UC San Diego Library

Granting ownership rights to data, as if it were private property, only limits data access without ensuring the benefits of researcher precedence or the rewards for good data collection.

Purpose: In 2019, the UC San Diego Library engaged in an organizational renewal activity that included parallel efforts to renew our strategic priorities, recruit new senior leadership, revise leadership portfolios, and evaluate the impact of previous organizational changes for adjustments. To engage in these initiatives in a cohesive way, we needed a framework to connect these planning activities to the intended service outcomes of our organization. This paper describes our use of the logic model planning and assessment framework to define service outcomes – that align Library priorities to campus goals, professional trends, and long-term impact areas – and to set up an assessment for future organizational development.

Approach: Logic models are visual planning and assessment diagrams that depict the connections between an organization’s work and the intended results. They are like concept maps that depict an if-then relationship between resources, activities, outputs, and outcomes/impact, i.e., if we have the resources, then we expect to conduct the activities; if we conduct the activities, then we expect to produce the outputs; if the outputs are delivered, then we may realize specific outcomes/impact. Outcomes may be divided by different types of change in our users – specifically in their learning, actions, and conditions. Additionally, outcomes may be differentiated by time range as short, intermediate, or long term. The logic model framework has been used by governmental, philanthropic, academic, and library organizations. It may be especially useful for aligning the current activities of the organization towards new or revitalized long-term service outcomes and developing assessment methods to inform this change.

Findings: We describe how the logic model approach contributed to a unified framework for coordinating strategic, leadership, and organizational planning during our multifaceted organizational renewal. We focus on three beneficial features of the logic model: a framework centered on clear outcomes around user change, connecting work activities to organizational impact, and gathering holistic perspectives in a manageable and structured manner. These features contributed to strategic planning by framing priorities in a resonant way to users and external stakeholders, providing a roadmap for implementation and assessment, and facilitating shared understanding and decision-making. In terms of leadership planning, the logic model approach was instrumental to aligning conversations around mission and strategic priorities, ensuring clear paths between leadership and organizational structures, and providing methods to align leadership with organizational work and operations. Finally, logic models contributed to organizational planning by ensuring that organizational structures support service priorities and users’ needs, prioritizing work based on outcomes and resources, and facilitating assessment at an operational and organizational level.

Value: The value of logic models for multifaceted organizational planning falls along four themes: (1) operational- and activity-centered strategic planning, (2) mission- and outcome- aligned organizational planning, (3) user impact-focused communication, and (4) contextual and additive assessment to coordinate planning. The underlying common element to these positives is the clearly articulated organizational outcome framed around user change and broader campus goals. Such outcomes lay the groundwork for evaluation, continuous improvement, and future organizational development. They also serve as indicators of progress and help identify course corrections in a changing environment. And by anchoring outcomes to long-term campus goals, we have the latitude to adjust our organization to suit changing needs and trends. This paper may help the reader engage in multifaceted Library planning through the design of organizational outcomes for planning and assessment.

Conference paper at the ARL Library Assessment Conference (November 18, 2020)

Panel 3.

Participants in The Diversity Committee forum at the 2019 ARLIS/NA Annual Conference in Salt Lake City presented on  intersectionality through leadership in working with diverse populations that defines library identity with groups that do not necessarily see themselves reflected in the workforce or in library resources. This zine was created as take home materials for attendees of the forum.

Concluding Remarks.

Structural changes in library leadership and services impact how librarians experience their work. When faced with externally imposed change, our public services team did more than adapt and navigate. We partnered management with organizational development to build a more inclusive team through shared visioning. Recognizing that everyone’s experience of change is unique, we employed a variety of tools and techniques to discover factors underlying motivation and resistance. We will share how we built our leadership skills to move a large team through change while respecting the identities, professional values, and experiences of each individual in the team.

This presentation covers the challenges and solutions of digitizing and preserving the UCSD Center for Music Experiment (CME) archive - a collection of approximately 1,644 analog recordings created between 1969 and 1993 documenting a wide variety of performances, lectures and demonstrations. The recordings were digitized by UC San Diego Libraries in an effort to preserve the content contained on deteriorating tapes and to make it available to music researchers in the future. The project involved use of the Archivists’ Toolkit for data management, adding the audio files to the library’s Digital Asset Management System, and building a custom player.

Libraries purchase thousands of databases, eJournals and eBooks each year, but their usage is relatively low. Research shows users understand the credibility and quality of library resources and prefer to use them if they can find them. But the complexity of information structure and poor design of many library websites make it difficult for users to discover this wealth of resources. How can librarians help make resources more discoverable to library users? Strategies successfully implemented at the University of California San Diego include better website design and navigation, Web 2.0-enriched subject portals, RSS for featured resources/services, user-controlled embeddable gadgets and tactics to link physical and the virtual libraries.

