• Read more about Native American Studies

More News April 30, 2018

Eli Labinger is a fourth-year psychology major who works as a Student Assistant in Special Collections and University Archives at the UCR Library.

Labinger grew up in West Hollywood, California as the younger of two sons. His mother is a first grade teacher and his father is a wholesale bookseller.

UC Riverside was an easy choice to make for Labinger because he wanted to stay close to home for college, but also wanted to attend a research university. “When I first visited, I really loved it. It has a very intimate feeling about it,” he said. “It was just a really good fit for me.”

Working at the library also turned out to be a great fit for Labinger. “There’s a lot to love about this job,” he said. “It’s really the anticipation of working with new things or in new areas every day keeps me interested and excited. There’s always something new to experience here.”

One of his favorite work-related memories comes from a 2016 event for the Chancellor’s Associates. “Donors who were visiting the library stopped by Special Collections,” Labinger explained. “We had seven or eight display tables set up around the reading room. Each table had things representing a specific area, and I got to present on The Lord of the Rings as representative of the fantasy literature collection. That was cool.”

His interest in fantasy literature helped to establish a friendship with Science Fiction Librarian Jacqueline “JJ” Jacobson. “I have talked a lot with JJ especially about The Lord of the Rings,” he said. “That’s sort of my outside interest.”

Aside from his work at the library, Labinger also works in a research laboratory in UCR's Department of Psychology. “I’m working on a project right now for the Chancellor’s Research Fellowship,” he said. “Psychology is a really new field and there’s a lot of research out there but there’s so much to be done. There are a lot of important discoveries yet to be made. I think that global change is going to stem from research.”

He feels most passionate about research that focuses on children and adolescents. “It’s such rapid growth period, and by the time we learn new things about these people, the people we’re studying grow up and grow out of our findings. A lot of things become out of date really quickly. There can’t be too much research with younger people.”

Between classes and working at both the library and the psychology lab, Labinger has little spare time for other hobbies. “I haven’t been able to do all the things I like to do, like read for pleasure.”

After graduation, Labinger will be moving to Portland, Oregon, to complete his PhD at Portland State University’s applied developmental psychology program. As a graduate student, he will be assisting Dr. Andrew Mashburn in his research, which includes assessing the effectiveness of early interventions for improving school readiness in preschoolers moving to kindergarten.

“I am especially interested in understanding the types of children and families for whom such interventions work best, and in using this information to find programs that work for all students and that have lasting positive effects,” Labinger said.

More News September 25, 2020

The UCR Library buildings remain closed during Fall Quarter 2020 to protect the health of the essential employees who are working on the premises to meet the teaching and research needs of our undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and researchers.

Although this means that students won’t be able to enter the Rivera or Orbach Libraries during fall quarter, rest assured: the UCR Library has not forgotten about R’Students!

As soon as campus closed in mid-March, the library quickly pivoted to online access to our services and library collections, as much as we possibly could.

Following the campus guidelines from the Chancellor and Provost, we are focusing our fall quarter plans on remote services that put students first, including:

Get stuff

• Curbside delivery of physical materials
• Expanded/free digital access to existing collections
• Additional online Course Reserves (E-Reserves)

Get help

• Ask a Student (starting Sept. 28) is a new chat service that connects students with peers to provide the resources they need to be successful in a remote learning environment, in collaboration with Undergraduate Education
• Ask a Librarian (online chat 24/7, text or email)
• Librarians assigned to Highlander Connections communities for first-year and transfer students, in collaboration with Student Life
• One-on-one Consultations with UCR Librarians

Learning communities

• Biweekly Maker Meetups with the Creat’R Lab
• Biweekly Digital Scholarship meetups
• Special Collections & University Archives workshops & events
• Workshops on a variety of other topics

In 2019, the library partnered with representatives from ASUCR’s Student Voice Committee to identify more ways in which the library could support our students. Through that survey, we identified the top five challenges facing UCR students at that time. However, we recognize that new challenges have certainly arisen in this new remote learning environment.

We want you to know that we are still listening. If you have ideas on how the Library can help you during remote instruction, please fill out this form so that library leadership can consider your suggestions. You can also suggest a book you need for your research, if we don’t already have it in our collections.

