More News November 10, 2017

On Nov. 2-4, several UCR Library staff members contributed programs and poster sessions for the California Libraries Association (CLA) Annual Conference in Riverside, CA. The 2017 conference theme was, “New Worlds Emerge.”

Maker Services Librarian Krista Ivy, Open Research Librarian Michele Potter, and Data Librarian Kat Koziar gave a presentation session called From Zero to Makerspace: The UC Riverside Creat’R Lab Story. “It was well attended, and the audience was engaged with what we presented,” Koziar said.

Data Librarian Kat Koziar, Special Collections Public Services Assistant Zayda Delgado, Head of Preservation Services Patricia Smith-Hunt, Preservation Assistant Sara Stilley, and Director of Distinctive Collections Cherry Williams collaborated on a poster presentation titled, New Technologies, New Worlds. The poster showed the evolution of books across a timeline from 2500 BCE to present day, highlighting the most significant inventions used to create, package, disseminate, and access information.

“We took several items from our teaching collection and people who stopped by got to see and touch the transformative technologies our poster highlighted,” Delgado said. “Conference attendees really enjoyed the hands-on experience.”

Social Sciences Teaching Librarian Christina Cicchetti gave a poster presentation called Promoting School Readiness Through Diverse Children’s Books, which she prepared in collaboration with Dr. Ashaunta Anderson, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the UCR School of Medicine and Principal Investigator for the Cultural Pride Reinforcement for Early School Readiness research project; Sharon Rushing, PhD candidate in the UCR Department of Anthropology; and Dr. Annette Goldsmith, Lecturer at the University of Washington Information School.

“The study will distribute books to children during well-child visits to their pediatrician,” explained Cicchetti, who serves with Goldsmith on a community advisory board that helped to select books used in the study and prepared an informational handout for parents.

University Programs Teaching Librarian Judy Lee organized and led a Riverside Asian American Walking Tour on Sunday, Nov. 5, after the CLA Conference concluded.

Carla Arbagey, Collection Strategist for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) led a tour of the UCR Library for attendees from the CLA conference.

“I had a lot of fun showing off our libraries and our campus,” Arbagey said. “Of course, the highlight of the tour was our visit to Special Collections and University Archives, and everyone was excited to see the home of the Eaton Collection.” Katz shared program goals and findings for 4 to Explore, along with the featured items from the current and prior months.

When showing Project Bi Nary by Steven McCarthy (nicknamed the “pillow book” by library staff), a recent acquisition from the September road show with Vamp & Tramp Artists Booksellers, Arbagey had an a-ha! moment: “I saw how one item from our collection can show how the seemingly disparate departments in our library are actually very connected.” The tour group first encountered it when they met with Patricia Smith-Hunt in Preservation, who explained how Preservation creates custom-made, acid free boxes to store special collections items.

Then in Special Collections, Katz explained that she had suggested the book as a purchase because it could be featured as part of a Creat'R Lab event on crafting and artists' books.

“So, you can see how our tour, which went from the Creat'R Lab to Preservation to SCUA, could be connected by this single (and very cool) book!” Arbagey concluded.

More News September 22, 2023

More News May 25, 2017

UCR Library patrons have a new, convenient way to pay online for reproduction services.

Did you even know that you can request copies of materials from our Special Collections department? Indeed, you can, and library staff will provide them for you in research or publication quality, as high-resolution TIFFs, JPEGs, or PDFs. (Details about our reproduction policy are available here.)

Before, library patrons could only pay for reproductions by check, which presented challenges for many library users. “We have collections that are well-known internationally and that have high use by researchers outside the U.S.,” Robin M. Katz, Outreach & Public Services Librarian explained. “People from all over the globe want to consult our materials, and so when we only took checks they had to deal with bank fees and currency exchanges, and mailing checks overseas, so it took a long time. Now it’s faster and better for everyone, but especially for our rather large population of international researchers.”

With the new online platform, Special Collections can accept payments via credit cards, debit cards, or funds in your PayPal account. They new system should also reduce the risk of compromising bank account information if a check got lost in the mail.

To request a reproduction of Special Collections materials, first create an account in our request system. Then submit your request. You will receive an invoice through the request system, which you can pay online. Library staff will deliver a link to your account within the request system, and you will have 30 days to download your documents or images.

For any questions about our holdings or how to access them, please email specialcollections@ucr.edu.

More News September 14, 2020

On Monday, Sept. 28, the UCR Library will launch Ask a Student, a chat service to help new and returning UC Riverside students navigate campus and get timely assistance from fellow UCR students.

Ask a Student will be available Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.; students can submit questions by email outside of those hours. Starting on Sept. 28, students will have three ways to access Ask a Student: via chat widgets on the library's Ask Us page, the new Ask UCR webpage, and the Keep Learning website.

Jointly managed by the library's Teaching & Learning and Research Services departments, Ask a Student will provide a place for students to connect with peers to get to the resources they need to be successful in the remote learning environment.

