It is not enough to wait for instructors, researchers, and students to come to us, the Lux Lab needs to actively promote its services and aggressively seek new and emerging applications for its services. It’s also vital to stay current with technological trends and to stay on the leading edge of technological change.
Much of my effort over the last few years has been to establish strong, lasting, and productive relationships with as many campus groups, departments, and persons as possible.
XR Initiative
In February of 2019, a VR task force issued its report about the state of VR/XR at UCLA. In Spring of 2019, a group was formed to discuss the report and attempt to implement some of its recommendations. Upon hearing about this initiative, I knew immediately that the Lux Lab needed to be involved. As part of the library, we are the only place on campus that is built to support every aspect of what goes on at UCLA. I volunteered to take the lead in organizing a series of Open House events so that all of the participating labs could get a chance to see what else was going on around campus. These tours happened over the course of May and June of 2019, and my reports on each of the tours can be found here and here.
The Rocket Project
Another key tenet of the library’s mission is community outreach. I am very fortunate to be working at a university that attracts and fosters superlative students. The Rocket Project is an extracurricular group whose rocket designs compete at the national level. In addition to being aspiring rocket scientists, the students in the Rocket Project reached out to the Lux Lab in order to produce rocket kits that they could then take to lower-income Middle Schools. We made about 25 of these kits, all of which were then donated to students in the LA area.
Fowler
and LSC
UCLA Library Special Collections is home to a world-class collection of manuscripts, books, artifacts, and much more. Similarly, UCLA’s Fowler museum has an extensive collection of objects from Africa, Latin America, and Asia and the Pacific. It only made sense that I establish working relationships with both Library Special Collections and the Fowler museum. We are currently working our way through LSC’s entire cuneiform collection, scanning each artifact in each of the collections. I have similarly worked with the Fowler museum to scan a variety of collections, in an effort to explore the possibility of using 3D scanning as a means of preservation and increasing access.