The Student Lab Coat Checkout Program was honored last weekend in Austin, Texas at the annual conference of the Campus Safety, Health and Environmental Management Association (CSHEMA). The program received three CSHEMA Innovation Awards.

Launched last spring, the lab coat program is a collaboration among SHS, the University Library and the chemistry and biochemistry department. Currently enrolled CSUSM students can borrow coats from the library for free for up to 16 weeks, with the items available on a first-come, first-served basis. The program served 241 students last semester.

Marissa Acosta, Vanessa Rivera and Victor Franco Bolanos from SHS worked with three employees in the library’s User Services department – Alysa Hernandez, Kelly Ann Sam and Leslie Hovland – to make the partnership a success.

Acosta said the program was created to address a barrier to equitable laboratory safety: access to proper personal protective equipment (PPE), specifically lab coats.

“Before the program, some students faced financial challenges when purchasing a lab coat,” said Acosta, who received the awards in person on June 19. “This inequity directly affected student readiness for laboratory participation and created preventable obstacles to maintaining a consistent and accessible culture of safety.”

Based in Wisconsin, CSHEMA is the pre-eminent leadership organization representing the environmental health and safety (EHS) profession in campus environments.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist
bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Bonnie Biggs was a longtime Cal State San Marcos librarian – so long that her tenure predates the university’s official founding by three years – who knew that her second act would revolve around canines. The colorfully named Koshare Squash Blossom Beignet Biggs – Koshi, for short – was a Catahoula leopard hound from Louisiana who had survived Hurricane Katrina and been rescued from a high-kill shelter in Fresno.

When their paths crossed at a local animal shelter two decades ago, Biggs knew she had found her next four-legged friend. What she couldn’t have anticipated was that the magic that happened between the two of them would ultimately spawn a magical event that has transformed the CSUSM community for the better.

Koshi has passed, but her legacy will be evident at CSUSM on May 7. On that Thursday, Biggs, her husband, Gunnar, and two of their current dogs – 12-year-old Zuni, who was Koshi’s little sister, and 3-year-old Molly – will be on campus along with 18 other teams of owners and dogs. They will be stationed outside the third-floor entrance to Kellogg Library to mark the 15th anniversary of Pause for Paws, the beloved, twice-annual event at which therapy dogs help soothe the jangled nerves of CSUSM students during the week before final exams.

To say that Biggs, fellow volunteers, their dogs and the campus community – not only students, but canine-crazy faculty and staff and even President Ellen Neufeldt – look forward to Pause for Paws would be an extreme understatement.

“There are hundreds of volunteers who I’ve worked with over the years, and this is everybody’s favorite visit,” Biggs said. “The students come swarming up the dogs and drop to their knees, hug them, love them. Even these big athletes go goo-goo. Everything changes when they’re around dogs.”

During the three-hour event (which runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.), hundreds of students will get their fur fix as they enter or exit the library. They will love on not only Zuni and Molly, but a menagerie of mutts – among them Lucy, a maltipoo whose owner, Liz, has been with Biggs from the beginning; Daisy, a terrier/dachshund mix; Katie, a cavalier King Charles spaniel; Dude, a standard poodle; Biscuit, a chocolate Labrador; Myles, a golden retriever; Bear, a mixed mutt; Sammy, a corgi; and Camper, a silken windhound.

Students can write and post messages on pieces of paper cut into the shape of chew bones, and in past years the sentiments have included things like:

• “Thank you for bringing the dogs. I really needed them.”
• “So grateful to you and our fur friends!”
• “This is amazing. This is the best day ever.”
• “All the beautiful pups brought me so much joy today.”
• “Thanks for making our lives not so ruff! XOXO”

With finals staring them in the face, students might derive the most benefit from the dogs, but plenty of employees mark their calendars as well. Regina Eisenbach, who retired as dean of academic advising and academic programs last year and is now serving as a faculty fellow, owns two dachshunds and jokingly calls herself a “crazy dog lady.” Pause for Paws is perennially her favorite day of the semester.

“Seeing so many different kinds of dogs is amazing to me,” Eisenbach said. “How can a corgi and a Great Dane be the same species? And how did they all descend from wolves? Truly incredible creatures.

“At Pause for Paws, I get to pet them all, release all the stress in my day and just get doggie kisses. Nothing better than that. Also, seeing how happy the students are to see the dogs warms my heart – I firmly believe it helps them study for finals.”

Biggs is a lifelong dog lover, but it wasn’t until her retirement years that she had time to make this present work her passion project. Her career had been a foundational one in CSUSM history. She began working at the university in 1986, when it was still a North County extension campus of San Diego State, housed in a Jerome’s furniture store.

As a librarian, Biggs was a member of the founding faculty when CSUSM was instituted in 1989, and she doubled as the assistant to longtime library dean Marion Reid. Early in her tenure, a professor who was Lakota Sioux asked her to reach out to tribal libraries that recently had lost funding from San Diego County. One of the unexpected outcomes of what became a long and fruitful partnership with local American Indian tribes is that, when students (seeking a school mascot) came to Biggs wondering about the Luiseno word for mountain lion, she consulted the tribe’s language keeper and came back with “Tukwut.” The name stuck.

Biggs planned to retire in 2003, but then-President Karen Haynes convinced her to stay on by creating the job of tribal liaison – the first such position at the college level in California. In her role, Biggs established another state first in the Native Advisory Council, a body that counsels the president on university relations with American Indian communities and fosters collaboration with area tribes.

“After we developed them, almost everyone in the state, all the way up to Berkeley, wanted to have some kind of tribal liaison, some kind of native council,” Biggs said. “So that’s something I’m proud of, and CSUSM should be, too.”

Retirement held for Biggs in 2007, and one of the first things she did was sign up for obedience training with her new dog, Koshi. Told by the trainer that Koshi would make a good therapy dog, Biggs admitted that she didn’t know what that was.  

She learned that therapy dogs are different from service dogs and emotional support animals. They are specifically trained to tolerate a wide range of environments and to provide companionship and comfort to many people.

Biggs was introduced to Love on a Leash, an organization founded in Oceanside in 1984 by Liz Palika, a dog obedience instructor who introduced the idea of pet-provided therapy to schools, hospitals and nursing homes. Love on a Leash has since expanded nationwide, with thousands of members across the country.

Biggs put Koshi through the Love on a Leash certification and began volunteering with her at hospitals, hospice facilities and – close to Biggs’ heart – libraries, where shy children gain confidence by reading books to eternally patient dogs. It seemed only natural to expand dog therapy to CSUSM, and that’s just what Biggs did in 2011.

“The idea of bringing all this love and support back here to such a special place for me was the best of both worlds,” she said.

Biggs and Koshi – joined by other volunteers and dogs – debuted at CSUSM in May 2011 for an event that they called the first University Stress Buster. By the second edition that fall, a volunteer had tagged it with the catchier name Pause for Paws.

“I knew I was on to something the minute I came here with Koshi, just based on the reaction,” Biggs said.

From the outset, CSUSM’s library has been a hand-in-hand partner with Pause for Paws – starting with Melanie Chu and continuing for the last nine years with Rosa Rodriguez, Chu’s successor as outreach coordinator. Rodriguez has broadened the scope of the event to include arts and crafts, creative activities and supply giveaways in collaboration with campus groups like Student Health & Counseling Services and the Cougar Care Network.

“I appreciate the joy it brings to students during finals,” Rodriguez said. “I love seeing the smiling faces around me as students, staff and faculty join the event to get some fur love.”

When Koshi was in her later years, Biggs and her husband – Gunnar is a bass musician who used to be an instructor at SDSU and Palomar College – adopted Zuni from Arkansas. A treeing Walker coonhound, Zuni also was certified through Love on a Leash and picked up the finer points of the therapy dog craft by observing her big sister. Molly, a “stubborn” beagle adopted from Calexico, in turn has learned from Zuni, who has been read to by children so often that a friend of Biggs awarded the dog an honorary Master of Library Science degree (the same one earned by her owner, of course).

The Biggses have a third dog, a chihuahua-beagle mix named Lupe, but she’s not people-friendly enough to be a therapy pet.

What do the dogs derive from their work?

“I think it’s that oxytocin exchange,” Biggs said. “It’s a comfort hormone, and they know they’re being loved. They know they make people happy. They feel useful.”

Pause for Paws has grown so popular that Biggs and her crew now make three other appearances on campus annually: the “What Gives Your Life Meaning?” campaign organized by the CSU Shiley Haynes Institute for Palliative Care each semester and Super STEM Saturday every March.

The event on May 7 outside the library, however, is what Biggs lives for – what she has lived for the last 15 years.

“I get the same good, warm feeling being on the other end of the leash,” she said. “I can’t imagine not doing this.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Now, as the grant period nears an end, that project – called Unifying APIDA Communities Together, or U-ACT – has partnered with the University Library to bring its work and its culture to the campus community.

The library’s Context Exhibit Series this semester is titled “Wayfinding Community-Campus Vā.” It’s a mixed-media collection that, according to the website description, “imagines how an ‘oceanic orientation’ promotes cultural education, sustains community relationships and engagements, and advances social justice. With a basis in the ancient foundation of Austronesian language families, Vā is ‘connecting space’ that link islands and ocean together as an interconnected worldview.”

The collection includes traditional wooden instruments, a double-hulled canoe, community-created murals, linguistic maps and a series of language and cultural workshop videos. It’s on display in the library’s third-floor exhibit space through July 31.

“Partnering (with the library) on community outreach was an easy decision on our end,” said Theresa Suarez, a sociology professor who’s the project director and principal investigator for U-ACT. “Our goal is to create greater alignment between campus resources and community engagement, especially through the Stop the Hate grant program, to support recruitment and outreach – that indeed public higher education opportunities are available for all.”

A reception celebrating the spring context exhibit will be held Thursday, March 5 from 5-7 p.m. on the library’s third floor and Kellogg Plaza. It will feature a performance by the CSUSM student organization Pāsefika Islander Scholar Association (PISA), live mural creation by a local artist, live music and multiple speakers.

Anyone is welcome to attend, with no RSVP needed. Attendees will be invited to provide feedback by contributing to a large paper lei, created with the guidance and support of The Makery in the library. 

In addition to Suarez, other members of the U-ACT team who curated the exhibit are Grant Muāgututi’a, co-investigator and assistant professor of liberal studies and linguistics; Madeline Lee, co-investigator and professor of social work; Sara Constantinescu, project coordinator and Academic Senate analyst; Lia Mauga, community liaison and director of TRIO pre-college programs; Joshua Galea'i, community liaison and senior adviser in the Office of Academic Advising; and Cheryl Landin, director of strategic initiatives in the Office of Inclusive Excellence.

Through U-ACT, CSUSM has partnering with various nonprofit organizations to help them offer free intervention and prevention services in communities and neighborhoods within the university’s service area. Two of the most prominent are ’Umeke, which is dedicated to the preservation, perpetuation and education of Hawaiian culture; and Save Our Streets (SOS), which focuses on reducing community violence by engaging all Oceanside youth through athletics and performing arts within a context of Samoan cultural values to promote healh, wellness, healing and safety.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

That man is an Escondido resident named Elmer Royce Williams, a retired U.S. Navy captain, and the full story of his military heroism is housed in the Cal State San Marcos library.

The special collections department of CSUSM’s library features a filmed oral history of Williams – and a host of other local military veterans – that was recorded last year by Jason Beyer, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and double CSUSM alumnus (bachelor's in business management, master's in social work).

Beyer leads a localized version of the national Veterans History Project, an initiative by which the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., collects, preserves and makes accessible the firsthand recollections of U.S. military veterans who served from World War I through more recent conflicts and peacekeeping missions, so future generations can hear directly from veterans and better understand what they saw, did and felt during their service. It was founded through unanimous vote in the House and Senate, and became law in 2000.

