Your paper is due at midnight. Your roommate just got dumped and needs to talk it out. And the status of your group project is a mystery to all.

Don’t worry. You’ve got this.  

Here are 5 reasons why:

1. ASU librarians. Helping you succeed is not just a thing they’re good at – it’s in their job description. Let them help you. They want to help you. It’s why they’re here.

2. Online help.  Your questions about citations, keywords and research databases already have answers, and you can find them on our FAQs page, where librarians are also available for online chat. Relax – if you have a connection to the internet, there is hope.

3. Group study rooms. Maybe it’s time to figure out what’s going on with your group project. Several types of group study spaces are available at our libraries to support those necessary conversations and collaborations. Gather your group and get it done.

4. Quiet and silent study. No signs of your roommate quieting down any time soon. Have no fear – ASU Library quiet and silent study is a thing, and it’s here for you. It’s a magical place where devices go silent and your thoughts thank you.

5. Counseling. Not a library service, but a great resource nonetheless, offered to ASU students who may be feeling like they need to talk to someone. You’re not alone. Also, you may want to suggest it to your roommate.

Relax, take a breath. You’ve got this.

A new book display of poetry and drama at Fletcher Library is encouraging the ASU community to take a chance on a book.

Immune from judgment, all books in this display are shelved spine-backward in an effort to encourage discovery and serendipity. Featured poets include Joy Harjo and Juan Felipe Herrera.

“Surprise Me” is the first book display in a new series of collection experiments, part of the Future of Print initiative at ASU, which looks at new and innovative ways to present print materials to library visitors.

Students, staff and faculty are invited to "explore the unknown" during normal library hours at Fletcher. "Surprise Me" will be located on the ground floor of the library through October 15.

Beginning Sept. 10, Fletcher Library on the West campus and the Polytechnic Library on the Polytechnic campus will stay open until midnight.

The new midnight hours are part of ASU Library's commitment to support student success. 

Fletcher Library hours are as follows:

Monday-Thursday: 7:30 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. (midnight)
Friday: 7:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Saturday: 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Sunday: 12:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Polytechnic Library hours are as follows:

Monday-Thursday: 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. (midnight)
Friday: 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Saturday: 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Sunday: 12:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. (midnight)

 For more detailed information on library hours, visit lib.asu.edu/hours.

For the first time ever, thousands of high-quality archival materials – photographs, documents and correspondence – chronicling the early history of Grand Canyon National Park (1890-1940) have been made digitally available to the public through a partnership between ASU Library, Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library and Grand Canyon National Park.

Coined 100 Years of Grand, the project commemorates the upcoming centennial of the legislative creation of Grand Canyon National Park in February 1919 and aims to enhance public understanding of the park’s history by weaving together several decades of cultural, geospatial, entrepreneurial, documentary and administrative archival history.

“Materials made accessible through this project will be of benefit to visitors to the park who may want to enhance their experience and historical understanding of the Grand Canyon,” said Rob Spindler, university archivist for ASU and the project’s director. “Students, teachers and historians at all educational levels will be able to acquire and reuse these materials for class lectures, assignments and related writings and research. Arizona businesses that rely on Grand Canyon tourism will also be able to use these materials in the development of their advertisement and marketing efforts.”

The archival materials – photographs, documents, ephemera, maps, correspondence and original manuscripts – have been digitized, presented and delivered via three Arizona repositories.

“The public can gain access to the materials through various ways, but the easiest would be through lib.asu.edu/Grand100,” Spindler said. “Many of the materials in the digital repositories have rarely been seen since they were created. These amazing artifacts tell a bigger story about Grand Canyon National Park.”

This project is supported by the Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records, a division of the Secretary of State, with federal funds from the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

If you want to know something about scholarly activism and indigenous communities, the office of David Martinez would be a good place to start.

It’s the collective home of every book ever nominated for the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award, now in its 10th year. (Check out a full list of Labriola book award winners.)

As chair of the selection committee, Martinez has literally surrounded himself with a decade’s worth of research — as many as 200 books — by indigenous scholars, Native and non-Native, around issues of environmental justice, sexual violence, historical representation and tribal sovereignty.

“We get anywhere from 12 to 20 nominees each year,” said Martinez, an Arizona State University associate professor of American Indian studies, who was recruited in 2008 by ASU Foundation Professor Donald Fixico and Regents Professor Peter Iverson to create a distinguished book award that honored scholarship in American Indian history and related fields.

At the time, there were few book awards within American Indian studies, but this has changed. From year to year, Martinez has seen a notable increase in opportunities for indigenous people-focused projects.

“Now more than ever, American Indian studies is relevant to the national discussion on democracy, which has come under assault. Nobody knows that better than tribal communities who have not always had their voices heard or counted toward policy decisions made on their behalf,” he said. “This is a time to pay attention to those voices.”

