When it comes to find a Good place to take naps for better learning outcome, UCI’s Chinese Student Association recently surveyed many places on campus and recommended five places — Langson Library, Science Library, Gateway Study Center, Anteater Learning Pavilion and Courtyard Study Lounge. Among these five, Langson Library and Science Library have been given five-star, whereas the other three four-star. Four criteria were used in the evaluation and ranking. They are (1) comfort seating, (2) quiet setting, (3) appropriate lighting and (4) good smell.

The most favorable features in Langson are the quiet zone, soft sofas, and good privacy protection. Science Library is liked most also because its privacy, comfort and quietness, plus the best view on campus and the Check Out desk facing the entrance (a feel of hotel hospitality).

More can be found at https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ffG5H8A7jqDf3AryRdMO4g (Chinese language texts as well as lots of photos).

An upcoming conference has an interesting theme:

The Innovative Library Classroom (TILC) 2020
Poster Session & Social on Thursday, June 4 and Conference on Friday, June 5, 2020
William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA

The theme is “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Are Not Synonyms.” Although the acronym EDI may imply that equity, diversity, and inclusion are one entity, each has value on its own. While equity, diversity, and inclusion inform each other, we need to understand and address each concept individually in order to create meaningful educational experiences that can benefit all of our students. DeEtta Jones summarizes the distinctions with this comparison, “[I]f your organization is a sports stadium, diversity would ask, ‘Who is at the game?’ Inclusion would ask, ‘Are everyone’s seats comfortable?’ Finally, equity would ask, ‘Has anyone been left out of the park? If so, why?’” A fuller perspective can be read at https://deettajones.com/equity-the-missing-piece-of-the-edi-puzzle/.

Proposals are currently invited for poster, lightening talks and presentations. See here for further information.

Last week I attended a great conference, IDEAL ’19: Advancing Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Accessibility in Libraries and Archives in Columbus, Ohio.  The conference, formerly known as the National Diversity in Libraries Conference, was sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), as well as the host campus, Ohio State University.  Over 600 people attended – most involved in some capacity in academic libraries in the U.S. and Canada.  There were many discussions, presentations, and workshops on all aspects of diversity, inclusion and social justice, and it was difficult to pick and choose which sessions to attend.  Some highlights I did attend were:

• Becoming better allies via the communication recovery model, presented by Jesus Espinoza and Larry Wentzel from the University of Michigan.
• Reading race: using book discussions to start dialogues on white fragility and other racisms, presented by Harrison Inefuku and Susan A. Vega Garcia from Iowa State University.
• Exploring racial equity (about the Racial Equity Institute), presented by Jennifer Garret, Gerald Holmes, and Mark A. Puente
• Pathways to leadership for librarians of color, a panel discussion which I was honored to moderate with 4 library leaders: Courtney Young, Shali Zhang, Lori Harris, and Gerald Holmes.

I was really energized by the dynamic opening and closing keynote speakers!

    The opener was Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, who is a leading authority in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law.  She coined the term “critical race theory” and has done a lot of work around the concept of “intersectionality.”

The closing speaker was Nicole Hannah-Jones, a journalist for the New York Times who focuses on racial injustice in her reporting.  She was a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2017, and she is one of the writers behind a major series called The 1619 Project that debuts today (August 13, 2019) in the NY Times.  This project memorializes the 400^th anniversary of the landing in America of the first ship carrying enslaved Africans. The NYT says, “The goal of the project is to deepen understanding of American history (and the American present) by proposing a new point of origin for our national story.”

I made a split second decision at ALA’s Annual Conference this year, and veered off from my planned schedule to instead hear Sonia Sotomayor. The impetus for her new children’s book was her experience  hearing someone else describe Sotomayor as a drug addict because they had seen Sotomayor give herself an insulin shot. Her book is titled Just Ask!/¡Solo pregunta! and encourages children not to make assumptions about other people.

When asked by someone in the audience what she would like law librarians (or research librarians in general) to be able to do, she is one of the few people I have ever heard succinctly state (I am paraphrasing from memory) “librarians help researchers think more broadly about the topic.” She wished librarians could just reach inside the researcher’s brain because we are so good at helping frame the research topic through our knowledge of different disciplines. The American Libraries coverage describes  the other delight in attending Sotomayor’s talk: “Sotomayor noted that as a child she could never sit still and was soon walking the aisles of the auditorium—followed closely by her security detail—telling her story, hugging attendees, and being serenaded for her upcoming birthday (June 25).

Matthew P. Canepa has been installed as the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in Art History & Archaeology of Ancient Iran within UCI’s Department of Art History and Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies and affiliated with the campus’s Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies & Culture. Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute, a private foundation that supports the active preservation, transmission and instruction of Persian language, history, culture and heritage, funded the $2 million chair in 2017, with additional support provided by the UC Presidential Match for Endowed Chairs program.

“We are very fortunate to have Matthew Canepa in the School of Humanities,” said Dean Tyrus Miller. “With his scholarship, we are one step closer to showcasing the full sweep of 7,000 years of Iranian and Persian history and culture, and UCI now has the largest group of tenured Persian studies faculty in the country.”

“I look forwarding to working with Dean Miller to build UCI into North America’s premier institution for doctoral education and postdoctoral research in ancient Iranian art and archaeology. We have several exciting initiatives planned and are eager to begin working with our partners in the community and the wider field to make them a reality,” Canepa said.

Touraj Daryaee, director of the Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies & Culture and the Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies & Culture, noted that Canepa’s position cements UCI as a destination for the study of ancient Iran. “With Matthew Canepa on faculty, we have the opportunity to train a new generation of scholars in the exciting field of Persian studies,” he said. “With this endowed chair, ancient art history and archaeology will be taught at UCI forever.”

Most recently, Canepa is the author of The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity Through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE-642 CE (University of California Press, 2018). It is a large-scale study of the transformation of Iranian cosmologies, landscapes and architecture from the height of the Achaemenids to the coming of Islam

.

Matthew P. Canepa (left) and Touraj Daryaee, director of UCI’s Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies & Culture and the Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies & Culture, answer questions at Canepa’s installation as the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in Art History & Archaeology of Ancient Iran. Ebrahim Safi / School of Humanities

Matthew P. Canepa is named to endowed chair in art history and archaeology of ancient Iran