Beyer’s project involves the oral histories being archived both at the Library of Congress and CSUSM’s special collections department. Last March, snippets from the interviews with Williams and five other local veterans were shown at an event on campus titled “Veterans History Project: An Unveiling of the Journey.”

The second edition of the event will take place on April 8, spotlighting the stories of seven other veterans.

Williams received the Medal of Honor during the State of the Union in the U.S. Capitol building on Tuesday night. He’s one of only 63 living recipients of the highest military decoration in the U.S. armed forces and the only one from the Korean War era.

On Nov. 18, 1952, during the Korean War, then-Lieutenant Williams and three fellow Navy pilots encountered seven Soviet MiG-15 fighter jets while defending U.S. naval forces off the coast of North Korea. In a fierce 35-minute aerial engagement, Williams shot down four enemy aircraft. After his own aircraft was struck by enemy fire and severely damaged, Williams continued maneuvering to shield the ships below before successfully landing his crippled jet aboard the USS Oriskany.

For more than five decades, the full scope of Williams' heroism remained classified due to sensitive geopolitical implications. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, declassified records confirmed the details of the engagement. Williams was initially awarded the Silver Star, which was upgraded to the Navy Cross in 2023. His eligibility and consideration for the Medal of Honor came this year when legislative action in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 removed prior time limitations.

To advance his work visiting and recording interviews with veterans like Williams, Beyer has founded a nonprofit called Veteran Lore. The president is Marilyn Huerta, a CSUSM communications professional, double alumna and military-affiliated advocate. Beyer and Huerta have applied for grants that would allow them to travel outside the region to gather oral histories from other veterans. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Last year, Ellis was a student in AMD 409: Advanced Graphic Design and Visual Arts, an upper-division class taught by Ghazal Foroutan. The assignment: Using only typography, create a promotional poster for a hypothetical California architecture conference being hosted by CSUSM.

The twist: Some of the posters that resulted would be displayed as part of a new student art gallery in Kellogg Library. Ellis made a poster about acclaimed Israeli-Canadian-American architect Moshe Safdie, and hers was one of 19 selected for the exhibit.

“I was thrilled and honored to have my work chosen to be displayed in the library and kept in the archive,” said Ellis, an art, media and design major who’s scheduled to graduate this spring. “It gave a greater sense of purpose to the project.”

The 19 posters compose the first installment of the Cougar Gallery, which is located on the library’s second floor, occupying the wall space between the Makery’s entrance and the stairwell down the hall. Foroutan said the idea came from a conversation with fellow art, media and design professor Kristin Moss, and it was brought to fruition through a collaboration with multiple employees of the library: associate dean Char Booth, outreach librarian Irma Ramos Arreaga, arts and humanities librarian Torie Quiñonez, and administrative coordinator Arely Ayala.

The initial exhibit has adorned the library’s walls since the start of the fall semester.

“Seeing the students’ work displayed in a prominent campus space has been incredibly meaningful,” Foroutan said. “As a professor, I am proud to share their work with the broader campus community and to see it recognized by the department and the library.

“For students, the exhibition validates their efforts beyond the classroom. Many have already photographed their posters and plan to list the show as a group exhibition on their CVs, as well as include the work in their portfolios.”

The Cougar Gallery, Booth said, fulfills a longstanding desire to increase the presence and visibility of student art in the library. As a prominent display of creative student work, it joins the Data Stacks on the library’s fourth floor.

"By establishing this new gallery, we are showcasing the creative talents of CSUSM student artists and designers and dedicating a highly visible area of the library to School of Arts students and faculty as a much-needed supplementary gallery space,” Booth said.

Once she was assigned Safdie as her subject (other famous architects featured include Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry), Ellis set out to make a poster that would promote a hypothetical discussion with the architect at the conference while also channeling the style and philosophy of that architect. In researching Safdie’s life and work, Ellis was drawn to his design theory, “For Everyone a Garden.”

“He envisions architecture as a living, evolving environment, integrating gardens and green space into almost all of his designs,” she said. “That phrase became my guiding concept and tagline for the poster, inspiring my color palette and imagery.”

Ellis incorporated both physical art and digital design in the creation of her poster. She also designed an accompanying booklet in the same style as the poster to round out the promotional material.

“Over the weeks of working on the project, we all watched each other's concepts evolve in the studio, so seeing them printed professionally and displayed in a space where so many students pass through was very meaningful,” said Ellis, who plans to apply for the CSUSM teaching credential program, with a goal of becoming an art educator.

Foroutan hopes to work with the library to rotate the exhibition at least once a year to showcase as many as much student artwork as possible.

“While the overall framework of the project will remain consistent, I plan to subtly revise the assignment each year to introduce new constraints, tones or conceptual directions, allowing the exhibition to evolve over time,” she said.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Long before he was an assistant professor of history at Cal State San Marcos, Amador was a doctoral student at New York’s Stony Brook University who was doing field work for his dissertation in Mexico. Hoping to comb through the historical archive of the people of Temacapulin, a small town northeast of Guadalajara, he was surprised to learn that they didn’t have one. What they had was thousands of documents piled haphazardly into boxes, all too vulnerable to environmental damage in the event of, say, a flood.

Helping to organize the town’s historical record wasn’t part of Amador’s dissertation, but his conscience wouldn’t allow him to return to New York with the papers in such disarray. So he gave himself a crash course in archival studies – which traditionally is more the domain of librarians – and, with the aid of some volunteers from the community, he led an effort in 2022 to whip the archive into shape.

During the three months that Amador was in Temacapulin, word of his project spread to neighboring towns. It just so happened that the Indigenous community of San Juan de la Laguna (La Laguna for short) was in the midst of an effort to organize its own historical documents. The people behind it invited Amador to town, and he discovered that this project involved almost twice as many documents (nearly 20,000), stretching back more than a century earlier, to the late 1600s.

“When I saw that this project was a different beast compared to the first one,” Amador said, “I knew we needed more resources and more help.”

After a hiatus of a few years – during which he finished his dissertation, earned his Ph.D. from Stony Brook and was hired by CSUSM – Amador finally found himself in position to revisit the La Laguna archive. Last spring, he received a $15,000 grant from the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library, the largest library in the world and the home of such storied pieces as the original Magna Carta.

Over the summer, Amador spent two weeks in La Laguna, and the funding not only paid for his trip, but allowed him to purchase laptops and hire and train five members of the community as full-time workers on the 10-week project.

“I never imagined I’d end up in this field, but it truly offers incredible opportunities,” he said. “I get to meet new people and develop skills in an area where, surprisingly, historians often know nothing about – archives. You’d think that’s odd, like chemists not learning about the equipment in their own labs. Now that I’m doing this work, I realize just how striking that gap is between what historians do and the archival side of their profession.”

Amador streamlined and accelerated a process that had progressed in fits and starts since his initial visit to La Laguna three years earlier. In helping gather the materials, he found that many of them were stored in unfavorable conditions, such as sacks, cardboard boxes and bound together with string. Many also were marked with water stains.

As the group surveyed and created an inventory of the documents, they encountered samples both mundane (countless tax receipts) and captivating. One example was a paper record of a legal battle in the early 20^th century between a town resident and an immigrant from Lebanon.

“How did a man from Lebanon end up in this little town?” Amador said. “That whole story sounds fascinating. Discovering history through these documents is, in a way, truly thrilling.”

Beyond just the work itself, the biggest challenge that Amador faced was gaining the trust of an Indigenous community that traditionally has had a fraught relationship with the local government and the outside world at large.

“With me coming from the United States, people wondered, ‘What are his priorities? Why is he here helping us? What’s in it for him?’ ” he said. “It really came down to open communication – reassuring them that I’m doing this because I love the work and involving them in the process as much as possible.”

As the grant-funded initiative wraps up this fall, Amador is considering a return to La Laguna in January to review the finished product in person. And as the domino effect continues, the second project might lead to a third one.

Another nearby Indigenous community heard about the work Amador led in La Laguna and requested his support for its archival project, which features more digitized material instead of old, yellowing papers. For that one, which remains in the preliminary stages, he is coordinating with classically trained archivists, namely Sean Visintainer and Jennifer Ho of the CSUSM University Library. He’s also talking with Visintainer and Ho about the possibility of introducing and teaching a history course in archival studies.

“I really did stumble into this type of work. I still am even hesitant to call myself an archivist,” Amador said. “I'm learning so much, and there's still so much for me to learn. But it does seem like this is where my career is headed – bringing archival studies and history together in some way.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

The Special Collections department of the CSUSM University Library recently received the archive of Joel Rafael, a singer-songwriter from San Diego County who has been making music with the Joel Rafael Band and as a solo artist for over 50 years. 

Rafael began performing in showcases and small clubs around Southern California in the early 1970s. He opened shows throughout the southwestern United States for artists including Crosby, Stills and Nash, Sheryl Crow, Laura Nyro, Taj Mahal, Iris DeMent, Emmylou Harris and John Lee Hooker.

The legendary Jackson Browne wrote of Rafael: “Joel Rafael’s songs are filled with passion and compassion; passion for social justice and compassion for those among us who have to struggle for a place at the table of American prosperity.  His voice is unmistakably his own – big, warm and strong – and a conductor for the human emotions that connect us all.”

No influence is more obvious in Rafael’s work than that of Guthrie. Rafael has been a featured performer at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Oklahoma for all but one of its 28 years, and he has five “co-writes” with Guthrie using lyrics given to him by Guthrie’s daughter, Nora.

Rafael and his wife, Lauren (a CSUSM alumna), were referred to Special Collections to discuss the disposition of his archive last spring by CSUSM music professor Merryl Goldberg. After an assessment of the collection, Rafael made the commitment to donate his archive to the CSUSM Library; about one-third of the physical materials have been moved to the library to date.

“For a few years now, I’ve thought about and wondered what will become of my life’s work spanning 60 years," Rafael said. "I am honored to have found a permanent home for my archives in the Kellogg Library Special Collections at Cal State San Marcos. North San Diego County has been my home for more than half a century. I have watched the evolution of the campus since its founding in 1989. I am heartened that the CSUSM core values of inclusion, culture and stewardship align with my own. Knowing that my work will be protected and available to the public gives me a feeling of peace, resolution and gratitude.”

The collection includes master recordings in various formats; documentation of all of Rafael’s (and collaborators’) performances and contracts; scrapbooks and news articles of his life and musical history; flyers, posters and photographs for/of performances and festivals; and fan interactions including letters, email messages and social media posts.

“I feel fortunate to know Joel and Lauren and to have the opportunity to steward Joel’s collection," said Jen Fabbi, a Special Collections librarian who has been working with the Rafaels to acquire the collection. “Joel has dedicated his life to social justice and activism through music, and that commitment, along with his talent and persistence, shines throughout this collection. I am excited for students and scholars to have access to it.”

Special Collections recently recorded the first part of an oral history interview with Rafael, in which he discusses his early musical influences, his participation in the 1960s counterculture movement and the beginnings of his success in the music industry.

A treasure trove of information about Rafael and his music can be found at https://joelrafael.com.

For more info, contact Fabbi at jfabbi@csusm.edu.

The University Archives and Special Collections staff work closely with donors to identify materials of research interest to be preserved. Although not all papers and records fall within the collecting scope of the unit, please send us an email to discuss a potential donation at archives@csusm.edu. In addition, you can support the mission of Special Collections to preserve North County history by making a donation.

She encouraged them to tinker, build, explore and let curiosity lead the way.

It might have looked like fun and games from the outside, but for Fuller, the experience was a deliberate lesson in rediscovering something that many adults forget.

