Copley Library Annual Report 2022-2023

Outreach and Engagement

Comic Studies and Practices Symposium In recent years, comic books and graphic novels, forms of sequential art, have become powerful teaching tools that

Copley’s Annual Signature Event — the Digital Initiatives Symposium

The 9th annual Digital Initiatives Symposium (DIS) took place on April 17-18, 2023, marking a return to in-person sessions and featuring guest speakers and attendees from across the country and beyond. Held over the course of two days, the event kicked off with workshops, covering topics such as digital exhibits, the management of digital projects, copyright issues in the digital era, participatory archiving, and open access agreements. On the second day, the proceedings commenced with a keynote presentation by Greg Eow, Center for Research Libraries, focusing on postcolonial knowledge commons. Eow’s speech delved into the significant challenges faced by libraries in response to the digital revolution of the past half-century, drawing parallels with challenges encountered more than four centuries ago during the emergence of the printing press. Featured speaker Sayeed Choudhury, Director of the Open Source Programs Office at Carnegie Mellon University (pictured below), spoke on “How Open Scholarship Will Help Reboot the World,” while closing keynote speaker Dr. Lisa Fagin Davis presented her work on reuniting fragmented medieval manuscripts using digital means. Other sessions covered advancements in primary sources and special collections in research, the establishment of a U.S. repository network, digital initiatives as seen from the perspective of library deans, and digital access to copyrighted materials, including an update on the recently-launched Project LEND. For additional information about the Digital Initiatives Symposium (DIS) and to access the complete program with presentation abstracts, please visit https://digital.sandiego.edu/symposium/2023/ .

enhance student learning outcomes through visual literacy. This engaging medium is no longer just

for pleasure reading, but like any creative expression reflects its time and place be it through popular culture, issues of race and gender, mental health, history, memoir and other subjects. Two librarians at Copley wanted

to celebrate this evolving genre in both scholarly and practice-based contexts by bringing like-minds together. V. Dozier and Millie Fullmer identified an opportunity by applying for a SCELC Project Initiatives Fund (SPIF) grant. SCELC, the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium, awarded the two librarians $12,500 to host a Comic Studies and Practices Symposium (CSPS). The two-day event took place on July 18-19, 2022, featuring spectacular keynote addresses by Dr. Chesya Burke, critically acclaimed author and Assistant Professor of English at Stetson University, on Afrofuturism in comics, and John Jennings, Eisner award-winning graphic novelist and Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, on the call and response interplay of comics. Both are leaders in the field of sequential arts, similarly, the presenters were also well-established authors, practitioners, scholars, librarians, and graduate students that touched on such topics as graphic medicine, pedagogical uses of sequential art, archives, cataloging, critical librarianship, and social justice. Symposium attendees tuned in virtually from across California, the United States and internationally. Following the event, Dozier and Fullmer actively engaged in collection development of comics, manga and graphic novels at Copley Library with generous support from Dean Theresa Byrd. You can see the full CSPS program agenda here: https://digital.sandiego.edu/csp-symposium/2022/ .

6 | HELEN K. AND JAMES S. COPLEY LIBRARY