Gary E. Strong
University Librarian
Presented at PRDLA in Shanghai
October 21, 2010
Brand Identification: Research Driven
 Brand Position:
 “Something great happens here”
 “Where discovery happens”
 “Laboratory for the humanities and social sciences”
 Demonstrated through
 Well managed content
 Technology supporting social networking
 Drivers
 Knowledge focused
 Inter-disciplinary
 Accessibility
 Attributes
 Trustworthy
 Accurate
 Innovative
 A collaboration with the Division of Humanities
 A laboratory for digital cultural heritage at UCLA
 Transformative scholarship and pedagogy
 Characterized as
 Interdisciplinary
 Collaborative
 Socially engaged
 Global in focus
 Timely and relevant
 Multi-dimensional digital representations enable new
forms of scholarly communication and offer
revolutionary means of exploring the past.
 Scholars and students meet in a lab environment to
evaluate and modify their hypotheses of how a given
building might have looked, how it might have
functioned politically and socially, and what its role
was in the cultural development of a city or empire.
 Traditional scholarship might produce a book. Digital
representation allows for new forms of scholarship.
 This has been the traditional role of the research
library.
 Rapidly evolving digital and electronic access
environments have change the ways in which students
and faculty use and collaborate with library collections
and services.
 This new space allows for interactive learning, research
assistance, collaboration and group study.
 Contributes fully to the creation of new knowledge
and the distribution of scholarly communication.
 Embedded in the day-to-day research process of
humanists and will respond directly to their specific
needs.
 Specifically tailored to humanists both through the
specific configuration of its visualization display—a
rear projected, ultra-high resolution flat screen—and
through its location in the research library.
 Creates a shared sense of ownership for the entire
north campus community, one that cannot be attained
by placing the facility in any other space on campus.
 With Special Collections and the Map library.
 With the UCLA Digital Library.
 With appropriate librarians and especially those with
digital library background.
 The Laboratory will promote the research and
development of new interfaces to these collections.
 For example, researchers might work on archived, paperbased versions of historic maps alongside ultra-high
resolution digital versions.
 Research seminars and colloquia focused on interactive
visualizations would not longer be limited to the theaterlike space in the campus visualization portal.
 Faculty with ongoing or recently funded projects in
Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture and Urban
Design, Classics, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures,
Germanic Languages, Spanish and Portuguese, and
the Scandinavian Section.
 While intended for research, the Laboratory will drive
a new form of scholarship that will integrate
undergraduate and graduate education into the
development cycle.
 Graduate students and upper division undergraduates
will work on one laboratory project over the duration
of the course.
 At the end of the course, a jury will critique the project
within the Laboratory.
 One version of the final publication will be exhibited
on a series of LCD screens installed in the major artery
of the Research Library, the “Street.”
 The Han Yu-shan Collection
 Contains hundreds of original palace examination and
academy examination papers from the Qing dynasty
(1644-1911)
 The Tom Leung Archival Collection
 Private letters of the Chinese Royal Society led by Kang
Youwei and Liang Qichao, the reformers of the late Qing
period
 Archives of Chinese Democracy Movement
 Original materials relating to democracy movement in
1989, including documents, transcribed radio
broadcasts, local newspaper and journal articles, posters,
communications, and assorted ephemeral sources, in
Chinese and English
 Statistical Data of China’s Third Census in 1982
 UCLA Library is the only one in North American that
owns the complete 1982 census data
 Collections
 Diverse staffing
 Robust technology
 Expanded curation roles
 Collaboration built on partnerships
I have always imagined that
paradise will be some kind of
library
--Jorge Louis Borges