“In our adult lives, we lose touch with play,” Fuller said. “But rediscovering it isn’t just about having fun – it’s a way to connect, build trust and spark creativity.”

For Fuller’s human development students – most of whom are preparing for careers as counselors, educators or community advocates – the exercise carried a deeper meaning. Play, she explained, is a bridge to empathy and understanding, essential tools for working with people who are coping with stress, trauma or isolation.

“Play builds trust, opens pathways for expression and helps people feel safe,” Fuller said. “It reminds us that learning and healing don’t always have to be serious. Sometimes they can be spontaneous.”

Among those who found the experience unexpectedly refreshing was Daniel Lopez, a human development major and student ambassador for the College of Education, Health and Human Services.

“Sometimes we get so focused on grades and deadlines that we forget how to just explore and enjoy the process,” Lopez said. “This experience reminded me that play isn’t just for kids – it’s a mindset that helps us stay creative, connect with others and bring joy into the work we’ll be doing in our future careers.”

Fuller’s playful experiment also reflects the broader mission of CEHHS, which emphasizes holistic, human-centered approaches to learning and practice.

In the end, the lesson was simple but profound: There’s room and real need for play in the serious work of helping others.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist
bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Located on the second floor of Kellogg Library, The Makery is a place for students to exercise creative freedom and explore new skills using a variety of tools and materials. In partnership with the HOPE & Wellness Center at SHCS, The Makery will be hosting art and mental health workshops to enhance students’ mental well-being and connect them to mental health resources.

During the most recent workshop, students created their own “monster” symbolizing their individual mental health experiences and struggles. Once the crafting was done, the students could share what they felt comfortable with about their monsters. The workshop was led by Anahi Martinez Mendez, a Master of Social Work graduate assistant, and Madison Di Palermo, a peer lead health educator.

The workshops give students the opportunity to process and express emotions and experiences that are often hard to put into words by using art. They also help students find community with one another and receive help whenever they need it.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim assistant director of editorial and external affairs
ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

April Ibarra Siqueiros, the curator of the exhibit and a user experience librarian at Cal State San Marcos, does indeed dream of zines – short for “magazine,” the term refers to handmade publications in booklet form about any topic, presented as an alternative to mainstream media.

Siqueiros dreams about the zines she wants to make. She dreams about the zines she wants to add to her growing collection. And she dreams about the zine community that she wants to cultivate at CSUSM.

Her current exhibit in the library – part of the biannual Context Exhibit Series, it’s on display in person or online through Dec. 15 – is a big step in that direction. Subtitled “publishing in your hands,” the exhibit is essentially a love letter to zine culture told through Siqueiros’ creative eye and curious mind.

It features about 60 zines from her personal collection – covering such topics as borders, immigration, art, gender and sexuality – and a dozen more that she has made, either by herself or with a group. It also includes information about the process of zine-making, the history of zines and the local zine community.

“Zines can be a way for marginalized and oppressed voices to use a format to share their stories, make calls to action, teach something and build community,” Siqueiros said. “They can also be random, silly and made to bring joy. It's a format that is open to all, regardless of skill level.

“Sometimes I hear someone say they aren't an artist or ‘creative’ when it comes to zine making, but in my experience teaching zine workshops, that doesn't matter. If someone intentionally explores zine making, it is likely a cool zine will come out of it.”

Growing up in the South Bay, Siqueiros says she was always a crafty child. She remembers first hearing about zines from a Nickelodeon cartoon in the early 2000s, and she bought her first one in 2008 – a Mexican cookzine called “Vegan de Guadalupe” (a play on veganism and the Virgin Mary), it’s included in the exhibit.

Siqueiros crossed over from simply collecting zines to making them about a decade ago when she was pursuing a master’s degree in library and information science at the Pratt Institute in New York. Inspired by attending the Brooklyn Zine Fest, she created her initial zine as part of an art collective with some friends. A year later, she displayed her first solo zine at the same festival.

“Having been an artist and crafter, I’ve always gravitated to making things,” she said. “Zines opened up another realm of creating for me, which stuck 10 years later.”

Most of zines Siqueiros has made fall under the general theme she conjured up called “Valley of Paradox.” Of those, she’s proudest of one named “Celestial Hearts: deep connections with deep space,” which is about her love of astronomy. It represented a leap forward for her in ambition, creativity and research, and about half of it is contributed content from fellow zinesters who responded to a call for submission. She’s working on a second and third part of the series, which will focus alternately on her personal astronomical adventures and stories, and research about astronomers and space explorers.

Siqueiros has worked for the CSUSM library since 2019, and during that time she gradually has become exposed to an interest in zines by the campus community – whether it’s professors incorporating zines into their assignments or colleagues who make them or are just intrigued by them. She began thinking about curating the exhibit two years ago, and her desire to pursue it was reinforced as she taught zine workshops for a few instructors, including Dominque Harrison, who works for the Office of Institutional Planning & Analysis but also teaches a seminar for first-year students. Three zines created during Harrison’s class last summer are on display in the exhibit.

“While zines are not mainstream, it just takes a zine point person to open up this format to someone’s world,” Siqueiros said.

She would like to be that person for any number of students who stroll by her exhibit this semester. But she doesn’t want “Zine Dreams” to be only a passive experience. The goal is to unlock others’ zine-making potential. On Oct. 9 from 1-2 p.m., Siqueiros will collaborate with the Common Read program on a workshop in The Makery where students can create a page in a collective zine that highlights their identities and stories.

“It might take someone years later to make one like it did for me,” she said. “Minimally, my hope is that anyone who sees the exhibit reflects on the power of DIY publishing and how zines provide a way for us to learn about things that we may never be exposed to otherwise.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

It was just part of her normal daily life.

“I was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis before I was even born,” Ferguson said.

Also known as CF, cystic fibrosis is a genetic disorder that affects the body's mucus-producing glands, causing damage to the lungs, digestive system and other organs.

Ferguson still takes medication and has treatments, but medical advances allow her to live a relatively normal life as a college student in her second year at Cal State San Marcos.

In fact, Ferguson is doing so well that she is among the candidates for the AbbVie CF Scholarship, which honors students who are thriving with cystic fibrosis. Public voting accounts for about 30% of the evaluation. Supporters can vote for Ferguson online or by texting "VOTE23" to 35309 through Sept. 18. Winners will be announced Oct. 23. Other evaluation factors are based on academic record and extracurricular activities, an essay and a creative presentation.

Ferguson received a $3,000 AbbVie scholarship last year and is hoping this year to win the top award, a $22,000 “Thriving Student Scholarship.”

“AbbVie is a pharmaceutical company, and I have taken their meds in the past, so it was just sort of a household name for me,” Ferguson said. “To have a scholarship like that and be involved with a company like that is really nice.”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the predicted survival age for people with cystic fibrosis was about 28 years old. Ferguson represents a new generation of young adults with CF who, thanks to medical advances, are living significantly longer. Life expectancy has improved to about 68, according to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Ferguson has seen the improvements firsthand. The more than four dozen daily pills she took as a child is down to 20. She said CF primarily affects her lungs and digestive system, and she also has a mild case of diabetes related to it. In addition to the medication, she does an hour of daily treatment and closely watches her diet.

“I don’t even drink caffeine,” she said. “I can’t miss out on my health because it’ll plummet really fast.”

Ferguson has found a supportive environment at CSUSM. Disability Student Services ensured that she received a single room in campus housing, which was vital because of the daily treatment she requires. A literature and writing studies major, Ferguson was thrilled to land an on-campus job in Kellogg Library during her first year and she also started writing this fall for CSUSM’s student newspaper, “The Cougar Chronicle.”

“I’ve learned to manage things and understand what I can and can’t do,” Ferguson said. “And I haven’t really had a problem in a long time because of all my treatments and medications.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The theme for 2025-26, “Stories as Mirrors, Windows & Sliding Doors,” uses fiction and nonfiction books to provide insight into different lived experiences and encourages compassion and understanding. Students can pick up a free copy of a Common Read book from noon to 1 p.m. on the following dates: Sept. 18, Oct. 16, Nov. 13 and Dec. 4, in front of Kellogg Library.

“We loved the banned books theme and we heard from a lot of students that they loved it, too. But after three years, we wanted to move on to a broader theme that reflected the current climate,” Carr said. “Given what we’ve seen in the news lately about a decline in reading, along with what we know about how reading encourages empathy and compassion, it was important that students gain a deeper understanding of people from all backgrounds.”

Carr explained that Common Read considers the diversity of authors and genres as well as the interests of topics to undergraduate students when selecting the books.

“While I’m excited about all of our books, this is the first year we’ve offered a collection of poems, ‘Song I Sing’ by Bao Phi. His poems, which are about immigration, race and class, feel a lot more accessible because of his slam poetry background,” Carr said.

The library’s Student Advisory Board selected “Cemetery Boys” by Aiden Thomas as one of the books to be included. The story features a trans boy proving himself to his Latinx family, while also featuring elements of a love story and a paranormal investigation.

The complete list of books selected for this year’s campaign is:

• “Bird Songs Don't Lie,” Gordon Lee Johnson
• “Daytripper,” Fabio Moon
• “The Remember Balloons,” Jessie Oliveros
• “Song I Sing,” Bao Phi
• “The Cemetery Boys,” Aiden Thomas (students' choice)
• “The View From Down Here: Life as a Young Disabled Woman,” Lucy Webster

“Stories can break stereotypes, increase awareness of systemic issues and encourage respectful interactions with people from different backgrounds,” Carr said. “At a time when empathy and compassion are seen as weaknesses, reading can help us build and sustain a community that's inclusive and addresses the inequities marginalized communities currently face.”

Common Read is also offering a zine-making workshop in collaboration with the Context Exhibit Series, “Zine Dreams” from 1-2 p.m. on Oct. 9 at The Makery. At the event, students can create a page in a collective zine that highlights their identities and stories. An RSVP is required.

“My hope for this year is that students gain a deeper understanding of people who are different from them, but also a great understanding of themselves,” Carr said.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Cinthya Ippoliti started in her position on July 1. Her hire was announced by CSUSM late last year.

"I'm thrilled to join inspiring colleagues within the University Library and CSUSM and contribute to the incredible work already underway to support students, strengthen community and encourage creativity as we continue to build a promising future together,” Ippoliti said.

Ippoliti has been a librarian for more than 24 years and has held roles at various academic institutions. Most recently, she served as director of the Auraria Library, where she provided administrative leadership for library services, spaces, partnerships and programming on the tri-institutional Auraria Campus, which includes the University of Colorado, Denver; Metropolitan State University of Denver; and Community College of Denver, serving approximately 35,000 highly diverse students in an urban setting.

Before joining the Auraria Library, she was the associate dean for Research and Learning Services at Oklahoma State University and head of Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland Libraries.

Ippoliti takes over for Char Booth, who was the library’s interim co-dean for administration and advancement, and Toni Olivas, who was interim co-dean for faculty and systems affairs.

"We are thrilled to welcome Dean Ippoliti to the University Library – she brings impressive experience to the table as well as aligned values and a strong focus on inclusion and equity,” Booth said. “Already in her first days, she has established herself as an excellent communicator and enthusiastic leader, and we look forward to working with Cinthya to continue to grow our support for students and the CSUSM campus community through robust and responsive library services, spaces and programming."

Ippoliti holds a Master of Library & Information Science degree from UCLA and bachelor’s in English from UC Santa Barbara.

The Cougars Affordable Learning Materials (CALM) program, managed by the University Library, has a solution. The CALM team works with faculty to adopt the use of low- and no-cost textbooks. This year alone, the CALM program saved students more than $4.6 million.   

The CALM team and CSUSM faculty across campus have reduced or eliminated the costs of textbooks for over 1,000 courses.  