We know that many students miss the community and opportunities for collaboration that came from seeing one another face-to-face at the library. Library staff miss your in-person presence every day. We are offering online meetups and workshops on an assortment of topics to facilitate human connections and a chance to learn together.

UC Riverside aims to help students succeed academically and strive toward their dreams beyond graduation. The UCR Library is here to serve you, so please, let us know how we can best support you during these challenging times.

More News October 14, 2022

Guidance from the University of California Libraries:

The federal government is making significant moves to encourage open access to research. This summer, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) made national headlines with its new guidance that, by 2026, research funded by all federal agencies should be made freely and immediately available to the public, with no embargo.

The new guidance will bring about three significant changes to the status quo:

• Removing the 12-month delay before research publications funded by the largest federal agencies become publicly available;
• Directing that both federally-funded research publications and their supporting data should be made publicly accessible at the time of publication; and
• Bringing all federal agencies into alignment with this open access publishing policy.

While the agencies are being given time to determine how they will operationalize the new guidance, the principles at its heart are in sync with the University of California’s long-standing commitment to make our research freely available to the scientific community and the public.

Here is what UC researchers should know now about what to expect:

When will these changes go into effect?

The OSTP guidance recommends that all federal grantmaking agencies implement the recommended changes no later than Dec. 31, 2025. Some agencies may update their grant requirements sooner.

What will I need to do with my research articles once this policy takes effect?

While many of the details are yet to come as each federal agency determines how they will implement the OSTP guidance, what we can infer now is that:

• We expect the agencies that already have policies regarding public access to the research they fund will continue to use their existing processes to the extent possible, updating them as needed to align with the new guidance. We will know more about those changes once the agencies release their updated public access plans.
• If you obtain future research funding from a smaller agency that does not yet require deposit in an open access repository, the agency will develop a policy requiring you to make your funded articles open access in some form. (The details may vary by agency.)

How does this federal guidance interact with UC’s open access publishing options?

As a UC researcher, you do not have to wait for this government policy to be implemented to make your research open access. In fact, the University of California has had an Open Access Policy in place for many years that enables UC authors to make their research publicly available immediately. To do so, you have several options:

• If you choose to publish in a journal that is part of one of UC’s transformative open access agreements, the UC libraries will pay all or part of the open access publishing fee on your behalf, using library funds that were previously allocated to pay solely for journal subscriptions.
• If UC does not have an open access agreement with the publisher of the journal that has accepted your article, you can typically choose to pay an open access publishing fee to publish your article open access. Under the OSTP guidance, all federal agencies should allow researchers to include publication and data-sharing costs in their research budgets.
• Another cost-free option is to upload your final accepted manuscript (i.e., prior to typesetting by the publisher) into UC’s institutional repository eScholarship. UC’s Open Access Policies allow you to make your final accepted manuscript immediately available unless the journal’s publisher requests an embargo period or a waiver of the UC policy (learn more or contact Data Librarian Kat Koziar with any questions).

If I may have to deposit a copy of my research in a government-approved repository anyway (which is the current requirement of some large federal agencies), are there still benefits to making the final published article open access?

There are access and discoverability benefits to having articles published OA on the publishers site, but the final decision depends on different factors like the goals you have for your final published article. Our librarians will be available for a fuller discussion as the individual agencies policies take effect. 

Will the new federal guidance make it easier to get funding to cover the cost of open access publishing?

While we do not yet know the details of how each agency will implement the OSTP guidance, based on the current approach of the large federal agencies, there will be a no-cost option available — such as an approved government repository — where you (or the publisher) can deposit your manuscript and meet the open access requirement at no cost.

Where and how do I share my data?

As agencies implement the OSTP guidance on data sharing, they may recommend or require specific repositories. Until those details are known, a subject-specific repository is usually the best place to share your data since it will be an intuitive location for other scientists to look for datasets in a particular field. There are also general repositories that take in a variety of subjects and interdisciplinary datasets. UC has partnered with the Dryad repository, and UC affiliates can deposit data there for free (as long as it is open and unrestricted, and contains no personally identifiable human subject information; see their FAQ for details).

Tip: When submitting data to a general repository, include data collection protocols, instruments, and other relevant documentation to ensure ease of data reuse. This will significantly enhance how FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) the data are.

Who can I contact if I have more questions?

