{ UCLA Librarian } Preserving knowledge. providing access to the universe of ideas progress report 2011–12 Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important Letter than the outcome. from the — Arthur Ashe University Sprinkled throughout the renovated spaces of the Charles E. Young Research Library Librarian are a handful of thought-provoking quotations. Some are from famous individuals with a close connection to UCLA, others are anonymous or from people who never set foot in Southern California. Yet each offers a uniquely personal reflection on the themes of discovery, journey, and collaboration that guided the renovations. Of all of them, it’s the quotation above from Arthur Ashe that may best capture the ongoing mission of research universities and the academic libraries that support them. Expanding the idea of “journey” into a broader theme of transformation, this issue of the UCLA Library’s annual progress report focuses on parti- cularly significant changes in our collections and facilities during the 2011-12 fiscal year. For everyone from distinguished faculty to harried graduate students to overwhelmed freshmen, UCLA’s libraries serve as a kind of transport for their ongoing journeys in quest of knowledge. They don’t come to the virtual or physical libraries just to find answers; they come to learn how to ask questions, how to find answers, what other questions to ask, who else is asking similar questions. Books, journal articles, confer- ence papers, primary documents – they don’t represent the destination; they fuel the journey. In the following pages you’ll find vivid examples of the UCLA Library’s latest transformations of its collec- tions and facilities to support those journeys. I’m quite proud of these changes, and of users’ responses to them. Yet I’m perhaps even more proud of the way they’ve helped us learn to ask new questions of ourselves about what the UCLA Library is, does, and needs to be. The demands these tranformations have placed on our staff have been daunting, yet our dedicated employees have met them with creativity, enthusiasm, and optimism. As challenging as it can be for libraries to cope with change and transformation, it may be even more diffi- cult for donors to agree to fund initiatives and projects for which there is no clear model. It requires trust, vision, and, in the end, often a leap of faith. One of the most visionary of our donors is Arcadia, whose transformative, multi-year contributions have both supported and inspired us to reconceptualize our collec- tions and services. To Arcadia’s dedicated leadership, and to all the generous donors who have supported the journeys of count- less UCLA students, faculty, and researchers through their donations to the UCLA Library, thank you for your continued belief that Arthur Ashe was right. Gary E. Strong University Librarian { UCLA Librarian } progress report 2011–12 page 3 Be Clean, My Country, Na.z_i_fah ya¯_ baladi_ c. July 16, 2011 Two-page f lyer UCLA Library Special Collections Ephemeræ of Learning: Shaping and Reshaping Collections “These papers of a day, the Ephemeræ of learning.” — Samuel Johnson, 1751 n early 2011 the world became transfixed by developments from the heart of Cairo. Though Tahrir Square had long been a site for I Egyptian protests, its name was unfamiliar to American audiences. But that changed forever over the course of eighteen eventful days in January and February 2011. Facebook postings, tweets, and smartphone photos from both participants and observers captured the moment-to- moment reality of events far more vividly than reports by the traditional news media could. { UCLA Librarian } progress report 2011–12 page 4 As the protestors succeeded in forcing Hosni Mubarak to resign and the revo- lution in Egypt proceeded, these historic events altered instructional and research landscapes at university campuses as well. With the most valuable documentation for the Arab Spring in the form of social media and other informal ephe meral formats, students and scholars quickly began to search for persistent, reliable access to these new primary resources. Dustu¯_r 2011 [Constitution 2011] c. March 2, 201 Four-page newsletter, numbers one and two together UCLA Library Special Collections In response, in February 2012 the UCLA Library launched a new Inter - national Digitizing Ephemera Project. Generously supported by a grant of $3.4 million from the Arcadia Fund, the project focuses on collecting print items, images, multimedia, and social networking resources produced in the Middle East. These unique materials are organized and made available online, together with digitized versions of relevant print items, for students and scholars around the world to utilize and build upon in research and instruction. The Library is collaborating with international partners on this five- year project, including the National Library of Israel. In the longer term, the pro ject may also expand to areas such as eastern Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Central America, where traditional documen tation of events and communities is lacking and researchers must rely on ephemeral primary sources. In addition, organizers hope that it will serve as a model that other institutions can adopt for collaborative international preservation and access activities. et even as its collecting expands to new formats and regions, the Y Library’s attention remains firmly rooted in Southern California, as exemplified by its signature acquisition during the 2011-12 fiscal year. The Library entered into an agreement to acquire the histo rical records of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), one of the most important public education enterprises in the nation. Encompassing more than 704 square miles in Los Angeles and twenty- six other municipalities, the LAUSD has the second largest student popu- lation in the country, serving 727,000 students. The district is the most { UCLA Librarian } progress report 2011–12 page 5 racially and ethnically diverse in the U.S., with more than ninety languages spoken by its students; in response, the district helped develop innovative language-arts programs for both English-language learners and vernacular English speakers. Covering more than one hundred years of Southern California public education and civic life, this extensive archive documents major aspects of district operations dating back to around 1875. Among its most significant contents are demographic surveys conducted in the 1920s to segregate school populations based on race, materials recording the school board’s response to the landmark Crawford desegregation lawsuit filed in 1963, and decades of files documenting the LAUSD’s administration of busing and desegregation programs. Also important are district-wide publications distributed by Susan Miller Dorsey, appointed the first woman superintendent in 1920; material docu- menting Faye Allen, the first African American elected to the board, in 1939; From: UCLA Library Special Collections Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education Records { UCLA Librarian } progress report 2011–12 page 6 From: UCLA Library Special Collections Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education Records and records of Japanese American students interned during World War II. As the leading public academic research library in Southern California, the UCLA Library is uniquely well-suited to house these records and make them accessible. Their acquisition exemplifies UCLA’s ongoing involvement with civic life and public edu- cation in this region as an integral element of the university’s overall mission, even as it enables the campus to also serve the commu nity by generating new research and scholarship. The LAUSD records complement the UCLA Library’s extensive special collections that document Los Angeles schools and public education-related activities of judicial figures, activists, and civic leaders. Records held by the University Archives document UCLA’s relationships with the district and its schools. And the UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research has con ducted numerous oral histories covering L.A. public schools and the expe riences of a diverse group of educators who have served in them. nother major acquisition mark ing a significant moment in labor his- A tory exemplifies how successful collection-building relies on active partnerships with campus colleagues. In 2007 the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment awarded a mini-grant to Tobias Higbie, an asso ciate professor of history, to document the history of Justice for Janitors, a dynamic labor organiza- tion with deep links to working-class immigrant and African Ameri can commu nities in Los Angeles. Starting with a shrinking base of downtown building-service workers in the late 1980s, Justice for Janitors grew into a power ful, city-wide organization by the early 2000s. { UCLA Librarian } progress report 2011–12 page 7 Combining street actions with industry research, the organi zation waged a campaign that pioneered a new approach to gaining collective bargaining rights for low- wage workers. With assistance and training provided by the UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research and UCLA Library Special Collec tions, UCLA graduate and undergraduate students in labor and workplace studies as well as the Chicano studies and history departments conducted oral history inter- views with and collected materials from union members to document the organization’s efforts and their individual roles. That project led to the UCLA Library’s acqui sition of the historical records of the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles. Donated by Services Employees Inter national Union United Service Workers West, the records document the movement’s development of innovative organizing and research strategies, demographic changes in the building- service workforce, and the transformation of labor union policies toward immigrant workers. The materials include business records, correspondence, educational and training materials, publications, and an extensive collection of photos, among other con tents. Most of the items date from 1985-2000, with a few dating back to the 1940s.