Data Curation & Management

When Samuel Liu noticed workplace friction among fellow Resident Assistants (RAs) at UC Santa Barbara’s San Nicolas Residence Hall, he decided to investigate. As a senior majoring in Communication and Sociology, Liu turned his personal and professional observations into an award-winning independent research project. His study, titled " 'It’s Not Just a Job, It’s Literally My Housing': Resident Assistants, Job Embeddedness, and Dissent," earned first place and a $750 prize at the 2026 Library Award for Undergraduate Research (LAUR).

A new $484,455 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will support the next phase of the University of California Open Source Program Office (OSPO) Network as they work to make OSPOs a permanent part of the UC system. With this new funding, the UC Santa Barbara Library’s Open Source Program (OSP) will continue to develop and deploy initiatives that raise awareness and support for open source software and hardware at UCSB.

Picture students divided into groups in a classroom, each group intently focused on a pile of Lego® building bricks. You’re probably picturing children at an elementary school, but in this particular case, they are graduate students at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara. Their task? To build a fantasy creation of their liking, with the proviso that they must describe their construction, in writing, in a way that it can be replicated.

New requirements from funding agencies and publishers to improve the reproducibility of scientific results, and to ensure that data and code products of grant-funded research are "Fair, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)," have sparked an open science revolution. While the benefits of open science are widely recognized, the burden of implementing its principles is left to researchers, and too often is unfunded.

The University of California has been awarded a grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the development of a UC-wide network of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs). This award leverages the work of the Open Source Program Office at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) and funds a collaboration of UC campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Diego with UCSC to promote open source research, teaching, and public service. 

The UCSB Library and the Office of Research would like to announce the launch of a new web resource: 

Research Computing and Data 
https://rcd.ucsb.edu

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded UCSB Library a $100,000 National Leadership Grant for "Always Already Computational: Library Collections as Data." The funds will be used for a series of meetings to develop strategies around library collections that support computationally-driven research and teaching. Of 85 submitted projects, only 15 were selected nationally for funding.