UCLA Library

The Core Competencies for Research and Information Literacy at UCLA provides a foundation for teaching and evaluating research skills and information literacy. Recognizing that there are varying needs across disciplines and experience levels, this document is intended as a starting point that can be adapted for specific contexts.

This document provides:

* a concise summary of the core competencies and their relationship to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy;

* a toolkit of learning outcomes, activities, and assessment techniques for each core competency;

* and an example assessment rubric.

Authors and Contributors

This document was created by the UCLA Library Teaching & Learning Functional Team, 2018-2019

Project leads: Doug Worsham, Diane Mizrachi, Monica Hagan

Contributors: Joy Doan, Nisha Mody, Renee Romero, Robert Gore, Elizabeth Cheney, Margarita Nafpaktitis, Julia Glassman, Reed Buck, and all UCLA Library staff that provided feedback throughout the process.

In Spring 2005, the UCLA Information Literacy Program charged a Task Force to investigate blended instruction options for information literacy credit courses and labs. The BICo Task Force was charged with investigating and making recommendations for a model 1-unit information literacy blended instruction course which would combine elements of in-person and online instruction. The Task Force looked into existing blended instruction courses, both for information literacy and for other disciplines, including those proposed by faculty in response to a 2004 UCLA Office of Instructional Development RFP for blended instruction courses, and made recommendations regarding expected learning outcomes, curricula, assignments and grading, instructional formats, types of technology (hardware & software) used to teach "blended courses," and assessment of effectiveness, as well as training needs.

Librarians have long had anecdotal evidence that undergraduates do not possess adequate information skills for some of the coursework they are required to complete. To obtain an objective measure of their information competence, the UCLA Library's Instructional Services Advisory Committee (ISAC) conducted an assessment project. The committee created a list of competencies and a survey instrument, which was administered to a sample of 453 undergraduates in Spring 1999. This report explains the research problem and methodology, explores the findings and conclusions of the research project, and makes recommendations based on the data.

The main goal of the project was to identify ways to make library instruction more effective at UCLA. A practical objective was to obtain data to use in discussions with faculty about students' information and research skills, the impact of those abilities on students' coursework, and the potential of library instruction to improve them.

The instrument ISAC created sought to measure how skillful or knowledgeable students were in general with library resources, online searching, and information-seeking concepts, rather than to assess the efficacy of existing library instructional programs. The instrument was vetted in several ways over the course of the project and was administered in a non-course-related classroom setting to a broad sample of students. A data analyst from the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR) oversaw the coding of data and performed several types of analysis on it to test hypotheses and verify significant findings.

Results indicate many gaps in students' understanding of resources and methods, which are discussed in detail in the report. The general level of information literacy as assessed by the instrument was low. Statistically significant findings based on an analysis of average scores and student demographics are:

-Students who reported frequent use of library resources scored higher on the test.

-Seniors scored higher than each of the other classes taken separately or combined. While seniors scored highest, class level was otherwise not a significant factor; that is, there was no difference between the mean scores of freshmen, sophomores, and juniors.

-Students whose majors are in the humanities scored higher than students majoring either in the social sciences or sciences.

The results did not allow ISAC to identify causes for these findings, although a number of hypotheses are possible. It is not clear whether or in what way the statistically significant results are substantively significant.

The mean scores of students who reported having had a high quantity of library instruction or tours were also analyzed. Although these students did not score significantly higher on the test, two thirds of them had their library classes or tours in high school; the number who had the sessions in college was so small that the result for this variable is not particularly meaningful.

Based on the results of this project and the collective experience of committee members, ISAC has made several recommendations aimed at the goal of increasing information competence. Library staff should share the key findings with faculty and create a dialogue about the information competence of their students. This might include discovering how faculty view students' information skills and exploring the effect of increased library use on information competence. Library staff should work with faculty and academic departments to define, adopt, and promote sets of basic and discipline- or major-oriented competencies; these should be used to develop library instruction that is part of a curriculum-integrated information literacy program. The Library should take a more systematic approach to instructional initiatives - which may include Web-based instruction, course-integrated instruction, courses, and remote learning mechanisms. Areas for further research and recommendations about the use of the instrument are also included in the report.

