception, focused primarily on efforts to develop COPIM’s open publication ecosystem's governance procedures for monographs and create durable organizational structures for the coordination, governance, and administrative support of the project’s community-owned infrastructure. 

In this presentation, the author will discuss the UCSB involvement and will lay out the philosophy of the project as a whole, giving attendees valuable insight into a major new initiative supporting scholar-led OA for books. 


‘‘Scaling Small’: A strategy to support open access book publishing

This talk provides an overview of the work of the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library and opportunities for collaboration. The Oral History Center puts stories in the historical record that hadn’t been there before and might otherwise be lost. We preserve thousands of voices from all walks of life, political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds through oral history interviews. We also produce interpretive materials, such as podcasts; train scholars in the field through educational initiatives, including workshops and internships; create curriculum for K–12; and write articles for scholarly and lay audiences. During shelter-in-place, we pivoted to remote interviewing, created a toolkit and hosted a webinar to train practitioners. We are committed to open access and all of our transcripts, articles, and podcasts are accessible online or in-person at no cost. We partner with other universities and organizations, such at the National Park Service and California State Archives, on projects ranging from the WWII home front to the birth of the Chicano Studies movement. Opportunities for collaboration include oral history projects; projects with oral histories and other archival materials; interpretive materials, such as multimedia showcases, exhibits, oral history performance, or podcasts; educational initiatives, such as building curriculum or conducting training; and digitization and preservation of oral histories; among others. Some benefits of partnerships include an enhanced scholarly experience (and donor relations) by supplementing existing or incoming archival collections with oral histories; highlighting the work of university alumni and leading university scholars; and creating more opportunities for public engagement.

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