This report describes the work done to build a prototype for a union catalog of art images as a proof-of-concept that it is technically possible to create such a union database.

This documentation strategy outlines an archival collecting model for the field of biotechnology to acquire original papers, manuscripts and records from selected individuals, organizations and corporations as well as coordinating with the effort to capture oral history interviews with many biotechnology pioneers.

The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Library’s inaugural Learning Spaces (LSP) Program was formally established on July 1, 2013 through a library-wide reorganization process spanning 2012-2014. As a new program whose offerings remain in development, 2013-2014 presented the opportunity organizationally to initiate new library services and amenities and to adopt a new path based on the program’s initial strategic objectives.  This chapter details several of the ways in which the program began during its first year to accomplish its goals of engaging library users, building a sense of community and patron ownership within the library’s learning spaces, establishing a culture of assessment among program staff, and developing library spaces where students feel welcomed and supported in their academic life.  Activities detailed in the chapter are provided as examples for other libraries working toward similar outcomes.  Additionally, a limited literature review of library engagement and community building in libraries is presented, along with research support for many of the Learning Spaces Program’s new initiatives.

The design of information literacy instruction and the building of it are two distinct skillsets and processes; yet all too often everything gets mashed together, creating needless confusion and stress. In this book Turnbow, an instructional designer, and Roth, an instructional technologist, suggest a better way to organize the work. They shed light on the people, processes, and resources required to create a sustainable portfolio of online instruction. With the goal of fostering conversations in your library about the most streamlined and effective ways to get the work done.

Demystifying the instructional design and development process used to create online learning objects, this book will help you understand how instructional design principles and approaches can benefit your learners.

Scholarly communication is undergoing an ever accelerating evolution in how research and scholarship are being conducted, how scholarship is being disseminated, and who is included in the creation and communication of new knowledge. At the forefront of this evolution are libraries and academics who recognize that students are not only creating new knowledge that is valuable beyond the walls of the classroom but that there is a dire need to support and educate students and institutions about the impact of information sharing on a global scale. Students share and receive information on the internet with very little context and support for their roles as knowledge producers and global digital citizens.

This chapter discusses how acting on these opportunities benefit the student well after graduation by inspiring citizens who are information-literate advocates for education, intellectual engagement, and science. The undergraduate who is trusted and supported as a public scholar can become a more empathetic and productive digital citizen. The authors; a scholarly communications librarian, a liberal arts professor, and an undergraduate alumna discuss and relate experiences of how addressing this educational opportunity through 1) classroom assignments, 2) instruction, and 3) publishing has created space for a deepened engagement with the affordances and challenges of being a public scholar and global citizen.

This book offers a new approach to longstanding philosophical puzzles about what colors are and how they fit into the natural world. The author argues for a role-functionalist treatment of color — a view according to which colors are identical to certain functional roles involving perceptual effects on subjects. The author first argues (on broadly empirical grounds) for the more general relationalist view that colors are constituted in terms of relations between objects, perceivers, and viewing conditions. He responds to semantic, ontological, and phenomenological objections against this thesis, and argues that relationalism offers the best hope of respecting both empirical results and ordinary belief about color. He then defends the more specific role-functionalist account by contending that the latter is the most plausible form of color relationalism.

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

Seemingly every day society faces a new ethical challenge raised by a scientific innovation. Human genetic engineering, stem cell research, face transplantation, synthetic biology – all were science fiction only a few decades ago, but are now all are reality. How do we as a society decide whether these technologies are ethical? For decades professional bioethicists have served as a mediator between a busy public and decision-makers, helping people understand their own ethical concerns, framing arguments, discrediting illogical claims and lifting up promising ones. These bioethicists operate in multiple venues such as hospital decision-making, institutions that conduct research on humans, and recommending ethical policy to the government. While functioning quite well for many years, the bioethics profession is in crisis. Policy-makers are less inclined to take the advice of bioethics professionals, with many observers saying that bioethics debates have simply become partisan politics with dueling democratic and republican bioethicists. While this crisis is contained to the task of recommending ethical policy to the government, there is risk that it will spread to the other tasks conducted by bioethicists. To understand how this situation came into being, and the solution to this problem, this book closely examines the history of the bioethics profession. Bioethics debates were originally dominated by theologians, but came to be dominated by the emerging profession of bioethics due to the subtle and slow involvement of the government as the primary consumer of bioethical arguments. However, after the 1980s the views of the government changed, making bioethical arguments not quite so legitimate. With this knowledge of the sociological processes that lead to this evolution, the book proposes a radical solution to the crisis, which is for the bioethics profession to give up on some of the work that it currently does so that it can focus upon its strengths, and change the way the profession makes ethical arguments.

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