To recognize participating faculty, the University Library hosted a CALM Faculty Awardees event on April 24. The 2024-25 CALM Faculty Awardees are Christopher Hardnack, George Brusch, Heather Cook, Kathy Fuller, Shannon Baker, Shannon Nolan-Arañez and Suzanna Krivulskaya. To see how much money each of these faculty helped students save, visit the CALM Faculty Awardees webpage.  

Fuller, a human development faculty member, is a CALM Hero. She CALMed five courses and saved students over $16,000 this academic year.  

Brusch CALMed five courses in the biology department, saving students almost $13,000. Asked what motivated him to use Open Educational Resources (OER) or low-cost textbooks, he said: "My major motivation for using an open-source textbook is because it is free. This alleviates the financial burden on students, making education more accessible and equitable.” 

CALM is part of the CSU Affordable Learning Solutions initiative started in 2010. The library’s CALM team – led by Kelly Ann Sam, interim head of user services and textbook affordability lead – aids faculty in replacing costly textbooks with lower-cost alternatives. This is accomplished by using high-quality OER, library materials, digital or customized textbooks, and/or faculty-authored materials.  

To address the high cost of textbooks, California Senate Bill 1359 aims to ensure that students have access to affordable course materials. It requires courses to be listed as zero cost in the schedule if students are not required to purchase any materials. Students actively can search for courses with the Zero Cost Course Material (ZCCM) logo when selecting classes. 

“It is essential that faculty confirm their ZCCM courses with the CALM team," Sam said. "By designating ZCCM courses in the class schedule before student registration, students are empowered to make informed decisions based on financial considerations. This allows them to save significantly on education costs each semester, potentially amounting to hundreds of dollars.”  

For more information, visit the CALM website or contact calm@csusm.edu.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Being a middle child among three sisters, Walker was often the person who would help and listen to her siblings, cousins and close friends when they needed someone to discuss their feelings or mental health challenges. Without even realizing it at the time, Walker was already heading down the path of psychological sciences.

Coming to Cal State San Marcos, Walker felt introverted and nervous to talk to others, but that did not stop her from pushing herself to step outside her comfort zone.

Walker has been inspiring her peers and helping create a safe space on campus through her work as a residential adviser; as a collections, delivery and access student assistant in Kellogg Library; and by educating and advocating for BIPOC mental health awareness at Student Health & Counseling Services as a HOPE peer health educator.

Walker’s efforts led her to be selected as the recipient of the 2025 Dean of Students Award for Outstanding Leadership.

“I was just watching true crime and crocheting when Dean of Students Jason Schreiber called and told me that I won the award,” Walker said. “I was shocked. After I talked to him during the candidacy process, I felt really good about our conversation. I was kind of thinking, ‘Wow, I just finished talking to the Dean of Students.’ ”

Walker first knew that she wanted to work in the psychological sciences at 13 after experiencing her best friend going through a challenging time. Walker was a constant advocate for her best friend by being there for meetings with social workers and comforting her when others were dismissing the friend’s mental health struggles.

Walker was able to separate herself from the situation and truly just be there for her best friend.

The experience opened Walker’s eyes to the need for mental health advocacy, specifically for BIPOC communities when she would hear people dismiss the mental health experiences faced by young individuals.

Walker reflected on the rhetoric used during her experience advocating for her best friend.

“People would say, ‘You're too young to be depressed. You don't have anything to be depressed about. You don’t have anything to be stressed about,’ ” Walker said. “There were a lot of things that were happening in her life and happening to her that people were dismissing, and that was taking a toll on her mental health as well. Just seeing how big of an effect it was having on her, I was shocked by the lack of support. It made me aware that people in communities of color do not care as much as they should.”

Walker is from Los Angeles and a first-generation college student, so coming to San Marcos was a big transition. But being so active on campus helped her thrive, leading her to believe that you always end up where you need to be.

After she graduates next month with her bachelor’s in psychological science and a minor in Spanish, Walker has big plans for the future. She plans to return to L.A. and work as a mental health counselor specializing in underserved communities and communities of color.

Her educational and career goals, however, do not end there. Walker intends to obtain her doctorate to work as a psychologist, along with continuing her advocacy and educational work for BIPOC communities, which is similar to her focus at CSUSM.

Walker’s hard work and dedication have not gone unnoticed.

“Miyah’s commitment to excellence in leadership, scholarship and service is clear, both as an RA and as a HOPE peer educator,” Stephanie Burga, a residential director, wrote in her nomination of Walker for the Dean of Students Award. “In all of her roles at CSUSM, she has challenged herself to think creatively and communicate effectively with a wide range of individuals. She has also played a significant role in developing programs and initiatives that advance the university’s mission, and each of the programs she’s hosted has contributed to enriching student life at CSUSM.”

There’s little doubt that Walker’s legacy at CSUSM will live on as she moves forward with her education and career goals of being a pillar for mental health awareness in BIPOC communities.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Downie, who curates the Brewchive through the University Library, was given the honor during the San Diego Beer News Awards on March 25 at Societe Brewing in Kearny Mesa. She was recognized for her tireless volunteerism on behalf of the San Diego Brewers Guild.

For almost a decade, Downie has served as the curator of the Brewchive, a comprehensive archive launched in 2017 that celebrates a county that’s widely regarded as the capital of craft beer. The collection is one of only a handful of special collections nationwide focused solely on beer.

It includes photos, videos, marketing materials, coasters, beer lists, menus, recipes, brewing logs, brewing manifestos, unique or rare trade periodicals, and interviews. Many of them come from the personal collection of Greg Koch, who founded Stone Brewing with Steve Wagner in San Marcos in 1996.

Downie, a special collections librarian, has worked for the University Library since the early 1990s, when she was still a student at CSUSM. She graduated from the school in 1994.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist
bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Before joining CSUSM, Ramos Arreaga worked at a public library in San Mateo, where she helped with children's services such as story times, arts and crafts, and community work.

“The reason that I came here was because the job was very similar,” Ramos Arreaga said. “With outreach, you're doing a lot of work in the community. In this case, the community is the campus, and so all the outreach that I was doing for children is experience that I use here, just in a different setting.

“There's typically not a lot of outreach librarians at university libraries. A lot of the time, outreach is embedded into other jobs. In recent years, outreach has become its own job to further connect with the student body. I like outreach because I like talking to people, I like connecting to people, and I get that more in my position than in a different academic library position. I like that CSUSM is a Hispanic-Serving Institution and that I would be able to help my community.”

Ramos Arreaga’s position has two different parts. On the outreach side, she's like the library's personal cheerleader, helping plan events, scoping out new services while promoting the current ones and overall connecting people to the library. 

On the inclusion side, Ramos Arreaga helps develop new programs through the library, and she works hard to make sure each program is meaningful and inspiring for those who participate. 

“The focus is really bringing new perspectives, new identities and new discourse for the campus to be a part of," she said. “We're being inclusive of the different populations on campus through our programming. As we are planning for programs, we're thinking of what groups to highlight and what would be representative and impactful for our campus.” 

The day-to-day schedule looks very different for Ramos Arreaga depending on the time of year. Many of her days are spent planning or hosting events in the library. Her busiest time of year is before each semester when the library prepares each art exhibit for the campus population. 

The Context Exhibit Series this semester features the work of Isidro Pérez García, whose exhibit is titled “Migratory Land Knowledges.” 

“Isidro Pérez García was inspired by his life,” Ramos Arreaga said. “He lived in the States undocumented for 20 years. A lot of the experiences that he had working under-the-table jobs influenced the exhibit, and then his background from Mexico, being from the countryside, working on farmland, that knowledge is also embedded into the artwork. Everything in the exhibit was made by him. The frames in the exhibit include handmade paper. The ink is made from cochineal (cochinilla), which lives on cacti. He harvested this parasitic insect and made ink out of it, which is an ancestral practice. He made all the anatomical hearts that are on the spiral table. He made the spiral table with the help of his brother, using scraps from an old furniture company that he worked at. Every decision that he made for every piece has a purpose. It's very meaningful.”

Long before an exhibit is set up at Kellogg Library, an artist must be located. Finding the artist takes a combination of going out to see community exhibits and sourcing through connections. After a potential artist is found, Ramos Arreaga meets with them and thoroughly views their collection, making sure they are a fit for the campus. 

Ramos Arreaga’s connection with the artists continues after the exhibit is completed. Eager to get the community involved, Ramos Arreaga invites the artist on campus for a workshop. For the library exhibit last fall, artist Salvador de la Torre came to campus and led students in a printing workshop. 

The workshop this semester will take place March 27 from noon-1:30 p.m. Pérez García will be bringing handmade paper and teaching attendees to harvest and create ink with the insects he uses to create his ink. Students will learn to balance the pH level to the ink and change the colors. Students will be able to use the paper to create their own designs and paint.

All the work Ramos Arreaga does on campus is in collaboration with the outreach team, including Rosa Rodriguez, James Guerrero and Victoria Holley.  

In addition to the exhibit workshops, Ramos Arreaga helps Allison Carr, the academic transitions librarian, run CSUSM’s Common Read program. Multiple times during the academic year, the library organizes programs relating to Common Read. Once again this year, the selection focuses on banned books. The library gives out free banned books at several of these events.  

“Who doesn't like giving out free books?” Ramos Arreaga said. “But people are usually really excited, and we interact with a lot of people in a short amount of time. So it's nice to see the campus and give out books.”

That is ultimately what Ramos Arrega hopes to accomplish in her role: see the lively campus and spread the love of books to the community. 

Upcoming Events

Common Read Banned Book Giveaway: March 4, noon-12:50 p.m., Kellogg Library

Meet the Artist: Isidro Pérez Garcia: March 18, 5-7 p.m., Kellogg Reading Room (fifth floor)

Exhibit Workshop: March 27, noon-1:30 p.m., The Makery (second floor)
 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

This marks the second year that Insight Into Diversity magazine has presented the LEAD Award, which honors academic libraries’ programs and initiatives that encourage and support DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) across their campus. These include, but are not limited to, research, technology, accessibility, exhibitions and community outreach.  

The CSUSM library was honored for the second year in a row and will be featured, along with 33 other recipients, in the March 2025 issue of Insight Into Diversity magazine. 

“The University Library is deeply honored to receive this recognition again because we believe that libraries are more than just places to access information – they are vital hubs where every member of our community feels seen, valued and empowered,” said Toni Olivas, the library’s interim co-dean for faculty and system affairs. “This acknowledgment reflects our ongoing efforts to celebrate diverse voices, foster inclusivity and create a welcoming space for everyone. Whether it’s through our multilingual collections, culturally rich programming or partnerships with community organizations, we are dedicated to breaking barriers and building connections.”

Insight Into Diversity magazine selected the CSUSM library because of its many diversity initiatives, including the infusion of DEI in its recently completed strategic plan; hiring a bilingual (Spanish and English) librarian to work with student families and the larger community; its support of underrepresented authors and researchers; art installations with DEI themes; and mandatory and valued DEI work in the librarian tenure process. 

“We know that many academic libraries are not always recognized for their dedication to diversity, inclusion and access” said Lenore Pearlstein, owner and publisher of Insight Into Diversity magazine. “We are proud to honor these college and university libraries as role models for other institutions of higher education.” 

A call for nominations for this award was announced in October. 

Insight Into Diversity also annually hands out the Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award, which recognizes U.S. colleges and universities that demonstrate an outstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion. CSUSM last fall received the HEED Award for the 11^th consecutive year.  

For more information about the 2025 LEAD Award, visit insightintodiversity.com. 

The event, titled “Veterans History Project: An Unveiling of the Journey,” will take place March 19 in the ballroom of the University Student Union on CSUSM’s campus. Directed by Jason Beyer (a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and CSUSM alumnus) and Marilyn Huerta (a CSUSM alumna and employee), the event will provide an intimate and poignant look into the personal experiences of veterans who served across multiple wars and branches of the U.S. military.