On the importance of visiting

Criteria for the Labriola book award emphasizes that the research be developed out of a meaningful relationship with the community on which it’s focused.

“The research must serve some need the community has, as opposed to research for the sake of research,” said Martinez, explaining that the idea stems from “our own intellectual history” — a standard set by Vine Deloria Jr., in his “Indian Manifesto” ("Custer Died For Your Sins," 1969), in which he criticized the social sciences for generating research that didn’t do the communities any good. “His belief was that work on Native communities must also work for Native communities.”

Deloria’s philosophy of socially embedded, use-inspired research — certainly a driving force at ASU — guided the work of Elizabeth Hoover in her 2017 book, "The River is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community," this year’s winner of the Labriola award. 

Hoover said the book came out of “kitchen-table conversations” with friends, workers, leaders and scientists in the remarkable upstate New York Mohawk community of Akwesasne, along the St. Lawrence River, who partnered up to develop grass-roots programs aimed at fighting environmental contamination and the threats it posed to their land, health and culture.

“There is something to be said for the importance of visiting and how it can impact a project,” said Hoover, the Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brown University. “These slow-simmering conversations gave me the impetus for wanting to look at these health studies and how people were responding to them. I had friends working in a gardening group who made me want to think more about the impact of food and the way that contamination has these collateral impacts as well, such as concerns over exposure that cause people to avoid food.”

Hoover, the fourth consecutive Native American woman to receive the Labriola book award, says she wants people to find her work useful and for other Native communities to see what Akwesasne has accomplished.

“I want people to have this information and for other people to be inspired by this work, including scientists,” she added. “Some have written me to say they’re thinking about their work in a different way now.”

‘An ongoing awareness’

Martinez said Hoover’s book is an elegant example of a project that brings together the best in indigenous scholarship with the real-world needs of the community.

“Hoover is becoming one of the leading figures on the issues of food sovereignty and environmental justice for American Indians,” he said. “In the next five to 10 years, her work will be as important as Winona LaDuke’s.”

For most people, environmental crises emerged in the 1960s — but from an American Indian perspective, tribes have been deeply concerned about the impact of development on the environment since the first settlers appeared.

“The diverting of rivers and streams, the changing of non-farm land into farm land, the impact of mining and the railroads — Native people have always been alarmed by what’s going on,” Martinez said. “Hoover’s book represents an ongoing awareness among American Indians that the development that has been occurring in their lands since the time of colonialism has been creating this ever-going environmental crisis.”

In the face of such crises, the books that practically spill over the shelves of Martinez’s office are proof of indigenous resilience and, more importantly, resistance.

“It’s one thing to overcome the hardships that come with living in a colonial system,” Martinez said. “It’s another thing for those tribes to enact a political agenda that rebels against power and brings about real change.”

You can learn more about Hoover and her book at a special reception and Q&A session, hosted by ASU Library’s Labriola Center, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 24, in C2 of Hayden Library.

Photo by Deanna Dent

The Juste family church tipi has been in service, helping heal the Salt River Gila community, for over 25 years.

“This tipi has a real history. A lot of people have received a lot of help,” says ASU’s Henry Quintero. “Its scars tell a story of this community and what it’s been through, and our perseverance.”

That history made its way to Arizona State University last week, when the church tipi was set up on the Tempe campus, by church roadman Glen Juste, himself, for the 10th annual Simon Ortiz RED INK Indigenous Speaker Series, formerly known as the Simon Ortiz and Labriola Center Lecture on Indigenous Land, Culture, and Community.

The new name follows its new director, Quintero, an assistant professor in the Department of English and the editor of RED INK, an International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts & Humanities. The journal is just one part of a larger initiative by the same name to enhance access to higher education for Indigenous communities, as well as global access to Indigenous creative and intellectual expression and discourse among Native and non-Native communities on Indigenous issues.

“RED INK is great, and it’s here to stay,” says Quintero, who is affiliated with American Indian Studies. “Part of what’s here to stay is sharing a kind of creative beauty that is intrinsically woven into Indigenous people’s lives.”

How we understand our stories and the relationships around us underscored this year's speaker series, which included a demonstration and talk on "Indigenous Epistemologies of Sustainable Geometries: Stories of the Cradleboard and Tipi" and a discussion of the development of the Native American Church and the tipi's evolution alongside.

Storytellers included Juste (Gila River Tohono O'odham), Sarita and Mac Nosie (White Mountain Apache), and Ksaws Brooks (Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation).

The annual series, now a decade old and sponsored by ASU Library’s Labriola National American Indian Data Center – home to thousands of books, journals, Native Nation newspapers and primary source materials, such as photographs, oral histories and manuscript collections – "seeks to create and celebrate knowledge that evolves from an inclusive Indigenous worldview and is applicable to all walks of life."