“One aim of this program is to support the Dean of Students’ initiative to build connections and feelings of belonging among the student body, despite our physical distance,” explained Dani Cook, the library's Director of Teaching and Learning.

Returning library student employees will staff Ask a Student, under the supervision of Teaching and Learning Services Coordinator Christopher Martone and Research Services Department Assistant Margarita Yonezawa.

“We still have Ask a Librarian for in-depth research questions,” Cook added. “And the student staff will be able to transfer questions between the services if needed.”

“The UCR Library looks forward to launching this new service to support our students. We hope it will be a useful complement to the ScottyBot, which focuses on financial aid and residential life, and help build a sense of connection for our students,” said Ann Frenkel, Deputy University Librarian. “We are grateful to our campus partners for helping us identify the need for this kind of service, and for taking the time to share details and scenarios with our student staff, so we can provide the best service possible.”

These partners include: the Dean of Students, Academic Resource Center, Basic Needs, CARE, CAPS, GSOE Academic Advising, the Ombuds, the Registrar, Residential Life, Student Life, the Student Disability Resource Center, Undergraduate Education, and The Well.

 

 

More News April 29, 2022

The UCR Library is experimenting with an innovative research tool that offers users a new way of viewing and discovering information.  

Artificial intelligence-powered research has landed at UC Riverside with the library’s adoption of Yewno Discover. The new research tool aims to help users perform meaningful research in a short amount of time.  

How does Yewno Discover work? Enter a concept into Yewno Discover and users will see a knowledge map. The primary concept searched for appears as a prominent node in the center of the map and is surrounded by smaller nodes representing connected (or secondary) concepts. These secondary concepts appear due to Yewno Discover’s built-in AI that ingests and scans information from sources like Wikipedia to deliver related concepts that may aid the user in their research.  

Once a primary or secondary node is selected, the user will be able to read a brief overview of the concept, view additional information on related concepts, and access documents on the concept, such as articles and books, that take a user directly to the relevant parts of the text.  

For certain users, what may have taken hours of searching using traditional methods might just take a single research session on Yewno Discover.  

“People think and learn differently,” explained Michele Potter, the UCR Library’s Collection Strategist for STEM. “With Yewno Discover, the idea is to offer people a new way to see and use information.” 

Potter has been working with Yewno Discover to refine and optimize the research platform to better serve the needs of the UCR community. She hopes to receive feedback from UCR users on what they enjoy about the tool and suggestions for improvement.  

Unlike other research engines, Yewno Discover’s emphasis is on exploration. While some may prefer conventional research methods, Yewno Discover’s unique way of allowing users to engage with information can be valuable for the more inquisitive.  

While using the tool, if a user notices a secondary concept they are not aware of, or the user is simply curious about what these concepts have in common, users can “generate a relationship” between a primary and secondary concept to see what the two selected concepts have in common.  

“Yewno Discover is particularly useful to use when trying to understand relationships between concepts,” Potter said. "It's a way of exploring a concept that's very holistic. Maybe you won’t learn in a linear fashion, but at the end of the day, you're probably going to have a pretty thorough understanding of the concept you searched for.” 

UCR students, faculty, and researchers can try out this innovative discovery tool right from the search bar at library.ucr.edu. Type in a concept and the user can connect to Yewno Discover along with UC Library Search, WorldCat Discovery, and other research resources. Users can also visit discover.yewno.com. 

If you want to learn more about Yewno Discover, read the library’s Yewno Discover Guide. 

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More News August 18, 2017

On Wednesday, August 16, 2017, approximately 26 library employees attended a luncheon workshop in Tomás Rivera Library sponsored by the Library Professional Development Committee.

The workshop topic was “Work-Life Balance” and featured a webinar plus small group discussion and sharing exercises.

“This topic was purposely picked from the suggestions staff gave in the first ever PDC kickoff event,” said Leslie Settle, Chair of the Professional Development Committee. “Almost 50% of those in attendance also completed the online survey, which had overwhelmingly positive feedback on both the content of the material and the facilitation from the breakout sessions. Many staff reported to me that they will apply the tools learned in the brown bag to enhance their work and home performance as well as educate others.”

Klein Librarian for Science Fiction JJ Jacobson won the luncheon raffle, which included the first public giveaway of a UCR Library branded fidget spinner.

The next PDC-sponsored event will take place on Thursday September 14, 2017. The focus of the September event will be “communication,” with learning objectives focused on developing active listening skills, changing the way you communicate, becoming aware of how others respond to you, and winning support.

The Professional Development Committee (PDC) is comprised of both academic and support staff in the Library whose goal is to offer an inclusive perspective on library employees’ development needs. The PDC offers four library-wide events per year as well as several “brown bag” lunch-and-learn sessions, like this most recent example.

More News October 26, 2016

The University of California, Riverside Library hosted International Open Access Week 2016, an event that was part of a global effort called Open Access Week.

Open Access Week is an opportunity for the academic and research community to learn about the potential benefits of sharing what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make “open access” a new norm in scholarship and research.

