UCLA Library

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.

Using previous LCSH research on derogatory terms, we develop a strategy to identify derogatory subject items in the newly implemented consortial unified resource management system of one of the largest collections in the United States. 

The Semantic Web encompasses the technology that connects data from different sources across the Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee and led by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This Web of Data enables the linking of data sets across data silos on the Web by providing for machine-to-machine communication through the use of Linked Data. This Guide provides descriptions and links to resources used to implement this technology. It also provides links to instructional resources, books and articles, use cases, vocabularies, tools, and best practices.

For over a decade, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) has offered some variation of the Community Workshop Series (CWS), a partnership to provide digital literacy and computer technology classes to community members at local public libraries. Both authors have served as coordinators of the program as library science graduate students at the UNC School of Information and Library Science. We situate this program within existing literature on digital and information literacy, community engagement, and the graduate student experience to show the utility of this program and similar programs for training graduate students, enhancing the graduate student experience, supporting the needs of community members, and bolstering the capacities of public libraries. The authors provide an overview of the program and encourage others to start similar programs. To this end, the authors present a case study of the CWS, including discussion of creating the program and keeping things going and a how-to guide for creating your own. The authors identify four recommendations for creating a similar program to clearly delineate takeaways that might inform readers’ attempts to create similar programs, and they provide additional materials and documentation in appendices to support the creation of new community-engaged programs in LIS.

The User Engagement division was established during a recent reorganization aimed at bringing together public-facing library services under one associate university librarian (AUL). This affected thirty-five academic and career staff across several libraries, including the Arts Library, Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, Eugene and Maxine Rosenfeld Management Library, Music Library, Powell Library, Science and Engineering Library, and the Charles E. Young Library Humanities and Social Sciences Division; each of these libraries had differing existing administrative structures and norms. The establishment of User Engagement required those staff to combine and divide units as well as workflow processes in order to successfully integrate and scale public services for patrons. A year later, John Kotter’s eight-step model of change provides an excellent framework to analyze the successes and ongoing challenges of the reorganization.