This essay provides a detailed report of the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program’s first four years and its outcomes, and draw conclusions about the role of this program in academic librarianship and in higher education more broadly. The experiences of CLIR Fellows are central to this analysis as they illustrate some of the challenges that programs of this sort will present, such as the need for new human resources categories, workflows, and procedures; new ways of capitalizing on the strengths of existing library professionals and providing retraining where needed; and new strategies for educating, retooling, and involving library users (especially faculty and other advanced scholars). Overall, this report shows that there is much that has worked well in the CLIR program for all involved. There is also much that could be improved, but in spite of this needed change, the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program embodies the transition that academic libraries, as a whole, are undergoing. Consequently, the academic library profession would do well to learn from the CLIR Program experience and explore opportunities to create similar programs to meet other staffing and recruitment needs within the profession.

Purpose

Prior to 2020, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Library's research services spanned multiple service points. Multiple locations were staffed by Library Student Research Assistants (LSRAs) and each location was supervised independently. While efforts to increase collaboration had been underway, much of the work and services remained siloed and often duplicated training and service hours.

Design/methodology/approach

With the onset of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), UCLA Library rapidly transitioned from entirely in-person to entirely online services. With multiple service points pivoting, UCLA was redundant to have multiple online desks providing Zoom appointments and that quickly became apparent. Moreover, transitioning in-person student work to remote work was paramount to providing both normal services to users and allowing LSRAs to keep jobs during a time of uncertainty and insecurity.

Findings

While the authors' original consolidation of services and implementation of shared supervision was a result of the pandemic and primarily involved online services, the authors have maintained this shared approach and collaborative vision in returning to in-person services. For the past year, the authors have offered shared in-person (at two library locations) and online services. As subject-specific library locations begin to reopen their desks, the authors continue to identify ways to leverage shared supervision and a robust referral model for those on-site services while negotiating student staffing and the need for both general and subject-specific services.

Originality/value

The authors present a novel approach to peer-to-peer teaching and learning and research services and shared student worker supervision with services coordinated across multiple locations and disciplines within a large academic library serving a large student population.

The diverse populations that librarians serve on a college campus have different scholarly communication concerns about open access, academic publishing, author rights, and related issues. Many academic libraries expect their librarians to have some working knowledge of scholarly communication, but not all campuses have a dedicated functional specialist. Two librarians at a large research institution will demonstrate their methods for identifying and adequately addressing these issues in their campus community.

Brownfield sites are properties with the presence of hazardous substances, toxicpollutants, or contaminants. Based on environmental regulations, these abandoned sitesare considered non-usable due to the presence of a high level of organic and inorganictoxic chemicals. Revitalization of Brownfield sites has ecological, economical and publichealth implications for the local communities. Our designated Brownfield site is locatedon the southern California Central groundwater basin and approximately 8 miles east ofthe Los Angeles River, and was previously used as a steel mill and more recently as a gasstation. In this study, our goal is to provide a baseline for the microbial community inassociation to the presence of heavy metals and toxic volatile chemical leaks resultingfrom previous activities. We employed the environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcodingapproach on soil samples collected from the site at different depths and transects toprovide a profile of microbial communities directly associated with toxic hazardousmaterials. The bacterial soil composition analysis shows the overall bacterial compositionof the site is altered compared to control; with the class of Acidobacteria being moreabundant in the core and depth soil samples. This class of bacteria can tolerate highlyacidic and heavy metal-containing soils. The identification of bacterial mixture can be agateway to classifying microorganisms that consume or breakdown environmentalpollutants and could be used for future bioremediation purposes.

Objective: We sought to several develop parsimonious machine learning (ML) models to predict resource utilization and clinical outcomes following cardiac operations using only preoperative factors.

