A Condensed History: Exploring the History of Swanton Pacific Ranch and Environs

Swanton Pacific Ranch is an educational and research facility owned by the Cal Poly Corporation and managed by the Cal Poly State University (Cal Poly) College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences. The rancho’s original inhabitants included Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, as well as various European immigrants and their descendants; currently, the staff, faculty, and students of Cal Poly occupy the land. Each of these groups used the land’s rich environment for a variety of purposes from subsistence to financial and intellectual pursuits. Over time, researchers and local historians have discussed specific aspects of the Swanton Pacific Ranch and its environs, particularly concerning its occupants, land use (e.g. businesses, farming, research), and land features (e.g. geology, botany). Una Legua Cuadrada: Exploring the History of Swanton Pacific Ranch and Environs by Jeanine Scaramozzino (available online at https://doi.org/10.15368/theses.2015.170 2015) offers a cohesive, descriptive narrative of the land and its people organized chronologically from prehistory to the present. This document provides a summary of the information presented in Scaramozzino’s manuscript

Una Legua Cuadrada: Exploring the History of Swanton Pacific Ranch and Environs

Swanton Pacific Ranch is an educational and research facility owned by the Cal Poly Corporation and managed by the Cal Poly State University (Cal Poly) College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences. Located about 180 miles north of campus and just 14 miles north of Santa Cruz, California on Highway 1, the property was first leased to and then donated to Cal Poly by the late Albert E. Smith in 1993. The rancho’s original inhabitants included Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, as well as various European immigrants and their descendants; currently, the staff, faculty, and students of Cal Poly occupy the land. Each of these groups used the land’s rich environment for a variety of purposes from subsistence to financial and intellectual pursuits. Over time, researchers and local historians have discussed specific aspects of the Swanton Pacific Ranch and its environs, particularly concerning its occupants, land use (e.g. businesses, farming, research), and land features (e.g. geology, botany). The following work offers a more cohesive, descriptive narrative of the land and its people organized chronologically from prehistory to the present

Redefining Library Partnerships: Sharing Physical and Digital Space with the Campus Community

Cal Poly State University librarians are engaging faculty, staff and students by transforming physical and digital library spaces to better support teaching and learning. A Science Café program hosted in the Learning Commons Library Café provides informal opportunities to come together over coffee, share current faculty research, and make salient the connections that exist between the numerous and seemingly unrelated areas of study on campus: science, humanities and the social sciences. The campus institutional repository (IR), DigitalCommons@CalPoly, is an ever-growing digital archive of faculty research, student work and campus documents which has facilitated new collaborations between faculty, campus constituents and the library and has elevated the visibility of faculty and student research. Sharing of physical and digital space provides for dynamic, campus-centered programs and initiatives bringing together technology, information, and people to create a myriad of connections. These initiatives are redefining physical and digital library spaces, catalyzing renewed interest in the library and fostering communication and connections on campus

Science Cafe: Conversation and Coffee at the Library

In 2007 a task force was convened by Cal Poly\u27s Provost to envision The Future of the Library. One of the top recommendations of this report was that the Kennedy Library should foster the concept of “the library as place.” The report stated that “the library needs to be an active space that meets a multitude of academic and social needs,” and recommended that Cal Poly “renovate and expand the library as a multi-use, social and academic center of campus”. This poster will explore the ways that the Kennedy Library has accomplished this, focusing in particular on its Science Café initiative, intended to encourage social and intellectual engagement on campus

