UC Berkeley Library

The Research Organization Registry (ROR), a recent initiative by California Digital Library (CDL), Crossref, and DataCite, attempts to address the issue of institutional disambiguation through the development of a non-commercial, open, and interoperable system of unique persistent identifiers for research organizations.

Academic library workers often make use of systemic, bureaucratic, political, collegial, and symbolic dimensions of organizational behavior to achieve their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, but many are also doing the crucial work of pushing back at the structures surrounding them in ways small and large. Implementing Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion captures emerging practices that academic libraries and librarians can use to create more equitable and representative institutions. 19 chapters are divided into 6 sections:

Recruitment, Retention and PromotionProfessional DevelopmentLeveraging Collegial NetworksReinforcing the MessageOrganizational ChangeAssessment

Chapters cover topics including active diversity recruitment strategies; inclusive hiring; gendered ageism; librarians with disabilities; diversity and inclusion with student workers; residencies and retention; creating and implementing a diversity strategic plan; cultural competency training; libraries’ responses to Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action; and accountability and assessment. Authors provide practical guiding principles, effective practices, and sample programs and training.  Implementing Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion explores how academic libraries have leveraged and deployed their institutions’ resources to effect DEI improvements while working toward implementing systemic solutions. It provides means and inspiration for continuing to try to hire, retain, and promote the change we want to see in the world regardless of existing structures and systems, and ways to improve those structures and systems for the future.

Academic library workers often make use of systemic, bureaucratic, political, collegial, and symbolic dimensions of organizational behavior to achieve their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, but many are also doing the crucial work of pushing back at the structures surrounding them in ways small and large. Implementing Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion captures emerging practices that academic libraries and librarians can use to create more equitable and representative institutions. 19 chapters are divided into 6 sections:

Recruitment, Retention and PromotionProfessional DevelopmentLeveraging Collegial NetworksReinforcing the MessageOrganizational ChangeAssessment

Chapters cover topics including active diversity recruitment strategies; inclusive hiring; gendered ageism; librarians with disabilities; diversity and inclusion with student workers; residencies and retention; creating and implementing a diversity strategic plan; cultural competency training; libraries’ responses to Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action; and accountability and assessment. Authors provide practical guiding principles, effective practices, and sample programs and training.  Implementing Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion explores how academic libraries have leveraged and deployed their institutions’ resources to effect DEI improvements while working toward implementing systemic solutions. It provides means and inspiration for continuing to try to hire, retain, and promote the change we want to see in the world regardless of existing structures and systems, and ways to improve those structures and systems for the future.

Academic library workers often make use of systemic, bureaucratic, political, collegial, and symbolic dimensions of organizational behavior to achieve their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, but many are also doing the crucial work of pushing back at the structures surrounding them in ways small and large. Implementing Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion captures emerging practices that academic libraries and librarians can use to create more equitable and representative institutions. 19 chapters are divided into 6 sections:

Recruitment, Retention and PromotionProfessional DevelopmentLeveraging Collegial NetworksReinforcing the MessageOrganizational ChangeAssessment

Chapters cover topics including active diversity recruitment strategies; inclusive hiring; gendered ageism; librarians with disabilities; diversity and inclusion with student workers; residencies and retention; creating and implementing a diversity strategic plan; cultural competency training; libraries’ responses to Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action; and accountability and assessment. Authors provide practical guiding principles, effective practices, and sample programs and training.  Implementing Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion explores how academic libraries have leveraged and deployed their institutions’ resources to effect DEI improvements while working toward implementing systemic solutions. It provides means and inspiration for continuing to try to hire, retain, and promote the change we want to see in the world regardless of existing structures and systems, and ways to improve those structures and systems for the future.

Based on interviews with big data researchers at UC Berkeley as part of an Ithaka S+R project, this local report provides insights on researcher practices and challenges in six thematic areas: data collection & processing; analysis: methods, tools, infrastructure; research outputs; collaboration; training; and balancing domain vs data science expertise. The report makes several recommendations based on these findings. A summary post with the recommendations is available at https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/2021/10/04/big-data-as-a-way-of-life/.

How can we best train student employees for public service roles? At UC Berkeley, as in many academic libraries, a student employee is the first person that a user will see when entering the library; they are the “face of the library.” A positive interaction will set a positive tone for the user’s library experience, while a negative interaction may discourage the user from ever visiting the library again. As such, it is critical to prepare student staff with the competencies to engage positively with library users and feel confident in their roles. This paper shares a case study of a public services training piloted for Access Services student employees at UC Berkeley.

One barrier to reproducibility is the lack of specificity in the materials and tools used in research. The Research Resource Identification (RRID) Initiative is a community-based solution addressing the issue of experimental resource identification, primarily in the biomedical and life sciences. Citing the RRID for research materials and tools in scientific publications eliminates ambiguity and enhances reproducibility.

Ready 4 Research is a 3-hour workshop to support students in learning about and getting ready to participate in research as research assistants and researchers themselves. It is aimed at UC Berkeley social sciences students, at the sophomore level and above, but there is content that can be used by students in other majors, other universities, and other educational levels.

The Languages of Berkeley: An Online Exhibition celebrates the magnificent diversity of languages that advance research, teaching, and learning at the University of California, Berkeley. It is the point of embarkation for an exciting sequential exhibit that built on one post per week, showcasing an array of digitized works in the original language chosen by those who work with these languages on a daily basis. Many of these early-published works are now in the public domain and are open to the world to read and share without restriction. 

Preparations for the online exhibition began in early 2018 with the final installment published online in October 2020. Using the Library’s instance of WordPress, the library exhibit comprises short essays of nearly all of the 59 modern and ancient languages that are currently taught across 14 departments on campus plus a dozen more languages that contributors wished to include. From September 2019 to August 2020, exhibit designer Aisha Hamilton and curator Claude Potts also installed a physical companion exhibition in Moffitt Library’s Free Speech Movement Café (FSM) centering on endangered languages which was cut short by the campus closure due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Photos from that installation are archived in this catalog with the open book publishing platform Pressbooks, along with the complete entries from the online exhibition. 

Aside from core support from the Library and the Berkeley Language Center, this multi-year project would not have been possible without the contributions and hard work of more than 45 librarians, professors, lecturers, staff, and students. 

Academic librarians have increasingly gone public with their experiences of low morale and burnout, yet less attention has been paid to the workplace experiencesof 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.” Our research team includes library staff, former library staff, a recent MLS grad and MLIS student, and librarians. Through 34 structured interviews with academic library staff nationwide, we seek to demonstrate how organizational culture, library hierarchies, and management style affect staff morale. In this webinar, we present our findings establishing that efforts to address equity in compensation, provide professional growth opportunities, and create more collegial work environments can all improve staff morale. Finally, wesuggest how you can make changes in your own libraries to assess and improve morale across staff hierarchies.