Methods: All patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting and/or valve operations were identified in the 2015-2021 University of California Cardiac Surgery Consortium repository. The primary endpoint of the study was length of stay (LOS). Secondary endpoints included 30-day mortality, acute kidney injury (AKI), reoperation, postoperative blood transfusion and duration of intensive care unit admission (ICU LOS). Linear regression, gradient boosted machines (GBM), random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) predictive models were developed. The coefficient of determination (R2) and area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUC) were used to compare models. Important predictors of increased resource use were identified using SHapley summary plots.

Results: Compared to all other modeling strategies, GBM demonstrated the greatest performance in the prediction of LOS (R2 0.42), ICU LOS (R2 0.23) and 30-day mortality (AUC 0.69). Advancing age, reduced hematocrit and multiple-valve procedures were associated with increased LOS and ICU LOS. Furthermore, the GBM model best predicted AKI (AUC 0.76), while RF exhibited greatest discrimination in the prediction of postoperative transfusion (AUC 0.73). We observed no difference in performance between modeling strategies for reoperation (AUC 0.80).

Conclusion: Our findings affirm the utility of ML in the estimation of resource use and clinical outcomes following cardiac operations. We identified several risk factors associated with increased resource use, which may be used to guide case scheduling in times of limited hospital capacity.

Presented are preliminary findings from a new study of UCLA students' reading format attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic. A study of UCLA's study of students' remote learning attitudes in spring 2020 did not include one question related to reading electronically or the library (https://teaching.ucla.edu/resources/keep-teaching/#student-perspectives). This study fills that gap and reveals that most students’ attitudes towards reading in e-format did not improve during COVID. It is possible that the increased amount of time spent on their computers during remote learning in general caused a screen fatigue that lowered their ability and desire to read their course readings online.

In early 2017, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Library joined 11 other institutions in the United States to participate in a qualitative study, led by Ithaka S+R, of the research and publication practices of Asian Studies faculty. This report summarizes the findings from the interviews of 34 ladder faculty in Asian Studies at UCLA and focuses on common and critical themes that emerged from the responses. It culminates with recommendations for the UCLA Library to implement in order to support the needs of these scholars and mitigate some of the challenges they face during the research and publication cycle.

Library Carpentry is a growing community of instructors and lesson developers whose mission is to teach librarians the tools, techniques and best practices around working with data and using software to automate repetitive tasks. Using the pedagogical practices of live coding, pair programming, discussion and exercises, Library Carpentry creates a safe and collaborative space for important concepts in computing and data, including data manipulation and organization, using the computer to repeat things and the importance of text pattern matching. We teach these concepts using the Unix shell to repeat commands over text and data, regular expressions to match and operate on text strings, and OpenRefine to clean and standardize datasets. Not only do these skills help librarians create reproducible workflows and repeated operations for data-centric tasks, they give librarians a common language with researchers that can lead to a better mutual understanding of data issues and it paves the way to greater collaboration between the library and research departments. In the last two years, Library Carpentry has held two sprints to improve the lesson materials that included over 100 people at 13 sites worldwide. The California Digital Library (CDL) has been awarded a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services that funds a two year, full-time North American Coordinator for Library Carpentry and discussions are starting about integrating with Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry. Currently, Library Carpentry instructors are trained and certified through Software Carpentry, and lessons for all of the Carpentries are created and maintained in Github, using the same templates. In the next year, Library Carpentry will map out an infrastructure of the growing community, formalize lesson development processes, expand its pool of instructors, and create more instructor trainers to meet the demand for Library Carpentry workshops around the globe.

PREFACE

In opening this volume, you might be thinking:

Is another book on school improvement really needed?

Clearly our answer is yes. Our analyses of prevailing school improvement legislation, planning, and literature indicates fundamental deficiencies, especially with respect to enhancing equity of opportunity and closing the achievement gap.

