Welcome back, Huskies! It’s AWESOME to have students back in our spaces again! We missed you! Thanks to all of our visitors who have been doing a great job keeping our Libraries safe (wearing your mask, not eating inside the Libraries, etc.) our staff, your fellow students and visitors appreciate it. We are just getting started, so our hours will be limited to start, especially on weekends. Be sure to check hours and what to Know Before You Go. We…
Authors: Conor M. Casey, Erin Grant, Keiko Hill, Kat Lewis, Crystal Rodgers In August of 2021, catalogers, metadata specialists, and archivists at the University of Washington Libraries published a statement on Critical Cataloging and Archival Description to the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism hub on the UW Libraries website. This statement is a road map to the actions UW metadata specialists are taking in support of the UW Libraries’ commitment to anti-racist work and in creating welcoming, informative, and transparent…
Adapted from ARL membership communications for spring/summer 2021 by Kaylyn Groves Betsy Wilson, Vice Provost of Digital Initiatives and Dean of University Libraries at the University of Washington plans to retire July 1, 2021, after a nearly 30-year career with UW Libraries, 20- years as Dean. As dean, Betsy leads a network of 16 academic research libraries across all three UW campuses, and the UW Press. She took on the additional role of vice provost for digital initiatives in 2013,…
The UW Libraries wants to support you in creating knowledge and sharing it openly through digital means! We’ve been piloting open hosting platforms over the past few years and we are pleased to announce that Manifold Publishing (digital book publishing), Digital Scholarship Hosting (Omeka, WordPress, Scalar, and more), and UW Pressbooks (for creating and adapting Open Educational Resources) are now part of the Libraries’ permanent service offerings! Explore How can YOU use these platforms to enhance your teaching and openly…
This week, March 1-5, 2021, is Open Education Week, an annual global celebration of open education efforts, including open courses, open textbooks, and other open educational resources (OER). OER and textbook affordability go hand in hand. OER are free or extremely low cost by definition. When courses are taught using open textbooks and other OER, students save money. That’s even more important now because COVID-19 has taken a heavy economic toll on students, as U.S. PIRG reported last week in…
This fall, I am working at the Labor Archives of Washington (LAW) in Special Collections at the University of Washington Libraries as their archivist-in-residence. Through a paid internship with Northwest Archivists, I have been processing the RIDGE records remotely from my home in Iowa. The newly-acquired collection documents land use activism in Kittitas County, WA. We selected this collection for processing because of its unique relationship to Washington State’s labor history. I was really drawn to working on this collection…
When UW Libraries buildings were closed at the start of the pandemic, our teams needed to respond quickly to adapt work for many employees whose jobs do not easily lend themselves to telework by identifying projects that could be completed remotely. At the start of the pandemic, we had multiple accessibility projects underway, but given the time-intensive nature of the work, progress was slow. With the increased availability of staff and student employees, there was an opportunity to tackle some…
International Open Access Week (October 19-25) is a coordinated annual effort by scholarly communities across the world to celebrate both our achievements and aspirations in making “openness” the default for research and ensuring that equity is at the center of this work. This year’s theme, Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion, is especially relevant as the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of barrier-free access to trustworthy information and laid bare the inequities in our…
As students in the iSchool’s Library and Information Science program, we have been working at UW Libraries during our tenure here. Our capstone project is focused on the UW Libraries Recommended Reads for Equity collection, an initiative that was launched in 2018 with the support from a UW Diversity and Inclusion Seed Grant and the UW Libraries. Recommended Reads for Equity is a collection of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI)-focused books curated by members of the University of Washington community…
UW Libraries inaugural Going Public event launched in 2017 as a forum for sharing ideas and exploring ways researchers communicate their work to the public through the media. In the following years, other topics were explored–like public scholarship, citizen science, and community-based participatory research. Hosting events like this is central to UW Libraries mission and vision advancing research for the public good. As Libraries work has evolved far beyond a mechanism to provide resources alone, we strive to help researchers…