It has featured such speakers as Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Peterson Zah (Navajo), Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee) and last year’s Myron Dewey (Newe-Numah/Paiute-Shoshone).

Quintero sees the series as an act of decolonization, passed down to him by his predecessor and mentor Simon J. Ortiz, an ASU Regents' Professor, who donated his personal papers to the Labriola Center in 2013.

“It’s a testament to the Labriola’s family commitment to Indigenous people and the understanding that Indigenous people have a philosophy and voice as well as the ability to share and integrate our incredibly valuable knowledge,” he says. 

Ortiz encouraged Quintero to share his knowledge about Indigenous plant medicine and the Native American Church back when Quintero was a graduate student at ASU. 

“He said, ‘you've got to write about this,’” recalls Quintero, who now researches Native American Church music, better known as “peyote music.”

“Peyote music is a philosophical, musical and literary system that dates back older than any of the Abrahamic traditions, and belongs to a larger tradition of indigenous plant medicines that we utilize to navigate the human experience,” says Quintero. “It’s like any other glorious representation of everything in our human experience. It’s a way of understanding interrelations with what’s around us – our earth, our families, other human beings.”

In peyote ceremonies, the tipi plays a foundational role, from the way its constructed to the stories that are embedded and the relationships interwoven.

“Anyone can take a pill, anyone can take a drug,” Quintero says. “When it truly becomes a medicine, from an Indigenous perspective, is when it integrates with your life, beliefs and culture. In this way, the tipi is a kind of ‘cultural container,’ a way of utilizing time, place and space with plant medicines to facilitate the best outcome."

Traditional teachings around Indigenous culture, the tipi and the cradleboard, a protective baby carrier, were all part of the spring speaker series events. Through these valuable teachings and new avenues of scholarship, Quintero says we begin to understand this time and space we’re living in now, differently.

"ASU is the place for RED INK and for Indigenous studies," he says. "Many Indigenous scholars see President Crow's commitment to the 2020 initiative as active decolonization for the benefit of the ASU and international community, but also, in a larger sense, as being the innovation that changes everything in that gentle, good way."

Digital technology offers unprecedented means to transmit, store, and utilize information.  While a growing number of individuals and communities are able to benefit abundantly from the expanded opportunities that new technologies offer, many people live in regions where access to the internet is rare, inadequate, or non-existent.  The resulting divide hampers opportunities for educational, cultural, economic, and social development.

A growing number of independent organizations and individuals strive to provide digital information access where internet access is limited.  While making significant headway, such organizations are often unaware of others' efforts, thus missing opportunities and technical advances that could be leveraged.

In order to explore these issues and to pursue solutions, Arizona State University Library and Bibliothèques Sans Frontières / Libraries Without Borders, with the involvement of IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations), organized an international summit, Jan. 30 to Feb. 1, 2018, at the ASU Library in Tempe, Arizona, USA.

Many of us have experienced the dramatic potential of the "offline internet," meaning the systems and services designed to bring internet-accessible content to people and places without existing, adequate, and/or affordable network access.  Participants perceived "offline internet" solutions as a key step towards enabling access to and mastery of digital information and education, as well as preparing users to participate fully in global communications. 

At the ASU Tempe Summit, 30 participants representing 15 organizations discussed the key factors affecting major aspects of providing "offline internet" information to communities, institutions, and regions that currently do not have robust (or any) internet access. 

As a result of these discussions, the active participants framed the following "Tempe Principles":

• Access to the information commons should be recognized as a fundamental human right.  We share a deep commitment to bringing meaningful, sustainable access to information resources for communities not well served by conventional access to the internet.  This commitment is very much in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

• We are forming a consortium that comprises people and organizations working together to identify common solutions, setting standards for software development, content indexing, and metadata, in the service of leveraging digital resources for communities that are not currently connected to the internet. 

• We share the belief that common development of standards and practices can help all interested parties to achieve their goals and meet their information needs more easily and effectively.  We therefore seek a more integrated, easily-mastered user experience of offline internet.

• We judge that open source and open access tools and content best meet the interests of the communities we seek to support.  We also see a need to champion the sharing of copyrighted materials to underserved populations.

• Communities of interest to our consortium include mainly those the internet fails to reach:  certainly those in remote locations, post-conflict or emergency situations, and refugee communities, as well as those whose disadvantage is political (governments do not support infrastructure and access), economic (lack of resources for easy access to broadband or data plans that support information access), and social (members do not have the education or experience to access digital information).

• We recognize the value of experimentation and exploration in developing and creating hardware devices that can function effectively in a range of challenges, from the personal to the enterprise.

