UC Santa Barbara Library

Angela Boyd and Yolanda Blue presented the poster on October 1-2, 2014 at West Virginia University Libraries in Morgantown, West Virginia.  The poster presents research findings  highlighted in a talk given by the authors.

In the United States, the library residency (sometimes referred to as a fellowship or internship) is defined as a temporary, entry-level position in a library that targets post-library school graduates as part of a diversity recruitment and/or early career development program.  There are fewer than 30 such programs in the USA.  

We conducted a nationwide survey of library residency programs in the USA.  Questions  addressed program planning and decision-making, attitudes toward various aspects of libraries and residents, and the effectiveness of residency programs in context.  This information will be used to develop a model for libraries that have existing residency programs or that want to start a similar program.

 Our research will paint a picture of the landscape of library residency programs in the USA.  A comprehensive survey of both residency coordinators and residents has not been conducted before.

The workshop and companion poster begin with both a theoretical and practical background based on our research. In the interactive portion, participants will be asked to share their individual experiences with early career development in their own countries; to discuss the need for effective early career development programs; and, finally, to design the ideal residency program that can be adapted for their own community needs.

This poster and a workshop was presented by Angela Boyd on August 19-20, 2013 at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress  79th IFLA General Conference and Assembly in Singapore, Singapore.

The UC Santa Barbara Library faced significant challenges in 2012 when it was determined that the collection of 700,000 volumes in the Library’s central tower had to be permanently reduced by 20 percent because of seismic retrofitting for an expansion and renovation project. While many libraries have reported on methods of engaging with faculty to inform selection decisions for offsite storage, little has been reported about using survey methodology for this purpose. To develop strategies for relocation that would have the least impact on research and teaching, a team of UCSB librarians worked with a faculty committee and the campus Social Science Survey Center to develop a survey of user behaviors and preferences in accessing library information resources. Members of the faculty committee were nominated by academic deans and the Academic Senate. The survey was distributed in spring 2012 to all faculty and graduate students. The target population returned 772 surveys, yielding a margin of error of 4.2 percent and a confidence level of 99 percent. Using survey results, the Library team developed six strategies for offsite storage selection. The strategies were then evaluated by the faculty committee to ensure consistency with the survey outcomes. Once approved by the committee, the strategies were presented to the campus and are now being implemented. The poster summarizes the steps taken by the Library team working with the faculty committee. It also presents the six strategies with supporting survey data displayed by graphs.  Janet Martorana presented the poster on June 30, 2013 at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois.

A review of THE BLACK BODY IN ECSTASY: READING RACE, READING PORNOGRAPHY, by Jennifer C. Nash; UNBOUGHT UNBOSSED: TRANSGRESSIVE BLACK WOMEN, SEXUALITY, AND REPRESENTATION, by Trimiko Melancon; and A TASTE FOR BROWN SUGAR: BLACK WOMEN IN PORNOGRAPHY, by Mireille Miller-Young.

What is the nature of ultimate evil?  Answers will vary, but it is logical to say that they will depend on what one considers to be the core of humanity: that which attacks that core is the ultimate evil.  Evidence in Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" mythos and J. R. R. Tolkien's "Middle-earth" mythos suggests that they both saw free will at the core of humanity, and that ultimate evil lies in the domination and subjugation of the will of others.  Kirby symbolized this evil in the "Anti-Life Equation"; Tolkien in the One Ring of Sauron.  This paper will compare the images of evil in the two authors'  works.

This report details the investigation of practices of instructors who use quantitative data to teach undergraduate courses within the Social Sciences. The study was undertaken by employees of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library, who participated in this research project with 19 other colleges and universities across the U.S. under the direction of Ithaka S+R. Ithaka S+R is a New York-based research organization, which, among other goals, seeks to develop strategies, services, and products to meet evolving academic trends to support faculty and students.

