UCLA Library

Support by academic libraries for open access (OA) over the past three-plus decades has largely focused on the development of digital infrastructure, promotion of open access publishing, support of policy-driven access mandates, and more recently, adoption of transformative agreements. Libraries have correspondingly created a broad array of scholarly communication roles to support these varied approaches. Surprisingly, one area of open access support that has received less attention from libraries is the facilitation of description and discovery of open access resources through the creation of robust original metadata. Expertise in Organization of Recorded Knowledge and Information represents a core competency of librarianship, yet the current academic library landscape shows few positions that specifically apply this expertise towards support for OA resources. Efforts to describe OA resources typically fall below those dedicated to licensed resources and pale in comparison to OA advocacy work, repository, publishing and other services. This case study offers an example of how one large academic library has introduced a metadata librarian position focused on description of open access resources into its activities supporting open access.  For decades, commercially licensed resources have benefitted from metadata enhanced layer by layer by commercial and library professionals alike. With increased focus and funding being devoted to open access driven by governmental, institutional, and private funders, attention is critically needed to ensure that these new resources obtain the description necessary to allow them to be useful. Metadata librarians focused on open access resources can work with array of positions, such as repository managers and other digital asset management professionals, to ensure that open access resources are properly ingested and managed, and that metadata practices are aligned with best practices for preservation and long-term access. OA metadata librarians could be responsible for developing and implementing metadata standards and practices for open access resources like scholarly articles, data sets, and other digital objects. These standards would help ensure that open access resources are accurately described and discoverable alongside purchased resources, making them more accessible to researchers and other users.   In addition to their technical responsibilities, OA metadata librarians can also play key roles in advocating for open access resources and educating library staff and users about the importance of metadata in supporting discoverability and accessibility. Through participation in professional organizations and initiatives focused on open access and metadata, OA metadata librarians can help raise awareness of the importance of metadata in supporting open access resources, their sustainability, and ultimately, their impact.

The UCLA Centennial 2019 story map uses words, historical pictures, maps, archival documents, and graphical mapping tools to tell an interactive story about changes that have taken place at the UCLA Campus during first 100 years. It explores collections that span a variety of resources and formats presenting the UCLA Campus from 1919 to 2019. Most maps presented in this story are part of the UCLA Henry J. Bruman Map Collection.

The interactive site indexes topographical map series available at the UCLA Henry J. Bruman Map Collection. Only the color grid cells indicate that a paper or digital map is available in the Library. Each individual grid cell contains basic information about its respective topographic map as well as the link to an image of the map. All maps represented by the index numbers have a scale of 1:250,000. The UCLA Library has in its possession maps at other scales, but at this time it is recommended that the user contacts the Library staff to access those maps. Also, note that this is not a finalized project but a work in progress; more regions will be added in the future, so please check in regularly for updates.

This story map employs the historical landscape of the city of Poznań from the medieval era up to modern times. It presents story of the 300 years of the settlement of Bambrzy migrants in Greater Poland, especially in villages near Poznań in the 18th century. From the trails of migration to the blending of cultures, the story of the Bambrzy is one that greatly defines the city of Poznań today. Therefore, this story map by using historical maps, photos, archival documents, and interactive mapping is illustrating peaceful and successful historically important migration (displacement) of people in Europe. In the history of European migration this is one of the few cases when a large-scale, transboundary movement of people happened almost without friction and led to lasting benefits of both the migrants and the host nation.

This article reports on personal observations and experiences gathered while teaching, working and consulting with librarians, students, and faculty during the author’s Fulbright Senior Fellowship in Poland. It discusses multiple opportunities and rewards for American librarians willing to serve as Fulbright Fellows including professional growth, knowledge sharing, meeting new people, experiencing new library cultures, traveling, and increasing the appreciation and visibility of librarians to the academic world. Additionally, it presents a short history of Polish academic libraries and the challenges they are currently facing.

The meeting held presentations and discussion about three locally developed and/or open source catalog projects. Ross Shanley-Roberts, Miami University, Ohio, gave a detailed history, technical overview and description of SolrPac (http://beta.lib.muohio.edu). Bess Sadler, University of Virginia, gave a detailed history, technical overview and presentation on the open source OPAC known as Blacklight. Chris Barr and Andrew Nagy of Villanova discussed the VuFind (http://www.Vufind.org/demo) project.

In 2020, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) Task Group on Identity Management in NACO sponsored a 14-month PCC Wikidata Pilot, complete with learning objectives, for participants to experiment with Wikidata, an open linked data platform. UCLA Library joined the Pilot to create and edit Wikidata items related to UCLA Library’s collections and UCLA Library entities. With the Pilot’s conclusion, the UCLA Library Pilot team reflected on lessons learned. By assessing UCLA Library’s experience against the Pilot’s learning objectives, the authors hope to contribute on-the-ground insights that may be relevant to PCC’s progress toward identity management, and the role Wikidata may play in this transition.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, British Calcutta stood as one of the most important cities in the world for the editing, printing, and selling of Arabic books. Before the famous Bulaq Press in Cairo was established in 1820, from 1801–19, European Orientalists and Indian munshis (scribes and clerks) and maulvis (Arabic, mawlanas), alongside one Yemeni scholar, had already printed 22 Arabic titles in movable type—many for the first time—at Fort William College in Calcutta (alongside 18 in Persian and 24 in Sanskrit).1 By 1831, a published “List of Oriental Works for Sale at the Government Education Depository, near the Hindu College, Potoldanga, Calcutta,” advertised 27 Arabic, 31 Sanskrit, 36 English, 16 Hindi and Urdu, 30 Persian, and 29 Bengali books.2 Far from a marginal undertaking, Arabic books represented a sizeable proportion of printing in Bengal at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Recent global events have underscored the need for broad access to digitized library special collections. At the same time, a burgeoning field of scientific and historical inquiry is finding a goldmine of data in the physical old books and manuscripts stored for centuries on library shelves. This article gives an overview of some of the interesting studies employing library materials in the new field of biocodicology, which expands the field of codicology (learning about book history through studying a copy's physical attributes, sometimes referred to as "archaeology of the book") to interrogate physical books with proteomic, genomic, and microbiomic tools. Historical health sciences collections provide rich, new research avenues for budding biocodicologists, and biocodicology and other interdisciplinary fields focused on material culture present an unforeseen justification for institutions' continued preservation and access to individual physical copies.