More News June 21, 2024

Participants will build robots and learn AI basics through hands-on activities

This summer, the UCR Library is hosting its first-ever robotics camp for undergraduate students led by Maker Services Coordinator Brendon Wheeler and Innovative Media Librarian Alvaro Alvarez.

The month-long camp began Monday, June 17 and aims to provide hands-on experience in robotics and artificial intelligence, giving students from science and non-science backgrounds an opportunity to explore these cutting-edge fields in a collaborative and supportive environment.

Brendon and Alvaro, who both previously worked at the University of La Verne, drew inspiration for the UCR summer robotics camp from a K-12 summer camp they were involved with at La Verne. They wanted to create a similar but more advanced experience for undergraduates.

“The focus of our camp is on the fundamentals of robotics, AI, and computer science. We want to offer a deeper dive into these areas than typical K-12 programs,” Brendon explained.

The camp has attracted a diverse group of around 20 students with backgrounds ranging from physics to art. This diversity reflects the growing interest in robotics and AI among today’s students.

Sessions are held twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, with additional time set aside for team projects. The camp kicked off with Python programming workshops in collaboration with Data Librarian Kat Koziar. Students are introduced to the basics of Python before moving on to build and program robots using the SunFounder Kit. This hands-on approach encourages critical thinking and problem-solving as students modify existing code to understand how and why it works.

While this year’s camp serves as a trial run, Brendon has high hopes for the future. He envisions the UCR Library becoming a significant player in robotics and AI projects on campus, potentially leading to groundbreaking innovations. The current camp is just the beginning, with hopes to expand and refine the program in the coming years.

More News September 18, 2019

The open access agreement between Cambridge University Press and the University of California is now ready for author submissions.

The agreement is a 3-year pilot that includes both access to read Cambridge journals and for open access of UC research publications.

The Cambridge University Press author submission system that allows UC Faculty Authors to register their affiliation and publish Open Access was launched on Thursday, September 19, 2019.

During the launch phase in 2019 the UC Libraries will pay the full cost of the OA publishing fees.

How to publish your manuscript open-access

Submit  your manuscript as usual; your acknowledgement email receipt will alert you to the UC open access publishing option. No action will be needed at this point.

When you manuscript is accepted, Cambridge University Press will email you again.  At this time, you will chose whether to publish open access or to keep your article behind the paywall.

If you choose open access, you will receive an email from RightsLink, Cambridge’s open access fee payment system. Choose the option, “Seek Funding from University of California Libraries.”

If you don’t want to publish open access, simply select a non-open access license on your author form, and your article will be routed to follow Cambridge’s standard publishing workflow.

Are all Cambridge Journals covered in this agreement?

Most journals are covered, but approximately 75 Cambridge journals don’t currently offer open access publishing options and are therefore not eligible for open access publication.

What happens with UC authors who already published with Cambridge in 2019?

You or your colleagues may hear from UC authors who published with Cambridge before September 19, 2019. Those authors may have paid an OA fee, or they may be curious about whether they can make their 2019 paywalled article open access retroactively. The short answer is yes, they can. The emerging details about how and when are below.

After our first phase of implementation goes live, Cambridge will start contacting authors who have published in a Cambridge journal earlier in 2019 to retroactively apply the terms of the agreement.

• For the authors that chose OA and paid an APC in 2019, Cambridge will be refunding authors the cost of the APC and will instead guide them through the new workflow. Approximately eight authors across the ten campuses are in this situation.
• For the authors who published in 2019 but did not choose OA, Cambridge will be offering them the chance to make their articles OA retroactively, at no added cost.  Approximately 110 authors across the ten campuses are in this situation.

For additional information, please see the following web pages:

• Cambridge University Press FAQ – live now on UC Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) website:
  https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/open-access-publishing-at-uc/cambridge-faq/
• Cambridge also offers this informational page/FAQ on their website:
  https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/open-access-policies/read-and-publish-agreements/oa-agreement-for-authors-at-university-of-california

Need assistance submitting your article or finding alternative open access publishing venues? Contact Swati Bhattacharyya, Scholarly Communication Librarian.

If you have any questions about the Cambridge-UC agreement, or other open access agreement questions, please contact Tiffany Moxham, Assistant University Librarian for Content and Discovery.

• Read more about How Do I Find - Images & Photographs

More News September 22, 2017

The University of California, Riverside Library will host International Open Access Week 2017, as part of a global effort called Open Access Week.