Here is what our work uniquely brings to policy and planning tables:

(1) An expanded framework for school improvement – We highlight that moving from a two- to a three-component policy and practice framework is essential for closing the opportunity and achievement gaps. (That is, expanding from focusing primarily on instruction and management/government concerns by establishing a third primary component to improve how schools address barriers to learning and teaching.)

(2) An emphasis on integrating a deep understanding of motivation – We underscore that concerns about engagement, management of behavior, school climate, equity of opportunity, and student outcomes require an up-to-date grasp of motivation and especially intrinsic motivation.

(3) Clarification of the nature and scope of personalized teaching – We define personalization as the process of matching learner motivation and capabilities and stress that it is the learner's perception that determines whether the match is a good one.

(4) A reframing of remediation and special education – We formulate these processes as personalized special assistance that is applied in and out of classrooms and practiced in a sequential and hierarchical manner.

(5) A prototype for transforming student and learning supports – We provide a framework for a unified, comprehensive, and equitable system designed to address barriers to learning and teaching and re-engage disconnected students and families.

(6) A reworking of the leadership structure for whole school improvement --

We outline how the operational infrastructure can and must be realigned in keeping with a three component school improvement framework.

(7) A systemic approach to enhancing school-community collaboration – We delineate a leadership role for schools in outreaching to communities in order to work on shared concerns through a formal collaborative operational infrastructure that enables weaving together resources to advance the work.

(8) An expanded framework for school accountability – We reframe school accountability to ensure a balanced approach that accounts for a shift to a three component school improvement policy.

(9) Guidance for substantive, scalable, and sustainable systemic changes –

We frame mechanisms and discuss lessons learned related to facilitating fundamental systemic changes and replicating and sustaining them across a district.

The frameworks and practices presented are based on our many years of work in schools and from efforts to enhance school-community collaboration. We incorporate insights from various theories and the large body of relevant research and from lessons learned and shared by many school leaders and staff who strive everyday to do their best for children.

Our emphasis on new directions in no way is meant to demean current efforts. We know that the demands placed on those working in schools go well beyond what anyone should be asked to do. Given the current working conditions in many schools, our intent is to help make the hard work generate better results. To this end, we highlight new directions and systemic pathways for improving school outcomes.

Some of what we propose is difficult to accomplish. Hopefully, the fact that there are schools, districts, and state agencies already trailblazing the way will engender a sense of hope and encouragement to those committed to innovation.

It will be obvious that our work owes much to many. We are especially grateful to those who are pioneering major systemic changes across the country. These leaders and so many in the field have generously offered their insights and wisdom. And, of course, we are indebted to hundreds of scholars whose research and writing is a shared treasure. As always, we take this opportunity to thank Perry Nelson and the host of graduate and undergraduate students at UCLA who contribute so much to our work each day, and to the many young people and their families who continue to teach us all.

Respectfully submitted for your consideration,

Howard Adelman & Linda Taylor

Introduction

Public education is at a crossroads. Moving in new directions is imperative. Just tweaking and tinkering with old ideas is a recipe for disaster.

Continuing challenges confronting public education highlight why moving school improvement policy and practice in new directions is imperative. With a view to enhancing graduation rates and successful transitions to post-secondary opportunities and well-being, pressing challenges include:

Increasing equity of opportunity for every student to succeed, narrowing the achievement gap, and countering the school to prison pipeline Reducing unnecessary referrals for special assistance and special education; Improving school climate and retaining good teachers Reducing the number of low performing schools.

As education leaders well know, meeting these challenges requires making sustainable progress in

improving supports for specific subgroups (e.g., English Learners, immigrant newcomers, lagging minorities, homeless students, students with disabilities) increasing the number of disconnected students who re-engage in classroom learning and thus improving attendance, reducing disruptive behaviors (e.g., including bullying and sexual harassment), and decreasing suspensions and dropouts increasing family and community engagement with schools responding effectively when schools experience crises events and preventing crises whenever possible.