The Veterans History Project is a collaborative effort among CSUSM, the Library of Congress in Washington and the university’s Kellogg Library, with the veterans’ interviews being archived both at the Library of Congress and the CSUSM library’s special collections department. The project’s purpose is to ensure that the stories of U.S. veterans are preserved for future generations, honoring their sacrifices and contributions.

The March 19 program, which begins at 6 p.m., will feature powerful snippets from filmed interviews with six local veterans:

• Elmer Royce Williams, a 99-year-old who served in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War
• Dora Beachman, Marines (and CSUSM alumna)
• Michael Lacea, Navy (and CSUSM alumnus)
• Albert Toro, Army
• Thomas Galyean, Army
• James Forester, Air Force

The event also includes a keynote address by Amy Forsythe, a Marine veteran, Navy reservist and CSUSM alumna who will reflect on the importance of preserving veteran stories and the ongoing impact of military service on communities.

The formal program will be preceded at 5 p.m. by a veteran/military resource fair and reception, offering attendees an opportunity to learn more about veteran resources and services.

The Veterans History Project is the result of months of dedicated work by Beyer, who connected with and interviewed the veterans and also ensured that all interviews met the criteria for archiving with the Library of Congress. Huerta, who spearheaded the initiative on the CSUSM campus, helped bring the project to fruition and is leading the coordination of the March 19 event.

CSUSM student Adel Bautista also played a key role by filming the interviews, and history lecturer Shad Thielman will be helping to create video transcriptions for the project archives. The resulting footage will be shared with the Library of Congress and archived for future generations.

Additionally, Sean Visintainer and Jennifer Ho from the CSUSM library are responsible for archiving the filmed interviews, ensuring their preservation for future research and study. These interviews will be included in the Voices of North County collection, a digital archive hosted by the CSUSM Library.

“These veterans’ stories are not just part of history; they are part of our community's fabric,” Huerta said. “By archiving these oral histories, we are making sure future generations can connect with the courage, resilience and sacrifice of those who served our country.”

The event is open to the public. CSUSM students and the military-affiliated community can attend for free, while tickets cost $5 for CSUSM faculty, staff and alumni, and $10 for the general public.

The Veterans History Project is sponsored by multiple CSUSM organizations: Veterans Services; the College of Business Administration; the College of Education, Health and Human Services; the departments of history and social work; Student Health & Counseling Services; and Kappa Sigma Tau-Omicron.

“We are incredibly grateful for our partners and supporters,” Beyer said. “Together, we are ensuring that the voices of our veterans are not forgotten and that their legacies continue to inspire future generations.”

Event tickets can be reserved online. Anyone interested in participating in the resource fair can email Huerta at mhuerta@csusm.edu or Beyer at beyer005@csusm.edu.

Veterans History Project: An Unveiling of the Journey

Date: March 19

Time: 6 p.m. (resource fair and reception at 5)

Location: CSUSM’s University Student Union Ballroom

Tickets:

• CSUSM students: Free
• Military-affiliated community and resource fair guests: Free
• CSUSM faculty/staff/alumni: Free
• Community: $10

Someone must have forgotten to pass that memo to the dozens of people who were eagerly waiting for Kellogg Library to open its doors for the first time on the morning of Jan. 20, 2004. The five-story structure, the largest in the California State University system at that stage, had been anticipated at Cal State San Marcos almost since its founding 15 years earlier, and here it was – finally a reality, a testament to the bold vision and ambition of a young university.

Judith Downie, a former CSUSM student who by then was the first alumnus of the university to become tenure-track faculty (as a humanities librarian), was one of several library employees who were greeting visitors on that day.

“We unlocked the doors,” Downie recalled, “and it was like a tidal wave of students who came in to explore this new space just for them.”

The opening of Kellogg Library fundamentally shifted the focal point of the campus, which for more than a decade had been the area around University Commons and the Administrative Building (then Craven Hall). It also marked a significant departure from other university libraries and particularly those in the CSU system, many of which had been built in the early-to-mid 20^th century and thus felt like relics from bygone generations.

“We have the enormous benefit of having entered the modern era of university libraries with Kellogg,” said Char Booth, the library’s interim co-dean for administration and advancement. “That was a really important time. It was a time of reckoning with what academic libraries were going to become, a lot of talk about e-books – are libraries necessary, are they even important anymore? And what you see is that absolutely they are, and we built a building that embodies how important this resource can be to a learning community, a student community.”

At 200,000 square feet, Kellogg remains one of the biggest libraries in the 23-campus CSU system. But it’s no fortress. Unlike many of its peers, which can feel dark and forbidding, it’s veritably bathed in natural light and boasts impressive vistas of the surrounding landscape from its multiple balconies and patios. And unlike many of its peers, it largely eschews long, intimidating stacks of books in favor of open and dedicated spaces designed for student collaboration.

Across its five floors, Kellogg features 1,443 seats that can be used for studying. To facilitate the numerous collective projects at CSUSM, the library has 43 group study rooms with a combined capacity of 289 seats, and that doesn’t include the intimate Reading Room, a fifth-floor events venue that doubles as a study nook.

Kellogg has shown a capacity to evolve with the times. Two years ago, in response to student needs, library leadership undertook a construction job in which the original computer stations near the third-floor entrance were replaced by a new area called the Hybrid Learning Lab, a partnership with Instructional and Information Technology Services (IITS) that includes individual study pods, group study spaces, an upgraded computer lab, Zoom rooms and comfortable furniture.

“There are nap pods, there are fold-out chairs,” Booth said. “You can plug in, or you can use group seating for collaborating. … If you’re tired, we want you to be able to take a nap. If you’re hungry, we want you to be able to get a snack from the satellite food pantry (on the second floor) that we’ve worked with the Cougar Pantry to create.”

This spring marked the debut of The Makery, a makerspace that reimagined a second-floor area that formerly housed media services. That low-fi addition to the library – featuring sewing machines, a craft printer, a button maker and myriad other supplies for arts and crafts – joined an existing high-tech one in Inspiration Studios, with its video, photography and audio production services.

“These are good, recent reflections of how we really want students to make this library their own and find ways to express themselves and consider this building a home,” Booth said.

During the infancy of CSUSM, it was the library that was searching for a home, or at least one with some degree of permanence. Like the rest of the new institution, it originated as part of so-called Cal State Jerome’s, the university that was born next to a furniture store in a strip mall off Highway 78.

There were only two library employees in that founding year of 1989: interim director, and future dean, Marion Reid (whose husband, Brooks, was a founding faculty member) and the first person she hired, Cathie Dorsett. They worked in concert with Bonnie Biggs, then the librarian of San Diego State’s North County campus and an eventual associate dean of CSUSM’s library.

The library, such as it was, occupied two ends of a building – with public services, magazines and two CD-ROM stations on one side and the humble book collection and staff offices on the other. It was a different era, to be sure.

“My first day, I remember Marion said, ‘This is your cubicle, and there’s a computer,’ ” Dorsett said. “I had never touched a computer. I was terrified. And she said, ‘And there’s already some email for you.’ I was like, ‘What’s email?’ ”

By 1991, SDSU North County was gone and the CSUSM library had grown to 15 employees. One of them was Downie, who was hired as a student assistant on the first day of orientation.

“They put me in charge of delivering media equipment, like TVs and VCRs, on a cart,” Downie said. “We did what we had to do to provide students and faculty with what they needed.”

CSUSM shifted its operations from the strip mall location to the hillside campus gradually, as new edifices were completed. Among the final units to make the move was the library, in the spring of 1993. It took over parts of the third and fourth floors of the Administrative Building, with the entrance from the Tukwut Courtyard.

The library’s new footprint was substantially larger, but the digs were far from ideal. Reid remembers that the space didn’t have lights at the beginning, so employees had to leave work as soon as it got dark outside. And even when the lighting came, it wasn’t suitable for a library because the room had been designed to contain a TV recording studio.

“The walls were dark, and the ceiling was a black, acoustic-type ceiling,” Downie said. “The day we opened up, a student walked in, looked around and said, ‘What’s with the cocktail lightning?’ There were sections of the stacks where you basically felt like you had to have a flashlight to read.”

The problems didn’t stop there. There weren’t enough computers or chairs to keep up with demand. There were only four study rooms initially, and all four had to be converted into faculty offices. There were, for some reason known only to 1990s design aesthetics, double-decker study carrels.

By the middle of the decade, it was clear that the library had outgrown its two floors in the admin building. But where could it go? This was a period when no less an authority than Barry Munitz, then-chancellor of the CSU system, was saying CSUSM didn’t need a library because – does this sound familiar? – all books were going to be electronic.

Into this uncertainty stepped the couple for whom the library would be named. W. Keith Kellogg II was the grandson of the cereal magnate, and he and his wife Jean eventually settled in Rancho Santa Fe and began directing some of their philanthropy toward CSUSM. In 1996, the Kelloggs donated $1 million to the university, then the largest gift in its history, to kick-start a project to construct a standalone library. They ultimately gave $1.5 million for the library, securing naming rights in the process, and also established an endowment that continues to fund library renovations to the present.

The groundbreaking took place in 2001, and the final price tag for Kellogg Library was $48 million. About six weeks after the doors opened to students, a grand opening ceremony was held on March 5, 2004, attended by new CSUSM President Karen Haynes (in her first semester on the job), U.S. Rep. Randall “Duke” Cunningham (one year before he went to prison on bribery charges) and, of course, the Kelloggs. Reid spoke at the event while wearing clothes reminiscent of early-1900s England.

“It was fun, a physical symbol of the importance of libraries,” Reid said of her outfit. “The message was: Look how far we’ve come and how advanced libraries always have tried to be. This isn’t a new thing.”

Reid worked closely with the architecture firm Carrier Johnson on nearly aspect of the library’s design and construction, particularly the interior.

“It was hours and hours and hours of time. But we had to do it,” she said. “Somebody had to speak for the people who were going to use the space.”

Kellogg Library opened with 35 total employees, and though the structure was new, the staff had long since begun to think of themselves as family. In at least one case, the dynamic became literal.

Dorsett had a son named Ryan in 1992, and he was 12 years old when Kellogg was born. Ryan doesn’t remember spending much time there – like many teenagers, he was a devotee of video games – but he valued his mother’s profession and, if nothing else, he gained an appreciation for the library through osmosis.

He enrolled at CSUSM in 2010 and, with Cathie’s help, immediately started working for the library as a student assistant. He stayed on for his five years of undergraduate education, then returned as a full-time employee in 2018. Last year, two years after his mom’s retirement, he transitioned from working in media reserves to becoming coordinator of The Makery.

“Some of the staff have known me since I was a baby. A lot of those relationships have carried on into the present, and it has made certain areas of the library feel really special to me,” Ryan Dorsett said. “I know that there are people here who I can go to and rely on now that my mom is retired. They are my other library moms.

“For me, this place is like an extension of home. It’s been a huge part of my life, in more ways than I can express.”

The Dorsett legacy in the library means just as much to Cathie.

“Talk about full circle,” she said. “I worked here before he was even a twinkle in my eye, and to have him coming in, I was so excited. It felt so right, and I knew he would love it, and he did and he does. It was one of my proudest moments to have my son here and watch him grow and make his own way.”

As Kellogg Library marks its 20^th anniversary – a celebration will take place Thursday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Kellogg Plaza – it’s preparing to begin its next chapter with a new leader, as a permanent dean could be announced by the end of the year. Whoever is hired will inherit a strategic plan that will guide the library for the proceeding five years.