The event will be on Wednesday, Oct. 25, in the Orbach Science Library, Room 240, from 9:30 am - 11:00 am. “Open in Order to Save Data for Future Research” is the 2017 event theme.

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, research and data planning and preservation.

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 program will provide information on issues related to saving open data, including climate change and scientific data.  The panelists also will describe open access projects in which they have participated to save climate data and to preserve end-of-term presidential data, information likely to be and utilized by the university community for research and scholarship.

The program includes:

• Brianna Marshall, Director of Research Services:  Brianna will welcome guests and introduce the panelists.

• John Baez, Professor of Mathematics, UC Riverside:  John was involved in saving US government climate data during the presidential transitions. (time, date, topic not confirmed yet)

• Perry Willett, Digital Preservation Project Manager, California Digital Library:  Perry will share the work he has done at CDL on the promotion and usage of open data initiatives.

• Kat Koziar, Data Librarian: Kat will give an overview of DASH, the UC system data repository, and provide suggestions for researchers interested in making their data open.

This will be the eighth International Open Access Week program hosted by the UCR Library.

The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. Please RSVP: openaccess2017.eventbrite.com

More News November 29, 2019

The UCR Library has supported the Bio 5LA course for more than three decades, according to to Early Experience Teaching Librarian Michael Yonezawa.

However, when the library reorganized its departmental structure in 2017 and the Department of Teaching and Learning (T&L) officially took over course-related instruction, he and fellow T&L colleagues felt that it was time to examine both the student experience and course content.

In 2018, they worked with the academic coordinator for Bio 5LA, Dr. Star Lee, to assess whether students were learning needed skills aligned with course goals. The results indicated that students were able to perform some required tasks without additional instruction, which created space for reimagining the course collaboration.

Yonezawa and T&L colleagues decided to update the lesson plan to focus on higher-level goals related to information literacy and critical thinking, as the previous sessions focused on instrumental skills for finding sources. Yonezawa explained, “It’s one thing, knowing how to find something, but it’s also critical to know how to discern between different types of information to determine whether an article is a quality primary research article.”

In an effort led by Yonezawa, T&L completely revised the lesson plan for Bio 5LA in order to empower students to evaluate different types of information resources, incorporating active learning and new technologies. “There’s no reason why you can’t make learning both effective and engaging,” Yonezawa said. “There are plenty of studies that indicate, if you’re having fun, you’re also learning.”

Teaching & Learning launched a pilot program of the updated Bio 5LA curriculum in summer quarter 2019, and is currently implementing the new course content for fall quarter 2019. “This is not a final stop,” Yonezawa said. “We plan to continue to improve over time based on additional data, feedback, and emergent best practices.”

T&L’s Director, Dani Brecher Cook added, “This project demonstrates our commitment to gathering evidence on how and what students are learning, and redesigning our lesson plans in collaboration with academic departments to meet learning goals. This is a great example of what data-informed teaching can look like.”

Students are welcome and encouraged to share feedback with Yonezawa.

• Read more about Creat'R Lab Makerspace

More News September 27, 2019

The UCR Library staff experimented with crowdsourcing to describe a collection of 50 Arabic manuscript leaves and facilitate their electronic discovery.

At two events called “Hivemind,” the library hosted more than 50 UC Riverside community members with a knowledge of Arabic and/or the Quran.

At the first event in May 2018, attendees helped to identify, transcribe, and describe the content of those newly-acquired original manuscripts. Dr. Imad Bayoun, staff research associate in the Entomology Department and faculty advisor to the Muslim Student Association, also gave a brief talk on the history of calligraphy in Islam.

During the second event in April 2019, attendees previewed the newly digitized collection, and library staff collected feedback on how to improve the descriptions accompanying the digitized images, which will help researchers to find and use these materials.

“It was a joy to see so many members of our campus community connect and learn from each other,” said Robin M. Katz, Primary Source Literacy Teaching Librarian and organizer of the Hivemind events.

This digitized collection was recently published online through Calisphere and made available for scholarly research. Find it under the heading Historical Artifacts Collection  from UCR: calisphere.org/collections/27117/

The online collection will eventually contain more examples of manuscript and printed leaves and gatherings in Western and non-Western languages, calligraphy and scripts.

Staff from across the library, including members of Special Collections and University Archives, Teaching & Learning, Metadata & Technical Services, and Digitization Services collaborated on the digital collection and helped to facilitate both Hivemind events. The events were co-sponsored by the UCR Library, the Middle East Student Center and the Muslim Student Association at UC Riverside.

