Social Sciences

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).

Generations of researchers who rely on primary sources faced a frustrating hurdle. Conducting original historical research typically required traveling to distant archives, navigating cost-prohibitive interlibrary loans, or adjusting a project’s scope based on access to sources. For students engaged in a senior honors thesis or a graduate seminar, these logistical barriers frequently choked academic curiosity before research even began. As a result, scholarship was often limited to specific geographic locations or well-funded departments.

The UCSB Library has acquired the Cedric J. and Elizabeth P. Robinson Archive, a collection of research and teaching papers, ephemera and digital materials related to the careers of the Robinsons, renowned for their seminal scholarship and activism that had wide-ranging influence at UC Santa Barbara, in academia, and across many public arenas. The archive was donated by Elizabeth P. Robinson and their daughter, Najda Ife Robinson-Mayer.

The University of California has entered into a two-year transformative open access agreement with SAGE Publishing. The agreement runs from January 1, 2022, to December 31, 2024, and covers open access publishing and reading access to SAGE’s hybrid and fully open access journals. The agreement includes open access publishing of an unlimited number of articles by corresponding authors at all ten UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and provides researchers throughout the UC system with expanded reading access to the full portfolio of SAGE journals.