A big part of the plan involves further rethinking of the building’s space. The Makery breathed fresh life into the second floor this spring, as the Hybrid Learning Lab had done for the third floor in 2022. The library has been raising money for its next signature project, a planned 8,200-square-foot renovation on the fifth floor that would expand and enliven the area dedicated to the Special Collections Department, currently located on the first floor, well beyond public view.

The library, however, wants to solicit feedback from the campus community about other ways that the upper two floors could be made over. Booth envisions, for instance, a family study room that would allow student parents to do their classwork while their children play with toys or games. And Booth would like to devote more space to highlighting student art and complement the existing art in Kellogg such as the twice-annual Context Exhibit Series and the striking mural by Jessica Sabogal that greets students in the stairwell.

“One thing we hear is that we likely don’t need to devote quite as much of our floor plan to storing books,” Booth said. “As our electronic resources grow, we can imagine different possibilities for those floors that could be larger areas for collaboration, more technology-rich spaces.”

From its humble origins in a strip mall, the CSUSM library has long been and remains the beating heart of campus. There’s a reason why Kellogg averages a million visitors per year, and it goes far beyond students cramming for their finals.

Reid recalls giving a tour of the library to a former CSUSM provost who had been involved in the planning but left the university before construction was complete.

“What he said afterward was that this building makes his heart sing,” said Reid, who retired in 2009. “I think about that a lot. My husband and I live in San Marcos, and it’s nice for us still to be able to look up on the hill and see it. I can’t imagine it being any other way than it is —the building, the community, the family.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

For the third straight year, Cal State San Marcos is bringing attention to banned books. Common Read annually gives students an opportunity to connect with and grow understanding of other communities. 

This year's selected books focus on African American, Latinx, Asian American, American Indian, LGBTQ and other characters, or challenge the status quo. These books are some of the thousands that have been banned across schools and libraries in America. Many of the books banned center around marginalized groups, particularly LGBTQIA persons and people of color.  

Banned Books Week takes place at the end of the month, and CSUSM’s library will be hosting several events that coincide with the week. 

This year's five Common Read books that the committee selected include:

• “Baddawi” by Leila Abdelrazaq
• “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison
• “An Indigenous People's History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
• “The Name Jar” by Yangsook Choi
• “V for Vendetta” by Alan Moore

“It’s important for students to know that books are being banned here in California, not just in faraway places, and what that means for them,” said Allison Carr, CSUSM’s academic transitions librarian.

“Reading books written by diverse authors opens up our perspectives to different lived experiences, which build empathy. Books written by authors from historically marginalized groups are disproportionately targeted for censorship to keep people from building that empathy, which keeps us divided.”

This year's Banned Books Week will take place Sept. 23-27, and the library will have another book giveaway on Sept. 24. There will also be a Graphic Book Novel Club meeting on Sept. 26 where students can attend a discussion about the history of censorship of comic books and graphic novels.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Recipients had to be members of the American Library Association to be eligible for the $200 bonus.

Rodriguez, a double alumna of CSUSM who earned her bachelor’s in 2013 in social sciences and her master’s in sociological practice in 2015, has been a library staff member since 2016. 

“I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to the person who nominated me for this award,” Rodriguez said. “Although the nomination was anonymous, I deeply appreciate the time and thought that went into recognizing the work I do here at the CSUSM University Library. Their acknowledgment means a great deal to me.” 

The awards were given in celebration of Patterson’s latest nonfiction book, “The Secret Lives of Booksellers & Librarians.” Patterson has given more than $100 million to education and literacy programs over the years. 

Award winners were acknowledged at the ALA Annual Conference held in San Diego earlier this summer. 

"I am honored to receive this award as it validates my commitment to supporting our students across their educational journeys through library outreach and engagement,” Rodriguez said. “It reaffirms the incredible and lasting impact that libraries can have on the lives of our communities. I am inspired to continue striving for excellence so that students feel welcomed, successful and safe at the library.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim assistant director of editorial and external affairs
ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

 Salas felt like she didn’t have people around her to ask for help, and she wanted to dive deeper to see if others had similar struggles by conducting research on fellow first-generation students.  

 “I found that a student's college experience plays a significant role in determining their success in higher education,” said Salas, who will receive a bachelor’s degree in sociology this month. “For Latinx first-generation college students, factors such as family, FGCS status and representation all play a key role in determining their success and resilience in higher education.” 

 Salas has been recognized for her findings as one of seven winners of the 2023-24 CSUSM Library Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity, which comes with a $500 cash prize for each winning submission.  

 Salas’s paper is titled “'I Don't Belong Here': A Qualitative Study on the Experiences of Latinx First-Generation College Students.” Despite an increase in Latinx students enrolled in undergraduate programs, she found that graduation rates have remained stagnant, raising a concern.  

 Salas discovered that Latinx students are systematically disadvantaged in higher education, causing them to question their sense of belonging and hurting their chances of success. But even in the face of these challenges, Latinx first-generation college students remain resilient. 

 After graduation, Salas plans to take a gap year, then continue her research in a Ph.D. program.  

 “I will most likely do a combined program or just go straight for my Ph.D.,” she said. “I plan to focus on Latino/a sociology and the sociology of education.”  

Other winners 

 Creative works category  

 Submission: “MET” 

Student: Mary Elizabeth Handler 

Program: Art, media and design  

Summary: Handler’s project is inspired by the book “The Metropolitan Museum of Art” by Howard Hibbard. This piece is a testament to the creative process of the exhibit.  

Submission: “Exploring Mental Health Stigmatization Within AAPI Communities” 

Student: Kayla Lankford 

Program: Psychological science 

Summary: Lankford’s work is a creative capstone of poems about mental health stigmatization in Asian American communities. Through her research, she created three poems, titled “Dad,” “War Cry” and “Recycling Day.”  

 Empirical works category  

 Submission: “Community Cultural Wealth: The Care and Resilience of Mothers in Poverty” 

Student: Colleen Janey 

Program: Social sciences 

Summary: Janey’s project explores the lived experiences of women who have timed out of welfare. Her research reveals the resilience of mothers facing poverty and inequitable systems.  

Submission: “Best Practices for Sharing Photovoice Research Outcomes” 

Student: Shyane Masters and Brandon Warren-Fox  

Program: Environmental studies 

Summary: Masters and Warren-Fox discuss the best practices for sharing images online for sustained community engagement. Their findings emphasize social media's role and participatory approaches, aiding in digital dissemination and bridging researcher-participant gaps in conservation efforts. 

Interpretive analysis 

 Submission: “From Mexicas to Ancient Aztecs, Classical Nahuas, and Modern Indios/as: Early Modern Criollo/a Constructions and Understandings of Indigenous New Spain” 

Student: Hugo Daniel Peralta-Ramírez 

Program: History 

Summary: Peralta-Ramírez’s project analyzes early national narratives of Mexico that were constructed by Criollo intellectuals with Indigenous pasts. 

Submission: “Howard the Duck vs. the Modernity of Man: A Critical Analysis on the Attitudes and Metaphors in Howard the Duck” 

Student: Emilio Serrano 

Program: Communication 

Summary: Serrano’s work analyzes “Howard the Duck,” a comic created and published by Steve Gerber. The comic used satire to offer a social commentary of the times through the lens of an alien. Through genre and metaphoric rhetorical perspectives, Serrano argues that Gerber was a visionary who was frustrated with the medium and sought to point it out on the pages of “Howard the Duck.” 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The makerspace, called The Makery, is located on the second floor of the library, just inside the doors leading to the main traffic circle, in an area that used to house the media library. It was unveiled to the campus community on Feb. 29 as part of a soft opening, and the grand opening celebration will take place on April 23, with a ribbon-cutting attended by President Ellen Neufeldt and other campus leaders at noon followed by a open house until 6 p.m.

And of course, as befits the name, The Makery’s first official week from April 22-26 will feature a host of maker activities, inviting guests to gather, create, invent, tinker, explore and discover while using a vast assortment of tools and materials.

“I don’t want people to be afraid to come in, or afraid of failing or afraid of what they don’t know,” said Kodie Gerritsen, a CSUSM alumna who’s now the makerspace specialist. “They can just come in here and mess up a bunch and still have a finished product at the end of it. I use the term ‘get your hands dirty’ a lot because that’s the point. The point is to come in here and get messy and make things.”

The Makery is a project that’s five years in the, er, making. Having noticed that more than half of the 23 California State University campuses boast makerspaces in their libraries, CSUSM’s library dean, Jennifer Fabbi, took the idea to a group of administrators and faculty in 2019.

They began to develop the concept, surveyed professors about how they would use it and even visited some existing makerspaces around the state. Then the pandemic struck, shelving the project for more than two years.

It was revived in fall 2022 with the hiring of Gerritsen. She had graduated the previous year with a degree in arts and technology/applied physics, and was working as a STEAM ambassador for Center ARTES, an on-campus arts organization founded by CSUSM music professor Merryl Goldberg. Lucy HG Solomon, another School of Arts professor and Gerritsen’s main faculty mentor, heard about the makerspace opportunity and thought Gerritsen would be a good fit.

“And it turns out I was,” Gerritsen said.

Gerritsen set about designing the 2,280-square-foot space with Char Booth, the library’s associate dean; the Office of Planning, Design and Construction; and an internal library group. Funding came from a Kellogg Library building endowment that is specifically to be used for library renovations.

The Makery was chosen through a campus naming contest. It was the overwhelming winner over the other two finalists: “Sandbox” and “Buildbox.”

“A makerspace in the library allows for a centralized space that is accessible and open to everyone in the campus community,” Fabbi said. “The Makery is a space where students, staff and faculty can use information to create new knowledge, which is what the library is all about.”

The creative flair and sense of whimsy that Gerritsen brought to the design of The Makery is evident even before you step into the room. A large neon sign hanging above the door displays the name of the makerspace in blue, green and orange letters. To the immediate right past the entrance is a collection of 27 high-density foam cubes that can be used for sitting in a large group collaboration or for alternate purposes like building a wall or other structures.

On either side of a desk where a student assistant is stationed to welcome visitors are two enclosed rooms. One of them, called The Pantry, features a few desktop computers for people to work on digital projects in a quiet atmosphere. The other is named Gina’s Game Corner in tribute to Georgina “Gina” Lopez, a longtime library employee who passed away last year. It has a game table and shelves that are stocked with games, puzzles and other forms of entertainment.

“I wanted to have a place where people can relax and have fun, unload a little bit,” Gerritsen said. “We ultimately settled on a game room, in part because Gina enjoyed those types of things, and also because we have a lot of games in the library and many people don’t know about them.”

The rest of The Makery is a large open area with half a dozen square tables topped with butcher blocks and surrounded by bright, colorful chairs. All are on wheels so that the furniture can be moved into any configuration. On an afternoon last month, two of the tables had been pushed together to display a paper welcome banner that visitors could draw and color on, and a third table held a container of purple kinetic sand.

The star attraction of The Makery, however, is the back wall. There you can find the primary making equipment, such as sewing machines, embroidery machines, a cameo cutter machine, button makers, a craft printer, a paper cutter and a power drill. There also are bins upon bins of arts and crafts supplies like paint, beads, string, ribbons, clips, rubber bands, markers and dozens more miscellaneous items.

The opposite wall is lined with shelves that showcase some of the creations that students already have made during the limited time that The Makery has been open.

“It's been cool seeing them make things on their own without direction,” said Ryan Dorsett, a 2015 CSUSM alumnus who in January shifted from a different job in the library to run the makerspace with Gerritsen. “It's like, ‘Wow, you made that here.’ We really wanted people to be excited about the space, and there's been a lot of excitement that students have expressed. They've been very clear in their joy.”

