2024-2025 Impact Report_final version

Alma Ortega, PhD

FUN FACT: I’ve visited all the continents except for one, Antarctica. It’s the only corner of the planet I’ve yet to reach but it’s on my bucket list!

I am one of the Research and Instruction Librarians of the newly created Research and Instruction Engagement Department at the library (Spring 2025). I am also the liaison to the Kroc School of Peace Studies. I serve as the liaison to Italian Studies and Spanish majors, the minors in Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Chinese, and to the Arabic and Japanese programs. I have also worked on special projects on the Border since Spring 2004. From the University of California at Berkeley, I have two BAs, one in Peace and Conflict Studies and another in Romance Languages – Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. My two master’s degrees are from UCLA: one an MLIS focused on research and collections, and the other an MA in Latin American Studies, with a concentration on Brazil and Mexico. I also earned a PhD in Leadership Studies from USD, where I combined librarianship and leadership studies for my dissertation on leadership styles. Since joining USD in 2003, I have built and maintained relationships with academic librarians in Baja California, including coordinating the Border Academic Librarians group, which recently celebrated its fourth meeting at the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education in Ensenada (CICESE) with the theme: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the challenges and opportunities it brings to academic libraries . I also coordinated Zoom gatherings between Copley Library and Universidad de Monterrey Library, our Sister Library, for the past two years. Moreover, after 18 months of much back-and-forth, in June 2025, I successfully set up a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the la Comisión Estatal de los Derechos Humanos de Baja California (CEDH-BC), stemming from a 2017 digitization project. My research also focuses on the importance of research assistance to students and faculty, as well as on building collections with broad topics in area studies to enrich users’ research experience. I have presented at the Acquisitions Institute at Timberline Lodge on the importance of Area Studies and how maintaining these collections provides another perspective on otherwise overlooked parts of the world. Over the past few years, the Seminar for the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials has allowed me to present on the processes required to digitize the CEDH-BC’s archived human rights cases. Along with two academic colleagues, I submitted and presented: The Forgotten Academic Educators: Academic/Research Librarians and their Role in the Adoption and Incorporation of AI tools in Library Instruction and Information Literacy in July 2025 at the 32nd International Conference on Learning. After 21 years at USD’s Copley Library, I still find much satisfaction in my consultations with students and faculty, collection management, and instruction.

2024–2025 IMPACT REPORT | 9