If you have questions about our open access agreements, please contact Associate University Librarian for Content and Discovery & Deputy University Librarian Tiffany Moxham.

More News May 04, 2018

“One year after launch, we have been blown away by the energy, talent, and sheer diversity of projects displayed in the Creat’R Lab,” said Ann Frenkel, Deputy University Librarian.

On the evening of Thursday, May 3, Orbach Science Library hosted more than 90 guests who came to celebrate those successes and enjoy some birthday cake at the Creat’R Lab Anniversary Showcase.

In talking about the genesis for the Creat’R Lab, Frenkel remembered, “Our students kept emphasizing that there was no other independent, inclusive space on campus devoted to project making. They also wanted a place that would allow collaborators to find each other — to put artists together with engineers, social scientists, and scientists.”

So the UCR Library, in partnership with the Office of Research and Economic Development (RED), turned this vision into the Creat’R Lab, a living, state-of-the-art technology incubator for discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Professors and students alike now call the Creat’R Lab “home” because it fosters experimentation and teamwork, according to Michalis Faloutsos, Director of Entrepreneurship at RED. “It’s also hosting some entrepreneurial activities of EPIC,” he said, referring to UC Riverside’s Entrepreneurial Proof of Concept and Innovation Center.

The showcase featured success stories from several Creat’R Lab users, including third-year Electrical Engineering student Gustavo Correa, whose Arduino electronics and programming workshops had such a high turnout that he had to move attendees to a larger room in Orbach Library to accommodate the class size.

Gender and sexuality studies professor Mzilikazi Koné described how her class collaborated with the Creat’R Lab on their zines project (hand-made magazines). “Zines are the ultimate project of creating something tactile, something you can pick up and pass around and marvel at,” Koné explained. “Zines center art and creativity as central to the project of learning – not as a side note. It is the front note.”

“My interaction with the Creat’R Lab generated a new world of amazing opportunities,” said earth sciences professor Christodoulos Kyriakopoulos of his project, which involved a 3D-printed model and a planned Virtual Reality model of California’s earthquake faults.

Each of the four panelists acknowledged the support and contributions of Creat'R Lab staff members Krista Ivy, maker services librarian, and Michele Potter, open research librarian.

Director of Research Services Brianna Marshall, who oversees the Creat’R Lab, announced the founding of a Steering Committee to engage student and faculty perspectives and provide guidance on future lab workshops, programming, staffing, space usage, equipment purchases, and program goals.

“I can’t overstate how excited we are for this new committee and the input and fresh ideas they’ll be bringing to the lab!” Marshall said.

Inaugural faculty and academic staff members of the Creat’R Lab Steering Committee include Konstantinos Karydis (Technology/Engineering), Haibo Liu (Social Sciences), Juliette Levy (Arts/Humanities), Christos Kyriakopolous (Science/Math), Michalis Faloutsos, Director of Entrepreneurship (RED), and Jay Gilberg (Entrepreneur in Residence, RED).

Student committee members are Patrick Le (ASUCR student representative) and Fahed Elkhatib (Technology / Engineering student representative). The Steering Committee intends to recruit three more student representatives. Any students interested in joining the Steering Committee should contact Brianna Marshall for more information.

• Read more about Creative Commons

More News March 05, 2018

On Feb. 27 - 28, 2018, the UC Riverside Library hosted more than 140 guests from all ten UC campuses and the California Digital Library (CDL) at the inaugural University of California Digital Library Forum (UC DLFx).

This was one of the first DLFx events – small, regional community-building events for Digital Library Federation (DLF) members – and the first of its kind held in California.

Local Arrangements Committee Chair Eric Milenkiewicz explained, “UC DLFx brought staff together from across the UC Libraries providing a great opportunity for us to share ideas, discuss ongoing projects, and connect with fellow UC colleagues working in this space.” Conference attendees included UC librarians, digital technology experts, educators, policy-makers, and other thought leaders from across the state.

The 2018 conference theme, Building the UC Digital Library: Theory and Practice, was explored through keynote addresses, presentation sessions, and break-out discussion groups that focused on topics including: data curation, digital asset management, digital collection building, copyright in the digital library, project collaboration, community engagement, and emerging technologies.

The conference featured two keynote presentations from Dr. Don Norman, Director of the Design Lab at UCSD, and Dr. Christine L. Borgman, Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA.