In some schools, continuous progress related to these concerns is being made. For many districts, however, sustainable progress remains elusive – and will continue to be so as long as the focus of school improvement policy and practice is mainly on improving instruction. Efforts to expand the use of instructional technology, develop new curriculum standards, make teachers more accountable, and improve teacher preparation and licensing all have merit; but they are insufficient for addressing the many everyday barriers to learning and teaching that interfere with effective student engagement in classroom instruction.

Most policy makers and administrators know that good instruction delivered by highly qualified teachers cannot ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to succeed at school.

Even the best teacher can’t do the job alone. Teachers need student and learning supports in the classroom and schoolwide in order to personalize instruction and provide special assistance when students manifest learning, behavior, and emotional problems. Unfortunately, school improvement plans continue to give short shrift to these critical matters.

We recognize, as did a Carnegie Task Force on Education, that school systems are not responsible for meeting every need of their students. But as the task force stressed: when the need directly affects learning, the school must meet the challenge.

The most pressing challenge is to enhance equity of opportunity by fundamentally improving how schools address barriers to learning and teaching. The future of public education depends on moving in new directions to accomplish this.

Now is the time to fundamentally transform how schools address factors that keep too many students from doing well at school. And while transformation is never easy, pioneering work across the country is showing the way. Trailblazers are redeploying existing funds allocated for addressing barriers to learning and weaving these together with the invaluable resources that can be garnered by collaboration with other agencies and with community stakeholders, family members, and students themselves.

The first step in moving forward is to escape old ideas. The second step is to incorporate a new vision in school improvement planning for addressing barriers to learning and teaching and re-engaging disconnected students. Our analyses envision a plan that designs and develops a unified, comprehensive, and equitable system of student and learning supports. The third step is to develop a strategic plan for systemic change, scale-up, and sustainability.

This book highlights each of these matters. We invite you to join us in the quest to enhance equity of opportunity for all students to succeed at school and beyond. And we look forward to hearing from you about moving schools forward to make the rhetoric of the Every Student Succeeds Act a reality.

This presentation will discuss the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) through the lens of open access. This introduction to IIIF will highlight recent use cases and, through dynamic visual examples, participants will gain an understanding of the model and technological components behind IIIF and how it supports “openness."  The session will conclude with a short, hands-on demonstration of IIIF features with time for exploring IIIF and investigating further resources. Presenters will also discuss how UCLA Library is adopting IIIF in digital collections to reduce institutional barriers and promote re-use.

Part of UCLA Library's annual International Open Access Week celebration. 

Instructional game created by UCLA Library in support of International Open Access Week 2019. Modeled after the public domain "Snakes and Ladders" boardgame. 

Instructional activity created by UCLA Library in support of International Open Access Week 2019. This actitivy takes users through a game of chance centered around the scholarly peer review process. 

The UCLA Centennial 2019 story map uses words, historical pictures, maps, archival documents, and graphical mapping tools to tell an interactive story about changes that have taken place at the UCLA Campus during first 100 years. It explores collections that span a variety of resources and formats presenting the UCLA Campus from 1919 to 2019. Most maps presented in this story are part of the UCLA Henry J. Bruman Map Collection.

The Misinformation Toolkit, built collaboratively by a team of librarians and library student staff, gives anyone interested in designing a lesson on misinformation the tools to do so. The core principles of the toolkit are that misinformation is a systemic issue and the best way to combat it is through a collaborative learning environment that gives participants many opportunities to reflect, share, and explore together. This session will present some background on the creation of the toolkit and then demonstrate using the toolkit. After this presentation we hope that participants will feel empowered to use the toolkit to build their own lesson on misinformation!

Matthew Vest will present a collaborative open access music score publishing project undertaken by the UCLA Music Library and Kaleidoscope, a local chamber orchestra. In February 2020, Kaleidoscope and the Library jointly put out a Call for Scores that attracted over 7,800 submissions from composers and received over 5,500 submissions for publishing in UCLA’s open access institutional repository. He will discuss the planning and implementation of the Call.

