Featured: Universal Design Center

Ensuring that campus technologies are accessible to everyone is a shared California State University responsibility. To assist CSUN in that charge, we are fortunate to have in residence the diligent and highly skilled team working in the Universal Design Center (UDC).  Housed in an unassuming nook on the Oviatt Library’s Garden Level, the staff of the Universal Design Center (UDC) works to ensure that the campus web environment is usable and accessible to everyone.  The key underlying principle of universal design is that all individuals, regardless of disability, should have access to information.

What's Up: The Transforming Library

Completion of the hugely popular new Learning Commons was an extraordinary achievement, but that was only the first successful step in a multiphase project that will continue the Library’s extensive, 21^st century transformation.

One year ago, in the summer of 2013, the Oviatt clearly outlined an ambitious new vision for the Library’s future. The introduction of this comprehensive Vision-Strategy Statement opens with the following: “Society at large and higher education in particular are in the midst of revolutionary changes in information flow and approaches to learning. In response, the Oviatt Library has embarked on a number of initiatives that will transform the face of our facility and our services.” 

Oviatt Spotlight: Student Employees 2014

We have long suspected that the Oviatt’s dynamic mix of student employees represent the very best and brightest that CSUN has to offer and – as it just so happens – our students agree.

The Oviatt employs approximately 150 CSUN students at any given time.  This large and essential component of the Library’s workforce consists of a remarkable cross-section of the university’s highly diverse student population. Library student employees come from across the street and from around the world.

Thanks & Recognition: Vern Bullough

It was a lucky day for our library when Vern Bullough, a young history professor from Utah, joined the faculty of what was then San Fernando Valley State College in 1959. Vern Bullough and his wife Bonnie met in high school in Salt Lake City, Utah, and were married barely out of their teens. The Bulloughs were together for nearly 50 years and had four children.

We Would Like You to Meet: Tony Ivankovic

According to Library Dean Mark Stover, the Oviatt Library has partnered with the National Center on Deafness (NCOD) to catalog items in the NCOD Library and make them available for search through the Library’s online catalog for the past several years. “Last year, the NCOD Director, Roz Rosen, approached me about increasing our partnership with NCOD by creating a new Library position that would better serve CSUN students who use the many vital resources in the NCOD Library,” Stover says.

Message from the Dean: Stewarding Beauty and Strength

Maya Angelou, the great American poet and civil rights activist who passed away earlier this year, said that parents should teach “young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.” 

In this issue of the Oviatt Library eNews you will see that there is indeed beauty and strength among the individuals, young and old, who serve CSUN students through the resources, services, and facilities of the Oviatt Library.