California State Librarian Greg Lucas and Günter Waibel, Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director of the California Digital Library, provided closing remarks at the end of the event.

“I walked away from UC DLFx feeling inspired by the passion and creativity of everybody I spoke with and heard present,” said Waibel. “For the UC libraries to thrive in financially difficult times, we must continue to build on our long history of working together. There is nothing like getting together face-to-face to stay in sync, and come up with new ideas.”

“All of the feedback received from attendees afterward has been positive with an overwhelming response of ‘let’s do this again,’” said Diane Bisom, Associate University Librarian for the Digital Library. “We have set the gold standard for this event that will hopefully be carried forward next year by one of our fellow UC campuses.”

One UC DLFx attendee wrote on the post-event survey, “Attending this event reinvigorated my dedication to our mission. It was a real shot in the arm.”

Conference sponsors included the Digital Library Federation, California Digital Library, UCR Library, UC Merced Library, UC San Diego Library, UCLA Library, UCSF Library, UCI Libraries, and Librarians Association of the University of California (LAUC).

The local arrangements committee was comprised of the following UCR Library team members: Digital Initiatives Program Manager Eric Milenkiewicz, Committee Chair; Associate University Librarian for the Digital Library Diane Bisom; Head of Preservation Services Patricia Smith-Hunt; Director of Research Services Brianna Marshall; Collection Strategist for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Carla Arbagey; Digital Assets Metadata Librarian Noah Geraci; and Communications Specialist Melanie Ramiro.

More News December 09, 2016

On Tuesday, November 29, 2016, students of the Music Department’s debut course “Genealogy of Hip-Hop” became the first to use UCR Library’s new Dexter Thomas Japanese Hip-Hop Collection.

Dani Brecher Cook, Director of Teaching & Learning at UCR Library, collaborated with Dr. Liz Przybylski, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology to make this new archive available for student research.

“It was a new and exciting class that was offered by the Music Department to music majors and non-majors,” Dr. Przybylski said. The course examined hip-hop’s global spread and specific case-studies in the global hip-hop scene.

Dr. Przybylski felt that her collaboration with Dani and the library was productive. “Dani helped the students to interact with some of the materials, which helped them to understand what an archive is and how they can use it,” Dr. Przybylski explained. “The students enjoyed themselves, and it’s great to see what can happen when we have someone like Dani, who has the skill and experience to translate collections into student learning.”

Dani agreed that the collaboration was a terrific experience, stating, “Liz was a librarian’s dream to work with. She had a clear sense of what she wanted the students to walk away with, regarding how distinctive collections can deepen their understanding, beyond or in addition to what a YouTube video or streaming music might.”

Student groups participated in an open-ended listening activity, with each group assigned to one artist, based on what the library had available in the collection. Dani felt that this experience demonstrated the importance of physical collections and how material objects can enhance our understanding of topics in unexpected ways. “The students closely examined each part of the CD, ranging from the artwork on the liner notes and how that correlated (or didn’t!) with the music that they heard on the tracks, picking out the range of influences that informed the music, and tracking how artists evolved over time.”

“Students who don’t have a history of working with a physical product just don’t understand what kind of information it’s possible to encounter when you’re looking at an actual album or all the ways you can interact with an album, other than just hearing the songs that are on it,” Dr. Przybylski explained. “The physical CDs helped to tune the students in to the artist’s trajectory. They were reading CD liner notes to see more than just the lyrics of the songs. One group put all the CDs in order by year and looked at how the images changed over time, what label are the artists on now versus the label they used to be on. It was so much more immediate and accessible with the music in their hands.”

Dr. Przybylski sees great potential for future collaborations between the Music Department and UCR Library, using this archive. She hopes to see the “Genealogy of Hip-Hop” class run each year, and integrate the Dexter Thomas Japanese Hip-Hop Collection more robustly into the course curriculum. She would also like to incorporate it into her graduate seminar in hip-hop so that students could research the collection in-depth.

“It’s exciting to see students discover new things and create new knowledge for themselves using our distinctive collections,” Dani explained. “I’m looking forward to having the whole collection available next time, and seeing how that will help to build new connections and facilitate different thought processes and discoveries.”