Gerritsen said her goal for the rest of this semester is to work out any operational kinks that crop up while gathering data on user numbers and behavior. Starting next school year, she plans to incorporate more programming and foster more partnerships with the campus community, which could include student orientations and campus tours stopping by The Makery or holding academic classes in the space.

“We’ll see how much of that can happen by the fall,” Gerritsen said, “but it’s going to grow as time goes on.”

The Makery is open Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The coordinators are seeking donations of craft supplies, office supplies or “anything that you can use to make stuff with,” as Gerritsen put it.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Wrinkles, scars, jewelry.  

They open a window into the collective and unique life experiences of the individual. For artist Monica Zavala, hands are an opportunity to represent her American Indian culture. 

Zavala has been working on a collection of paintings for the past year that depict the hands of American Indians engaging in traditional and ceremonial Native practices, including basket weaving, beadwork, burning of white sage and more. The exhibit, entitled “All Our Relatives,” pays homage to Zavala’s California Indian heritage and highlights the diverse customs of Native tribes.

To reflect such diversity, Zavala connected with members of different Native communities and painted portfolios of their hands, emphasizing their distinct regalia and traditions. She pays special attention to details such as nail polish and tattoos to accentuate the personality of each subject. Her subjects are from a wide range of tribes; her own, the Gabrielino tribe, and others such as the Kumeyaay, Cahuilla, Serrano, Hoopa, the Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians and more. 

As part of the Cal State San Marcos library’s spring Context Exhibit Series, Zavala’s collection of paintings is on display on the third floor of Kellogg Library and available for members of the community to view in person or online through May 10. 

“I hope visitors get a little bit of education through this exhibit,” Zavala said. “I want people to know we’re not all just the stereotypical image of war bonnets and bows and arrows. We’re very diverse when it comes to regalia. We have many traditions and instruments, and you’ll see in the exhibit that there’s not just one type that fits all kind of Native American.” 

Zavala’s work being featured in the library’s exhibit is especially meaningful as she graduated from CSUSM with a bachelor’s in art, media and design in 2021. Today, she continues to be a prominent member of the CSUSM community as project coordinator of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center (CICSC), where she also worked as a student assistant. 

“I wouldn't change coming here for anything,” Zavala said. “I found a really good community with the American Indian students and the American Indian professors. It’s more than just teachers and students. It's like a community, a family. It's very close-knit.”

It was through her CSUSM family that she connected with American Indian Studies professor Eric Tippeconnic, a fellow artist in the Native community. As her mentor, it was Tippeconnic who encouraged Zavala to expand her collection of paintings for the Context Exhibit Series and pursue her idea of illustrating representation through hands. 

“He’s been taking me under his wing and showing me the ropes on curating my own exhibit,” Zavala said. “I started my journey doing exhibits with him at Cal State Fullerton, and now I get to do my first solo exhibit here at my alma mater.”

Visitors can get an inside look at Zavala’s first independent exhibit and learn more about her proud depictions of American Indian culture at Kellogg Library’s free reception on March 14 from 6 to 8 p.m. An RSVP is required to attend, and it is open to all students, faculty, staff and community members. 

“I enjoy the aesthetic qualities of Monica’s work and emphatically applaud her analytical approach in rendering contemporary Native life,” Tippeconnic said. “By guiding the viewer's gaze to the hands, Monica underscores the value of community and reciprocity to reflect traditional Native American values.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

This year marks the first year that INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine has presented the LEAD Award, which honors academic libraries’ programs and initiatives that encourage and support DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) across their campus. These include, but are not limited to, research, technology, accessibility, exhibitions and community outreach.  

The CSUSM library will be featured, along with 55 other recipients, in the March 2024 issue of INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine. 

“We are so grateful for this honor that recognizes the work we do each day for the benefit of our students and in alignment with our campus values,” said Jennifer Fabbi, dean of the CSUSM library. “While we know that diversity work never ends, we are proud to be placed with such an access- and justice-minded group of libraries.” 

Insight Into Diversity magazine selected the CSUSM library because of its many diversity initiatives, including the infusion of DEI in its recently completed strategic plan; hiring a bilingual (Spanish and English) librarian to work with student families and the larger community; its support of underrepresented authors and researchers; art installations with DEI themes; and mandatory and valued DEI work in the librarian tenure process. 

“We know that many academic libraries are not always recognized for their dedication to diversity, inclusion and access” said Lenore Pearlstein, owner and publisher of INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine. “We are proud to honor these college and university libraries as role models for other institutions of higher education.” 

A call for nominations for this award was announced in October. 

INSIGHT Into Diversity also annually hands out the Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award, which recognizes U.S. colleges and universities that demonstrate an outstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion. CSUSM last fall received the HEED Award for the 10^th consecutive year.  

For more information about the 2024 LEAD Award, visit insightintodiversity.com. 

This semester, the featured art is the work of a collaboration between graphic design institution Graphis and artist Kit Hinrichs of Studio Hinrichs. Graphis and Hinrichs sent out a call for creative work to the public and received nearly 400 submissions. Through a juried selection process, 60 posters from around the world were chosen to be included in the showcase, and 30 of them are on display in Kellogg Library. 

The Context Exhibit Series is a library program held every semester that grants students access to art and encourages campuswide dialogue. It showcases thought-provoking installations that center around an overarching theme and connect to the campus curriculum. Classes are invited to visit the display to enhance their learning experience and engage with the campus community. The free exhibit can be viewed on the third floor of Kellogg Library during operating hours or virtually on the library website.  

“The Context Exhibit Series has been a program that often dives deep into conversations of social justice, and this exhibit strongly resonates with that goal,” said Rosa Rodriguez, CSUSM’s outreach librarian and the main orchestrator behind Context.

The graphic design posters in this semester’s exhibit offer a worldwide perspective on the war in Ukraine and highlight the power of coming together to champion for peace. To initiate discussion about the showcase, the library is displaying books that connect with the artwork and a visitors' journal for student reflection. By providing free accessibility to art and literature, students can learn about the social and historical context surrounding the exhibit and share their thoughts in a productive and communal setting. 

“I hope that this exhibit challenges and inspires students to critically think about our roles and responsibilities to support peace for everyone,” Rodriguez said. “While the Ukrainian invasion may not directly affect our everyday lives for many of us, the exhibit represents how we can stand united in response to injustice, violence and conflict.”

Kellogg Library will welcome the exhibition by hosting a free reception on Oct. 26 for students, faculty, staff and community members. Hinrichs will discuss the collaboration with Graphis, and attendees can learn more about the inspiration behind the graphic design posters, all 30 of which will be on display.

Graphis also will be selling catalogs of the posters, and Hinrichs will be signing the catalogs along with Michael Pantuso, one of the graphic designers. All proceeds will go to humanitarian aid. 

For more information or to RSVP for the reception, visit here.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The Office of Inclusive Excellence and the Sustainability Program have worked together since 2015 to provide additional pathways for students while working with campus partners to connect diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging with sustainability-related and environmental issues.

The project came to fruition through the collaboration of Ariel Stevenson of the Office of Inclusive Excellence, Juliana Goodlaw-Morris from the Sustainability Program and Lucy HG Solomon, a faculty fellow of Center ARTES, to create a unique program that joins mentorship, creative artmaking, sustainability and climate justice. The program’s goal is to empower students to create meaningful art about the issues they care about, and in the process empower participating students to become changemakers for the planet. The articulate, creative visions expressed by participating students reveal the transformative potential of the program.

“This collaborative project speaks to our outstanding and dedicated students at CSUSM,” said Stevenson, the deputy diversity officer in the Office of Inclusive Excellence. 

“The mentorship program is one example of how CSUSM practices inclusive sustainability on our campus. Faculty and staff partners continue to help students thrive under the CSUSM inclusive sustainability umbrella.”

Stevenson noted that there was an initial donor for the program inspired by the merging of the campus’ inclusive sustainability efforts with the arts, and the program has learned that a new funder will be providing support for this academic year.

The program is a paid opportunity for students to be mentored alongside faculty and staff, including  Goodlaw-Morris,  Solomon,  Stevenson and faculty members from across campus, such as environmental studies professors Gabriel Valle and Shannon Swanson. This year, the program will seek outside mentors and also look to those who completed the program to act as peer mentors.

“Through our inclusive sustainability program and now our Planet Mentorship program, our students have benefited from creating an environmental justice internship, won competitive research awards, partnered with students to publish, received full scholarships, and participated in this paid mentorship program,” Stevenson said.

Students combine art and data to illuminate how climate change and environmental justice issues impact marginalized communities. The program also allows students to explore pathways for their futures and learn useful skills, such as communicating complex themes and ideas, project development through collaboration and creative problem-solving.

“We thought about the kind of change we wanted to grow and where to focus our joint mentorship,” Solomon said. “The program invites all students to participate and supports individualized research in different ways. The program engages students of color in the pursuit of creative works around climate and social justice. Data visualization involves research into layered problem sets, and the creative aspect of the program – the problem identifying, distilling and conveying through dynamic artworks – empowers students to become researchers/artists and elevates their voices in the discussion around climate.”

Last month, Planet Mentorship held an event called “Stories for the Planet,” which showcased students' art. The goal of the exhibition was to show what future changemakers are doing to help bring climate issues to light. 

“CSUSM is positioning itself as a sustainability and climate justice leader in the region,” Goodlaw-Morris said. “In order to successfully prepare our students for future opportunities, we need to allow them to be intersectional in their thinking and creative activities. This program has engaged students from across disciplines to connect their future careers and goals with the needs of our planet. Our inaugural students showcased amazing pieces of artwork connecting social justice, sustainability and climate change.” 

Recent biochemistry graduate Mellie Nitunga was initially interested in the program because it sounded like an opportunity for her to start a career in saving the planet. 

“I also wanted to learn more about how climate change can affect us and the steps necessary to help stop climate change,” Nitunga wrote on the program website. “The program has given me opportunities to have mentors, which can help further my goal and education."

David Ramos – an environmental studies and art, media and design student – joined the program because he wanted to gain skills that he could utilize outside of classwork. 

“I want to be the person who stands up to the challenge and aims to help people who are less fortunate and unfairly represented in the community,” Ramos wrote. “Through this internship, I can bring light to these issues in a way that feels fulfilling to my overall career. I want to stand up for the health of my community and the environment in an ever-changing world."

The first collection of planet changemakers art is on display at the Data Stacks on the fourth floor of Kellogg Library. Visit any time during library hours to see the students’ artistic meditations on climate and justice.

Thanks to the generous support of the Wells Fargo Foundation, the 2023-24 cohort of Planet Mentorship will launch this month. The Wells Fargo Foundation’s support also was instrumental in garnering additional donor support, doubling this year’s student cohort. This effort is instrumental in building a more inclusive and sustainable future for all.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

For the second straight year, the theme is banned books, which has become a hot topic in libraries across the country due to increasing censorship and restriction in recent years. According to the American Library Association, the books commonly targeted are ones that center around marginalized groups, particularly LGBTQIA persons and people of color. By highlighting these underrepresented groups, the Common Read will create a space for everyone to have a voice and share their thoughts on how the banning of books affects marginalized communities. 

The University Library holds the Common Read annually, providing students with the opportunity to select a free book and engage with the campus community through constructive discussions and activities that connect to the readings. With a diverse selection of five books to choose from that vary in genre, students can learn more about why books get banned and the important concepts discussed in these texts, such as issues relating to race, gender and sexuality.

“I am such a firm believer in the value of a liberal arts education and getting outside your comfort zone,” said Allison Carr, CSUSM’s academic transitions librarian. “Reading something you normally wouldn’t can open your mind to issues outside your personal experience and expand your knowledge on important matters in society.”