Swanton Pacific Ranch: Student Research Bibliography

Swanton Pacific Ranch (SPR) is a 3,200-acre ranch in Santa Cruz County, California, outside the town of Davenport. The ranch is an educational and research facility owned by the Cal Poly Corporation and managed by the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences. SPR is a learning laboratory that employs Cal Poly’s Learn By Doing philosophy. Many students have completed research projects at SPR but no complete list of student projects exists. This bibliography includes Cal Poly authored student research and those co-authored with Cal Poly faculty and staff. Documents include senior projects, master’s theses, class projects, reports, and more. Though this bibliography is the most comprehensive to date, it is not exhaustive. The purpose of this document is to provide researchers with citations for difficult to locate gray literature. A number of resources were used to collect these citations, including DigitalCommons@CalPoly, Cal Poly’s library catalog, physical documents located at Swanton Pacific Ranch, and citation lists provided by Cal Poly staff and faculty. The citations include as much detail as available and the information was not edited or updated. The following document types are included: a “Senior Project” is a course or sequence that many departments require for a student to earn a bachelor\u27s degree; a “Master’s Thesis“ is the product of a systematic study of a significant problem; a “Class Project” corresponds with a specific class the author took during the author\u27s time at the university; and a “Case Study”, “Special Problem”, or “Report” involves detailed research on a specific subject. Please note that names of departments and classes have changed over time, and there are also name variations for some locations (ex. “Scott” Creek, “Scotts” Creek, “Scott’s” Creek). Missing citation information is noted by the following abbreviations UN (unknown document type), ND (no department listed), and DU (date unknown)

A novel assessment tool for quantitative evaluation of science literature search performance: Application to first-year and senior undergraduate biology majors

Expertise in searching and evaluating scientific literature is a requisite skill of trained scientists and science students, yet information literacy instruction varies greatly among institutions and programs. To ensure that science students acquire information literacy skills, robust methods of assessment are needed. Here, we describe a novel tool for longitudinal, crossover assessment of literature-searching skills in science students and apply it to a cross-sectional assessment of literature-searching performance in 145 first-year and 43 senior biology majors. Subjects were given an open-ended prompt requiring them to find multiple sources of information addressing a particular scientific topic. A blinded scorer used a rubric to score the resources identified by the subjects and generate numerical scores for source quality, source relevance, and citation quality. Two versions of the assessment prompt were given to facilitate eventual longitudinal study of individual students in a crossover design. Seniors were significantly more likely to find relevant, peer-reviewed journal articles, provide appropriate citations, and provide correct answers to other questions about scientific literature. This assessment tool accommodates large numbers of students and can be modified easily for use in other disciplines or at other levels of education

Map Room to Data and GIS Services: Five University Libraries Evolving to Meet Campus Needs and Changing Technologies

Programs for geospatial support at academic libraries have evolved over the past decade in response to changing campus needs and developing technologies. Geospatial applications have matured tremendously in this time, emerging from specialty tools to become broadly used across numerous disciplines. At many universities, the library has served as a central resource allowing students and faculty across academic departments access to GIS resources. Today, as many academic libraries evaluate their spaces and services, GIS and data services are central in discussions on how to further engage with patrons and meet increasingly diverse researcher needs. As library programs evolve to support increasingly technical data and GIS needs, many universities are faced with similar challenges and opportunities. To explore these themes, data and GIS services librarians and GIS specialists from five universities—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Texas A&M, New York University, North Carolina State University, and California Polytechnic State University—with different models of library geospatial and data support, describe their programs to help identify common services, as well as unique challenges, opportunities, and future plans

An Undergraduate Science Information Literacy Tutorial in a Web 2.0 World

The development of an interactive web-based science information literacy tutorial that introduces undergraduate science majors to basic components of scientific literature is described. The tutorial introduces concepts, vocabulary and resources necessary for understanding and accessing information. The tutorial content is based on the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education and the Information Literacy Standards for Science and Engineering/Technology (American Library Association (ALA) /Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)/Science and Technology Section (STS) Task Force on Information Literacy for Science and Technology). In order to engage students in a Web 2.0 world, the tutorial has evolved to incorporate interactivity, graphics, and self-assessment. This paper provides information on the development of the tutorial, examples from the tutorial, suggestions for future designers, and the next steps in development of the tutorial and web-based tutorials. This tutorial fills a gap in information literacy as professors are trying to provide more instruction in limited classroom time and provides a resource that can be assigned or reviewed throughout a user\u27s college career, reinforcing information literacy principles. This is especially important for science majors who, unlike social science and humanities majors, may not need to use science reference materials actively until upper division classes