UCLA Library

Amid targeted attacks on the field of diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially in institutions of higher education, it is essential to uplift and demystify key elements of work that can catalyze structural shifts to foster a sense of belonging among all constituents. It is particularly necessary to foreground the work individual people are empowered to undertake through rigorous self-reflection and in dialogue with proximate people who can shift institutional dynamics and lead to broad-reaching systemic change. Small groups of people have invariably found ways to overcome narratives of powerlessness to build coalitions and effect change by strengthening relationships with each other. By cultivating shared practices that ensure people’s needs are met, including and especially people whose minoritized identities have historically prevented them from experiencing a deep sense of belonging, such groups have generated sufficient momentum to enact structural changes. This article aims to highlight potential elements that can support such transformation and to foreground the synergies that become possible when individuals practice a restorative version of accountability and embody a commitment to inclusion and equity.

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.