The Open Access movement is made of up advocates (librarians, publishers, university repositories, etc.) who promote the free, immediate, and online publication of research. The event was held on Tuesday, Oct. 25, in the Orbach Science Library, room 240, from 1-3 p.m. “Open in Action” was the 2016 event theme – the program provided information on new publishing models, including those based on Open Access and other alternative publishing models for faculty. The panel at UC Riverside discussed, “Challenges of Open Access in the Digital Age.”

“We organized this panel to provide a thoughtful discussion space for these emerging open access models and show how faculty can benefit from wider and more visible distribution of their research articles,” said Rhonda Neugebauer, the Open Access coordinator at UCR. “We will also discuss UCR’s current Open Access discount and waiver agreements, and ways the library can assist faculty to increase the citing and impact of their research.”

The program included:

• Gabriel J. Gardner, Senior Assistant Librarian for Criminal Justice, Linguistics and Romance, German, and Russian Languages and Literatures at the California State University, Long Beach. Gardner discussed the guerilla open access movement.
• Alison Scott, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Scholarly Communication at UCR, addressed the significance of transformative scholarly publishing projects and best practices.
• Kent LaCombe, Water Resources Librarian at UCR, talked about how librarians at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln fostered high deposit rates of faculty scholarly articles into the “Digital Commons,” the campus institutional repository.

The program concluded with a presentation from three UCR librarians, Kat Koziar (engineering), Tiffany Moxham (medicine), and Michele Potter (engineering), who provided an update on UCR’s Open Access discount and waiver agreements, and a brief look at emergent open access publishing models.

This was the seventh International Open Access Week program hosted by the UCR Library.

More News July 01, 2015

Last summer, University Librarian Steve Mandeville-Gamble asked Ann Frenkel, Associate University Librarian (AUL) for Research and Instructional Services, to pull together a team of librarians and staff to rethink how space is used in the UCR Library. They were given a budget for purchasing new furniture to enhance research and study interactions. The team analyzed how students use the physical library, studying where students carve out spaces for particular functions.

The team found that students engage in various types of activities, including individual study, group study, individual project work, project collaboration, social interaction and more. They discovered that open areas with tables are conducive to group collaboration, and that students who want to work quietly alone seek out nooks and corners between stacks. Students particularly enjoy the ability to create their own work environment. In the past few months the team has selected furniture to enable these experiences, using bright, bold pieces for open group spaces, creating collaboration stations with shared screens for project work, and installing pieces such as the “egg” chairs and bean bags for individual study. Most of the furniture is moveable and students are using the new mobile white boards as dividers, enclosures, or presentation walls.

We hope you enjoy the 100 new working spaces in Orbach Science Library. Enhancements will continue to be made in both library buildings, so keep an eye out! The Facilities Department is making special effort to maintain a clean, organized, and inviting environment. AUL Ann Frenkel welcomes feedback on the renovations.

More News November 17, 2017

As GIS Day 2017 concluded on the afternoon of Wednesday, Nov. 15, Geospatial Information Librarian Janet Reyes reflected on a successful community event at UC Riverside to celebrate Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Day and Geography Awareness Week.

“What I found most gratifying about the day was seeing all the interactions and networking taking place, between and among UCR community members and our off-campus guests,” Reyes commented. Many people interacted with the poster contestants as they explained their entries, and visited the information tables outside Rivera Library to talk with representatives from UCR Extension and Esri.

The first place winner in the poster contest was Dion Kucera (above, center) for his poster on Decadal resistance and resilience of the Los Angeles urban forest in response to drought and temperature stress. Second place went to Peter Ibsen (above, right), whose poster depicted regional and local climate drivers on the NDVI~Air Temperature relationship in urban areas. Third place was awarded to Brianna Chew (above, left) for her StoryMap on Academic Success Factors in K-12 Education: a quantitative analysis.

Presentations highlighted both academic and practical applications of GIS to advance work and research, with topics including the link between environmental features and behavioral health, climate change and biodiversity, looking at problems from a spatial perspective, the use of GIS in crime analysis, and more.

Patty Spurlock, Esri Human Resources Manager, shared information about careers in GIS.

“GIS Day went very well,” Reyes said. “The success was due to the collaboration of the Planning Committee, in addition to support from departments throughout the Library.”

Related events spanned multiple days, including a craft workshop on Nov. 14 sponsored by the Creat’R Lab, where students made map-themed ornaments; and a talk on Nov. 16 by Manuel Urrizola, Head of Metadata and Technical Services, titled “Is California an Island?” Urrizola brought archival maps from his personal collection, with supplementary materials provided by UCR Library’s Special Collections and University Archives.

“We tried several new things this year and will build on our experiences in planning for next year,” Reyes said.

GIS Day 2017 was co-sponsored by the UCR Library, the Center for Conservation Biology, the Departments of Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, and Psychology, UCR Extension, and Capital Asset Strategies. The GIS Day Planning Committee included Hoori Ajami, Jennifer Campbell, Robert Johnson, Karen Jordan, and Paige Trubenstein, with Reyes as committee chair.