“This is just the beginning,” Katz added. “Now that these materials are online, we hope to learn more about when and where the manuscripts originated.” She encouraged scholars and community members to explore and use the digital collection, and then to reach out to the UCR Library to share their thoughts.

• Read more about Native American Studies

More News September 07, 2021

On Tuesday, Sept. 7, Megan Murphy joined the UCR Library as the new UCR NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) Specialist.

Megan has a BA in Archaeology from Dickinson College and an MA in Anthropology with a focus on Archaeology at University of Colorado, Boulder, where she also served as a Teaching Assistant.

Megan has extensive experience in working on repatriating human remains, cultural objects, and funerary objects, having interned at both the University of Knoxville in Tennessee and the University of Pennsylvania on NAGPRA projects at those institutions. She has also done an archaeology internship at Fort Vasquez Museum and an oral history internship at Louisville Historical Society.

Megan will be working closely with Professor Gerald Clarke, the UCR NAGPRA Repatriation Coordinator, to contact proactively and consult with all possible tribes affiliated with the small number of Native American human remains and artifacts covered by either the federal NAGPRA or state CalNAGPRA laws and facilitate tribal claims for their repatriation. This work will include preparing and submitting notices to be published in the Federal Register.

In addition, she will be working closely with Dr. Matt Hall, the Director of the Archaeological Curation Unit on campus to re-inventory the 600 cubic foot collection of artifacts held by the unit in compliance with CalNAGPRA as per the requirements of Assembly Bill 275, which significantly amended the law in September 2020. The same law will require at a minimum confirming that the UCR Library’s inventories of its holdings of Native American artifacts, archives, artwork, etc., primarily in Special Collections and University Archives, meet the requirement of AB275 (which requires inventorying all object, artwork, artifacts, archives, etc. in consultation with tribal leaders in order to identify which materials do or do not fall under the purview of AB275).

Megan will also be assisting the University Librarian Steven Mandeville-Gamble in his role as UCR NAGPRA Administrator to help organize meetings and support the work of the new UCR Repatriation Oversight Committee, once it is convened in late September 2021. Megan will divide her time between her office on the fourth floor of Rivera Library and in Watkins Hall, working on the inventory of the Archaeological Curation Unit.

Please join us in welcoming Megan to the UCR Library team!

More News July 25, 2017

The California Digital Library and the UCR Library recently partnered to digitize nearly 6,000 photographs from the Jay Kay Klein papers – and completed the task in less than two days.

“If we had done the same project in-house, it would have taken us several months to do,” said University Librarian Steven Mandeville-Gamble.

UC Riverside is the first among the entire UC system to employ this specialized workflow with proprietary object holders designed by Pixel Acuity. The company has used the process with previous clients that include the Smithsonian Institution and Stanford University.

According to Mandeville-Gamble, this project demonstrated that non-book content can be digitized en masse at an affordable price by working with outside vendors.

 “The Jay Kay Klein papers were so well cataloged and prepped for digitization, we finished well ahead of schedule,” commented Eric Philcox, owner of Pixel Acuity. “It was a pleasure working with UCR and CDL.”

 “A standard has been set here, one that we will strive to meet in our future efforts to digitize comparable collections,” stated Eric Milenkiewicz, Digital Initiatives Program Manager.

This was the first in a series of pilot projects to use Pixel Acuity’s specialized mass digitization process to make more of the UCR Library’s non-book collections available online. For this inaugural project, Milenkiewicz selected 35mm negatives from the Eaton Collection’s Jay Kay Klein papers (MS 381), documenting the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) from 1960-1971.

 “We are actively working to make the collection available to researchers worldwide, which I know was one of the goals of the original bequest from Jay Kay Klein,” Mandeville-Gamble added.

The UCR Library plans to make the resulting digital collection available on Calisphere by August 15, 2017.

Although the full project spearheaded by the California Digital Library has not been completed yet, their Technical Lead for UC Mass Digitization Projects Paul Fogel commented, “Overall, I feel like the project is a big success.” Fogel added that CDL was motivated to work with UC Riverside thanks to the library's eagerness and the fact that library staff were already working with some of the systems that CDL wanted to test.

“It is always hard to be the trailblazer and I'm impressed by UCR's willingness to take bold steps in digitization,” Philcox added. “The impressive results of UCR and CDL's first mass digitization pilot will certainly have a positive impact on UC's digitization efforts moving forward.”

Milenkiewicz concluded, “This collaborative project allowed us to witness firsthand the efficiency at which non-book mass digitization can be completed and has provided us with techniques that can be deployed locally to increase our own productivity.”