The library addition and renovation project will provide much-needed space for new programs to support the rapidly changing research environment, but will have no impact on the library’s ability to provide access to the scholarly record. Because of the insufficient collections budget, UCSB access to global research necessary for our faculty to compete and excel is now severely at risk. Despite high inflation in the cost of scholarly information resources over the last decade, the collections base budget has remained flat. As a result, UCSB now stands at a significant competitive disadvantage, ranking last among AAU public institutions in collections expenditures. Although the faculty have identified collections as the library service most in need of improvement, acquisitions will decline sharply starting next year. Even with the cancellation of a thousand journals, book purchasing will decrease by 50 percent, with further steep declines in the following years. We invite a campus conversation about a critical issue that concerns the entire UCSB community and urgently requires our collective deliberation and action.

This report summarizes the design, implementation, and assessment of a credit-bearing information literacy course offered at UCSB for undergraduates in the Winter 2021 quarter. This course was developed by the 2019-2022 Evolving Workforce Residency Librarian at UCSB Library. 

In Queer Traffic, Jennifer Tyburczy traces how sexual dissidents across the Mexico-Canada-US borderlands transport the objects and experiences that nourish their sexual and social lives. She situates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a pivot point in the formation of panics aimed at stamping out these outlaw sex practices. Highlighting NAFTA’s erotic investments in hetero- and homonormativity, racial capitalism, markets of dispossession, and neocolonialism, Tyburczy directly engages with art, activism, and archives to revisit the struggles of people who invented circuits of sexual exchange through four decades of violence and criminalization. In conversing with actors from bureaucrats to pornographers and in studying choreographies, social movements, and street vocabularies, she examines an array of tactics that undermine the market logics of trade law and policy. Dreaming of other forms of living that go beyond mere survival, Queer Traffic guides us through the renegade pathways that circumvent the seemingly endless reach of free-trade capitalism toward other routes to pleasure.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

How can “Speaking Rights to Power” construct political will to respond to human rights abuse worldwide? Examining dozens of cases of human rights campaigns, this book shows how communication politics build recognition, solidarity, and social change. The book presents an innovative analysis of the politics of persuasion, based in the strategic use of voice, framing, media, protest performance, and audience bridging. Building on twenty years of research on five continents, this comprehensive study ranges from Aung San Suu Kyi to Anna Hazare, from Congo to Colombia, from Arab Spring to Pussy Riot. It includes both well-chronicled campaigns like the struggle to end violence against women, as well as lesser-known efforts, such as interethnic human rights alliances in the United States. Cases of relative success are carefully compared with unavailing struggles. The author's analysis is grounded in the concrete practice of human rights campaigns and derives testable strategic guidance for human rights struggles. “Speaking Rights to Power” addresses cutting edge debates on human rights and the ethic of care, cosmopolitanism, charismatic leadership, communicative action, and political theater, and the role of social media. It draws on constructivist literature from social movement and international relations theory, and analyzes human rights as a form of global social imagination. Combining a normative contribution with judicious critique, this book shows how human rights rhetoric matters—and how to make it matter more.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.

This book provides an introduction to the field-theoretic methods and computer simulation techniques used in the design of structured polymeric fluids for a wide variety of applications. By such methods, the principles that dictate equilibrium self-assembly in systems ranging from block and graft copolymers, to polyelectrolytes, liquid crystalline polymers, and polymer nanocomposites can be established. Building on an introductory discussion of single-polymer statistical mechanics, the book provides a detailed treatment of analytical and numerical techniques for addressing the statistical properties of polymers subjected to spatially-varying potential fields. This problem is shown to be central to the field-theoretic description of interacting polymeric fluids, and models for a number of important polymer systems are elaborated. Self-consistent field theory is treated in detail, which is a collection of analytical and numerical techniques for obtaining solutions of polymer field theory models in the mean-field approximation. The book concludes with a discussion of analytical methods for going beyond the mean-field approximation and an introduction to the exciting new field of field-theoretic polymer simulations — the direct numerical simulation of polymer field theory models.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California Libraries.