• We will engage and empower our partners in underserved communities to design and develop technologies, as well as create content collections, as peers alongside consortia members.

• We expect to work in the space of not-for-profit and non-governmental organizations, while welcoming conversations with, on the one hand, governmental entities and, on the other, commercial enterprises that can focus attention and resources on this work in ways compatible with our principles and commitments.

• We will not, at this time, seek legal standing.   Our governance will emphasize participation and collaboration and be open to organizations and individuals that share our principles and commitments.

• We believe that this collaboration can help us identify potential funders and make the case to them that there are good reasons to invest in our activities.

Our next steps are to proceed along three tracks:

(1) A governance group has been formed to propose overall structure, process, and identity. 

(2) Working groups have been formed to propose objectives and goals in areas of software, hardware, content, operations, and advocacy.

(3) Meanwhile, certain agreed tasks will proceed on an informal basis.

We warmly invite additional players, participants, and collaborators to endorse these Principles and join in this crucial work.  The summit's organizers are strongly supportive of this effort and pledge to remain actively involved.

# # # # # 

Arizona State University Library:  The university charter expresses our ambition for our success to be measured not by whom we exclude, but by whom we include and how they succeed.  The aspirations of those who work on ‘offline internet’ are exactly in that spirit.  Empowered learners, master learners, and inspired teachers hold the future in their hands, and we believe this project extends the planet’s capacity to shape that future effectively.

Bibliothèques Sans Frontières:  Libraries Without Borders works to ensure that regardless of their circumstances, people throughout the world can live with dignity and the opportunity to thrive through access to information, education and culture.  This effort is not one that any one of us is able to take on single-handedly. This coalition unifies our voices in order to raise the voices of those who are not connected to internet.

IFLA:  IFLA is the global voice of the library and information profession.  Our key objectives include promoting high standards of provision and delivery of library and information services, and encouraging widespread understanding of the value of good library & information services.  This coalition actively furthers our core goals, and we are honored to play an organizing role.

For more information, contact:  internet.unplugged@gmail.com

Summit website:  http://www.offline-internet.org

Organizations Attending the Summit:

Arizona State University Library

BSF (Bibliothèques sans Frontières / Libraries Without Borders)

eGranary Digital Library

Gigabit Libraries Network

IFLA

INASP

INEE

Internet-in-a-Box

Kiwix

Learning Equality

LibraryBox

MAKAIA Foundation

Rumie Initiative

Sarawak State Library

SolarSPELL (ASU)

State Library of Arizona

Sunna Design/Moon Project

TEEAL

WiderNet@UNC

* World Health Organization (WHO)

* Observer Status

ASU Librarians Dan Stanton and Lisa Kammerlocher had the opportunity to travel to Rwanda as part of the SolarSPELL team, delivering information resources to places that lack internet connectivity. 

A former Peace Corps Volunteer, Stanton is passionate about local community development. Here, Stanton writes about his involvement with SolarSPELL, "contributing to the creation of the low-cost, rugged, solar-powered boxes could bring dramatic change to education in remote places," in addition to his recent trip to Rwanda. 

"Two of my greatest passions in life are travel and being a librarian," writes Kammerlocher, who works at the intersection of student success and e-learning. Here, she describes her "Top 10 Magic Moments" from her time teaching information literacy skills to students in Rwanda.

Read Stanton's blog post in its entirety.

Read Kammerlocher's blog post in its entirety.

As materials move out of Hayden Library, in preparation for the library’s renovation, the Labriola Center will be moving to a new, temporary location during Hayden’s remodel, to be complete in 2020.

Beginning January 8, the Labriola Center will welcome students, faculty, staff, researchers and the public to its new location in room 305 of Fletcher Library on ASU’s West campus.

Open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Labriola will continue to provide its same high level of service to the ASU community and beyond – offering access to its unique collections, specialized reference assistance, library skills instruction for classes and co-sponsorship of various public events.

While we understand the inconvenience this may cause, we are excited about the future of ASU Library and Labriola’s place in it.

ASU Library has entered a lively phase of its reinvention, with many books, collections and materials in transit as Hayden Library prepares to undergo a major renovation, slated for 2018-2020.

While all libraries will be impacted, students, faculty and staff can expect to see the most disruptions at Hayden Library and Noble Library on the Tempe campus.

Plans to redesign Hayden Library include adding multiple points of access, with greater indoor-outdoor connection; dedicating space for community gatherings; breaking the library up thematically to better facilitate navigation and research discovery; featuring and enhancing special collections; and building a smaller, highly curated academic print collection that draws from the library's 4.5 million volumes.

Questions about the Labriola move? Contact Joyce Martin at joyce.martin@asu.edu or 480-965-6490.