Rachel Boehl will discuss the next steps for the Score Collection, including global context and promotion, as well as offering student perspective on open access music scores.

Using previous research on derogatory terms in LCSH, we investigate their prevalence and use in UC Library Search at UCLA. We discover how users, cataloging practices, and system behavior work in real life

Editor's Preface: This project aims to promote creative writing skills among Japanese language learners and provide them with opportunities to publish their work to benefit future learners. The project targets undergraduate students in their third and fourth years of Japanese language studies, taking courses designed to develop their reading skills to allow them to read a novel without external support. To this end, students were encouraged to participate in significant reading activities outside class. However, students indicated that they had hard time to find more attractive reading options other than textbooks they read for class assignments. This project seeks to address the gap by encouraging students to create their own fictional works. Working in groups of three or four, students wrote a fictional work together. The students in the third-year Japanese class learned onomatopoeia used in literature and Japanese superstitions as parts of course works. Their creative writing was inspired by the course materials and used various words that are not found in commercial Japanese language textbooks. They successfully differentiated writing styles and applied these to their creative writing. Upon completing these assignments, students were motivated to publish their own work for future students of the Japanese language, expressing hope that their works might encourage others to write in various genres to improve their language proficiency.

Editor's Preface: This project aims to promote creative writing skills among Japanese language learners and provide them with opportunities to publish their work to benefit future learners. The project targets undergraduate students in their third and fourth years of Japanese language studies, taking courses designed to develop their reading skills to allow them to read a novel without external support. To this end, students were encouraged to participate in significant reading activities outside class. However, students indicated that they could not find attractive and appropriate reading options among the extensive Japanese reading collections. This project seeks to address the gap by encouraging students to create their own fictional works. Working in groups of three or four, students wrote a fictional work together. The students in the third-year Japanese class read Spirited Away and watched the original anime as course assignments. Their creative writing was inspired by the story and used various words that are not found in commercial Japanese language textbooks. Fourth-year students wrote a story relating to the main theme of the course: Tokyo. They successfully differentiated writing styles andapplied these to their creative writing. Upon completing these assignments, students were motivated to publish their own work for future students of the Japanese language, expressing hope that their worksmight encourage others to write in various genres to improve their language proficiency.

Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke is an extended dialogue between film scholar Michael Berry and the internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker. Drawing from extensive interviews and public talks, this volume offers a portrait of Jia’s life, art, and approach to filmmaking. Jia and Berry’s conversations range from Jia’s childhood and formative years to extensive discussions of his major narrative films, including the classics Xiao Wu, Platform, The World, Still Life, and A Touch of Sin. Jia gives a firsthand account of his influences, analyzes the Chinese film industry, and offers his thoughts on subjects such as film music, working with actors, cinematography, and screenwriting. From industry and economics to art and politics, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke represents the single most comprehensive document of the director’s candid thoughts on the art and challenges of filmmaking.

Can a history of cure be more than a history of how disease comes to an end? In 1950s Madras, an international team of researchers demonstrated that antibiotics were effective in treating tuberculosis. But just half a century later, reports out of Mumbai stoked fears about the spread of totally drug-resistant strains of the disease. Had the curable become incurable? Through an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India, Bharat Jayram Venkat examines what it means to be cured, and what it means for a cure to come undone. At the Limits of Cure tells a story that stretches from the colonial period—a time of sanatoria, travel cures, and gold therapy—into a postcolonial present marked by antibiotic miracles and their failures. Venkat juxtaposes the unraveling of cure across a variety of sites: in idyllic hill stations and crowded prisons, aboard ships and on the battlefield, and through research trials and clinical encounters. If cure is frequently taken as an ending (of illness, treatment, and suffering more generally), Venkat provides a foundation for imagining cure otherwise in a world of fading antibiotic efficacy.

Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial fortune-telling cafes where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals can navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life.