“Some students seemed surprised that they really enjoyed the music even if they didn’t understand the lyrics,” Dr. Przybylski mused. She found only one drawback to the experience: “Having someone fluent in Japanese to translate the materials would enable us to extract even more information from them.” Perhaps this need could inspire a future collaboration between the library and the Asian Studies department.

Students also expressed interest in who the collector was and how he put this material together, Dr. Przybylski explained, because they resonated with and were inspired by the success that he had achieved post-UCR. Dexter Thomas graduated from UC Riverside in 2006 with a major in English and is now a PhD candidate in East Asian Studies at Cornell University. While at UCR, Thomas served as the Student Director of Programming at KUCR-FM, and after graduation he became a correspondent for the HBO show Vice News Tonight. Thomas won a Pulitzer Prize for his work at the Los Angeles Times on the 2015 San Bernardino shooting. He is currently writing a book about Japanese hip-hop.

More News July 26, 2022

The University of California announced two new open access publishing agreements today. The first supports open access publishing with the technical professional organization IEEE, which is among the largest publishers of UC research. The other is an extension of UC’s 2020 agreement with Springer Nature that adds funding support for open access publishing in the prestigious Nature journals; previously only titles in the Springer portfolio were eligible.

About the agreement with IEEE

The four-year agreement with IEEE, effective July 15, 2022 through December 31, 2025, enables UC corresponding authors to publish open access in all IEEE journals, regardless of whether they have research funds available to pay for open access publishing or not.

Authors who have research funds available for open access publishing will pay their own open access fee (known as an article processing charge, or APC). For authors who do not have sufficient funds available to pay the APC, the UC libraries will cover the full cost on their behalf, ensuring that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for UC authors who wish to publish open access in IEEE journals. The agreement also covers overlength page charges for all UC authors regardless of how they choose to publish with IEEE.

The deal also provides UC scholars with reading access to over five million documents from the IEEE Xplore Digital Library, including scientific journals, proceedings, and standards.

For details, see the IEEE agreement FAQ on the UC Office of Scholarly Communication website.

About the agreement with Nature

Beginning August 1, 2022, the UC libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the APC for UC corresponding authors who choose to publish open access in the Nature portfolio of journals, including Nature, the Nature research journals, Nature Communications and Scientific Reports.

The remainder due on each APC for publishing in these journals must be covered by the authors themselves, utilizing research funds available to them. Authors without research funds to pay the remainder of the APC may publish their articles on a subscription basis.

UC authors publishing open access in Springer Nature’s other journals (including Adis, Biomed Central, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, Springer Open, and hybrid Academic journals on Nature.com) will continue to receive the UC libraries’ automatic $1,000 contribution, as well as the option for full coverage of the APC if they lack research funds for publication.

All aspects of the 2020 Springer Nature agreement, including UC’s reading access to all currently licensed Springer Nature journals, will continue through December 31, 2024.

For details, see the Springer Nature agreement FAQ on the UC Office of Scholarly Communication website.

UC has now secured more than a dozen open access agreements with various publishers, a notable milestone in the University’s effort to make it easier and more affordable for its authors to publish open access. Open access publishing, which makes UC research freely available to the public, is central to UC’s mission as a public university.

More News July 11, 2016

Flexible classrooms provide space for students, faculty, and librarians to teach collaboratively and engage students in active learning and critical thinking.

Thanks to a campus technology grant submitted under the leadership of Associate University Librarian Ann Frenkel, a Rivera Library classroom recently underwent a “flexible” transformation.

Splashes of bright tangerine now brighten the space of room 140 with one end of the room serving as a dedicated whiteboard wall.  New lime-green rolling chairs and mobile tables encourage group collaboration. Flat screen monitors are mounted on three walls with a rapid charging station housing MacBook Pros for students to engage in multimedia learning and production throughout the space.  Mobile charging units are also available.

This spring, the campus Faculty Technology Support Group and the Library’s Research and Instructional Services Division hosted Re-thinking the Classroom Mini “Unconference” as one of the first sessions held in our newly, redesigned flexible classroom. Faculty came together in the flexible classroom to share best practices for online teaching as well as discussing effective approaches for active learning and student engagement. The attendees left rave reviews and thoughtful comments on the whiteboard wall.

The room is now available for booking library instruction sessions this fall.