UC Libraries Forum 2021: Leading with Innovation, Stronger through 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.

The UC Common Knowledge Groups (CKGs) provide an inclusive environment for sharing knowledge and information across the campuses that enrich communication among library staffs, expand resources and benefit library users in equitable ways. Reinforced by the structure of the California Digital Library (CDL), and in the spirit of all things related to equity, diversity and inclusivity (EDI), the intention is to foster innovation and continuous improvement by providing an open venue to exchange ideas and collaborate on systemwide initiatives.

The UC system currently has about 20 subject-based CKGs; these are the focus of this presentation. Subject-based CKGs contribute to UC acquisitions, licensing, processing, staff training, utilization of new and emerging technologies and implementation of new services that benefit and advance the University of California in fundamental ways. Subject CKGs also advise and give feedback on UC initiatives (e.g. shared print, the eScholarship repository, shared cataloging and data management), leveraging the collective knowledge and thoughtful consideration of librarians who bring a direct knowledge of their discipline-based constituencies.

This panel presentation will: 1) provide an overview of subject CKGs; 2) share results of survey of CKG members conducted in Summer 2021; and 3) suggest impactful ways that the CKGs can contribute so libraries and their staffs are more resilient and empowered and collections meet patrons needs. We will conclude with an interactive discussion to elaborate and expand on the ideas presented. Our goal is to contribute to a shared understanding of CKG activities and spark discussion on ways that CKGs can continue to innovate and evolve.

Academic librarians have increasingly gone public with their experiences of low morale and burnout, yet less attention has been paid to the workplace experiences of 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.”

We decided to examine that gap in the research. In exploring the landscape of library staff morale, we hypothesized that the nature of the academic library’s hierarchies, and staff roles within them, would be major factors in levels of morale. We also sought to investigate questions of organizational culture, opportunities for professional development, and management style.

Our research team, including library staff, former library staff, a recent MLS grad and MLIS student, and librarians, conducted 34 structured interviews with academic library staff nationwide (purposefully excluding UC staff). The interviews took place during a three-week period in May-June 2020, and provide perhaps the final snapshot of library staff life in the pre-COVID era. Interviews were transcribed by a student who was trained by a member of our team, and de-identified transcripts were analyzed using the qualitative data analysis software MAXDQA.

In this talk, we present our findings, some of which surprised us. Among other things, the findings establish that efforts to address equity in compensation, provide professional growth opportunities, and create more collegial work environments, in particular addressing the librarian-staff divide and the need for manager advocacy, can all improve staff morale. In addition, we suggest concrete ways to make changes in libraries in order to assess and improve morale across staff hierarchies, and we offer resources for workplace development and support for staff.

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

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.

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.

This presentation shares the work at the UC Davis Library, Research and Learning Directorate to revamp our process for collecting research consultation metrics - to give us better insight into who our users are, and how they engage with our consultation services.

We will share how we renovated our research consult metrics gathering process, including 1) identifying shortcomings of our previous processes, 2) gaining institutional buy-in to revamp the process, 3) forming a representative team and inclusive feedback process, 4) determining which metrics to gather, 5) working with IT to assemble a technological stack for data input, tiered data access and visualization, and 6) workforce training and rollout.

We will also share the results of our informal survey of how research consult metrics are collected and used across the UC Libraries - including whether UC Libraries: 1) use a centrally organized or standardized process for collecting research consult metrics 2) What software (if any) is used to collect research consult metrics 3) what survey/form instruments are used and what metrics are collected, and 4) whether UC Librarians consider their metrics to be useful for improving how they deliver services.

Finally, we will discuss our ongoing work to establish an evidence-based practice of reviewing and acting on these data regularly. We will also touch on the tensions between use of this data for service improvement vs assessment of librarian performance.

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.

I will present information about the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Becoming Better Allies Group that I launched in 2020. Library staff who are interested meet on Zoom to collaborate on allyship for the BIPOC and LGBTQ population. This is an independent group that meets biweekly. We share, explore, and discuss various articles, books, and videos that call attention to marginalized communities and steps to make changes within ourselves and our communities and institutions. I will discuss the importance of creating a Statement of Intention (with examples) for folx who wish to start their own anti-racist library group. We will also look at how creating a bibliographic website helped us track and choose the anti-racism issues we wanted to work on. In addition, participants of this lightning talk will be able to access my slides and extra resources including our website: Becoming Better Allies: Committed to Equity in University Libraries.

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.