The five books selected for this year’s campaign include: 

• “We Are the Land: A History of Native California,” Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer
• “The Handmaid's Tale,” Margaret Atwood
• “All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir Manifesto,” George M. Johnson
• “Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood,” Marjane Satrapi
• “Separate Is Never Equal,” Duncan Tonatiuh

This year’s Common Read is also finding its way into classrooms. To bring students into the conversation, the library is partnering with faculty to implement the chosen readings into their curriculum. Through class discussions and group projects, professors are spreading the message about banned books to their students and fostering an environment that encourages an open dialogue. 

“Talking about censorship through these assignments allows students to examine how it is intertwined with cancel culture and the overall timeline of banned books,” said Dominique Harrison, a member of the Common Read committee and a professor of General Education Lifelong Learning (GEL).

Harrison collaborated with Rosa Rodriguez, CSUSM’s outreach librarian, in selecting the picture book “Separate Is Never Equal.”

Students will have more opportunities to engage with the material and pick up a free book throughout the semester, as there will be four more Common Read events: 

Banned Books Week Activity and Giveaway 

• Tuesday, Oct. 3, noon, outside Kellogg Library's third-floor entrance: Pick up a free copy of a Common Read book, participate in trivia and activities, win prizes, learn about censorship, and more.

Bilingual Storytime and Craft: ‘Separate Is Never Equal’ 

• Thursday, Oct. 5, noon, Kellogg Library Reading Room (KEL 5400): There will be a reading of "Separate Is Never Equal" and a hands-on craft. Free copies of the book are available for pickup. All ages welcome, including kids.

Pride Center Book Discussion: ‘All Boys Aren’t Blue’ 

• Tuesday, Oct. 17, noon, Pride Center: A discussion of the book "All Boys Aren't Blue." Free copies of the book will be available for pickup. You don't need to have read the book to participate.

Common Read Book Giveaway 

• Tuesday, Nov. 14, noon, outside Kellogg third-floor entrance: Pick up a free copy of one of the Common Read books. 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Last year, when Ho noticed that Community Relations & University Engagement was awarding grants for faculty or staff to partner with the community in new and innovative ways, she knew she had just the right proposal. Ho received $5,000 to launch the North County Oral History Initiative, a novel project that took work that Ho and other archivists do – recording interviews of people talking about their lives – and put it in the hands of everyday citizens.

“Even if you have zero money or things to pass down to your kids, you can still sit down and tell your own story, if given the opportunity,” Ho said.

For the initiative, Ho teamed up with Tanis Brown, a member of the first CSUSM graduating class and a retired CSUSM employee who since 2009 has served as president of the San Marcos Historical Society. Last September, the organization hosted two days of workshops at which Ho trained a dozen community members (whom Brown had recruited) in the art of oral history – what it is, how to record an interview, how to ask questions, how to follow tangents.

The trainees then were dispatched into the community with instructions to apply what they had learned and record oral histories with a few people of their choosing. The result is 24 original interviews of North County residents telling their own life stories.

Last Thursday, the nearly year-long projected culminated with a showcase event at the historical society at Heritage Park in San Marcos. Ho and Brown gathered with the interviewers, the narrators (oral history lingo for those telling their story) and other guests to celebrate the participants in the initiative.

“I just think of how gracious people have been to take the time to be part of this,” Brown said. “Because sometimes being interviewed can be a little bit awkward, and you’re trusting people to share your story publicly, and in perpetuity.

“Also, like so many things that happen in life, here's an opportunity to bring a previously unknown group of people together, and all of a sudden, they have this link. They have partnered to create something bigger than just who they are. It's all these stories combined that are our legacy, and hopefully students coming up can learn from these stories.”

Among both the interviewers and narrators, there were unexpected treasures. A few weeks before the workshops last fall, for instance, an elderly woman showed up at the historical society building to share some photographs that the center might want for its collections. It emerged that the woman, Lucy Wheeler, had a background in agriculture but that, out of a desire to try something new, she had picked up photojournalism in her 80s. Brown informed her of the oral history project, and Wheeler eagerly signed on.

Wheeler ended up conducting three interviews with families who were longtime farmers in North County, including George and Althea Nagata, Japanese American farmers based in Oceanside who were incarcerated as part of the Japanese internment camps during World War II.

“Their interview was really special and interesting,” Ho said.

Other highlights among the narrators were Gezai Berhane, a beloved CSUSM employee who was interviewed by Brown (a classmate from the inaugural CSUSM graduating class) around the time of his retirement last December; Diania Caudell, a member of the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians who learned basket weaving from her cultural elders after sustaining a serious back injury; Rebecca Jones and Sharon Jenkins, mayor and deputy mayor of San Marcos, respectively; and Eva Tinoco, a Mexican immigrant whose six daughters include San Marcos City Councilwoman María Nuñez and Arcela Nuñez-Alvarez, former director of the National Latino Research Center at CSUSM.

“Our little project really engaged a wide scope of San Marcos and North County residents who came here maybe without a plan,” Brown said. “And look what happened.”

Ho is so pleased by the model she created through the North County Oral History Initiative that she anticipates replicating it in multiple ways. She and Brown already have discussed using the same process with the CSUSM Retirees Association. And though students weren’t involved in the recently completed project, Ho can envision working with a class or student organization in the future.

“For example, I could train students from the Latinx Center in oral history in the same way we did with this workshop and then maybe partner with some Latinx-focused group so that the students can interview people in their own community, people who look like them and don’t see themselves in the historical record,” she said. “I want to put students in the driver's seat when it comes to record keeping.”

The North County Oral History Initiative, which features video recordings and full transcripts of all 24 interviews, soon will become the latest addition to Voices of North County, the larger repository for all oral histories accumulated by Special Collections during its five years of existence.

“What I've gotten from this project is that people are really interested in history,” Ho said. “People are interested in other people's stories, and it's gratifying to me to be able to facilitate that.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

To understand the reasoning behind this report, Cortes conducted empirical research examining important aspects of Latino wellness such as food and culture, sense of belonging and mental health treatment.  

“I wanted to further explore what made the Cougar Pantry such a great resource on campus,”  Cortes said. “And I wanted my research to be relevant to myself and my community.” 

His hard work paid off when he was announced as one of six winners of the 2022-23 CSUSM Library Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity award, which comes with a $600 cash prize for each recipient. 

“It is inspiring to see the work that our students are doing here at CSUSM,” said Rosa Rodriguez, CSUSM’s award chair and outreach librarian. "I am proud of our awardees and all those who submitted their amazing research and creative works.”  

Cortes was encouraged to apply by sociology professor Jill Weigt as this was an excellent opportunity to showcase his research and expand his professional experience.  

The library helped with his research process by providing access to the databases and resources on how to correctly write citations, literature reviews, abstracts and narrow down research questions. And there was one other advantage. 

“Everything was free,” he said.  

Cortes’ paper details that understanding the mechanisms beneath the reasons why Latinos reported mental health benefits from using the pantry can provide the university with information that can help it better support students. 

Other winners 

Creative works category 

Submission: Photographic Reflections on Landscape, Post-Colonial Society and Colonial Artifacts 

Student: Ken Waddy 

Program: Art, Media, and Design 

Adviser: Nancy diBenedetto 

Summary: This photobook highlights landscape, focusing on Rancho Guajome Adobe, the location of a settler colonial project that was built on the servitude of the Payómkawichum people (native to California). The photos reflect the different factors of settler colonialism, most notably how all of the subjects are a product of the process erasing and replacing.  

Submission: “Triggers” 

Student: Kelly Ibarra Perez 

Program: Art, Media, and Design 

Adviser: Siobhan Arnold 

Summary: “Triggers” (Transeúnte) is a short film that conveys how living somewhere between two places feels, physically and mentally. As an immigrant and a first-generation Mexican daughter, Perez portrays the relationship with her family and roots, and the distance between herself and her memory of home. 

Empirical research category 

Submission: Altruism and Mindfulness in Prosocial Helping Behavior 

Student: Alyssa Hudkins 

Program: Psychology 

Adviser: Virginia Tasulis 

Summary: This study’s results reveal how participants with higher mindfulness rates did not show significantly higher altruistic tendencies, and participants who rated themselves higher in altruism were not statistically more likely to help others in a high-risk situation.  

Submission: ‘Don't Jew Me’: How Antisemitism is Expressed, Experienced, and Ultimately Challenged 

Student: Eric Wilsker 

Program: Sociology 

Adviser: Mary Roche 

Summary: Through interviews, an in-depth literature review and a content analysis of items from contemporary American culture, this paper examines how Jewish people experience antisemitism, how antisemitism is expressed through various social mechanisms and a means by which antisemitism may be challenged.  

Interpretive analysis category 

Submission: Engendering Binaries: The Transhistorical Experiences of Catalina de Erauso 

Student: Hugo Daniel Peralta-Ramirez 

Program: History 

Adviser: Miriam Riggs 

Summary: This paper examines the crossdressing Basque Monja Alferéz Catalina de Erauso to demonstrate how gender performance iconography and symbolism are rooted in the way people experience and interact with Erauso and their performance within the archetypal standards of their contexts.  

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Greg Koch, co-founder of Stone, and the Ecke family famous for its legacy of floriculture in the region are the lead funders for a plan to build a new public services area on the fifth floor of Kellogg Library. The donations kick off the fundraising for a project that is projected to cost $2.5 million and be completed in two phases.

“In a short time, we’ve made great strides to preserve the history of our region, especially that of North San Diego County, and this space will allow our communities to converge around a common purpose: to keep community stories alive,” said Jennifer Fabbi, dean of the CSUSM library.

The Special Collections Department at CSUSM, housing collections that are irreplaceable or rare, has existed for about five years, and it occupies a space on the first floor of the library (the second floor is street level). The space features only one viewing table for people to interact with the material, and with the collections confined to a storage environment, there is limited opportunity to display memorabilia and engage the public and campus community with the rich history within each collection.

The vision of the 8,200-square-foot renovation project, designed by San Diego architecture firm LPA, is to broaden the footprint of Special Collections and create a permanent and accessible center on the library’s fifth floor.

The new space will open with a grand entrance from the fifth-floor elevator. Off the main entrance will be the exhibit gallery, where physical and digital collection elements will be on display. The gallery will flank a central event space that can be set up for seminars, presentations, or community gatherings and celebrations.

Opposite the gallery will be a reading room, a secured location for hands-on interaction with the collections and a place for research engagement for students and scholars.

Since its inception, Special Collections has grown to include such major archives as:

• The Brewchive®, a comprehensive archive of the “third wave” of San Diego’s craft brewing history, from 1980 to the present.
• The Paul Ecke Ranch, Inc. Business Records and Family Papers, three generations of materials documenting the influence of the Ecke family on North County.
• The Dan Rios Papers, more than one million photo negatives of North County from 1968-2001.

Launched in 2017 in a county that’s widely regarded as the capital of craft beer, the Brewchive® is one of only a handful of special collections nationwide focused solely on beer. It includes photos, videos, marketing materials, coasters, beer lists, menus, recipes, brewing logs, brewing manifestos, unique or rare trade periodicals, and interviews. Many of them come from the personal collection of Koch, who founded Stone with Steve Wagner in San Marcos in 1996.

“It’s well known that the history of San Diego craft brewing is recognized nationally and internationally – you can find ‘San Diego-style’ IPAs being brewed across the country and around the world.” Koch said. “However, I love that it's being appreciated and housed at CSUSM, near where Stone and so many great craft breweries started. This project is going to bring the Brewchive® out of the basement and invite the community in to interact with it, maybe even try a couple of vintage recipes.”

The Ecke collection numbers hundreds of boxes of business records, flower catalogs, photographs, correspondence, maps and other documents. They were donated 10 years ago by three Ecke siblings in the fourth generation of a family that immigrated to Southern California from Germany in the early 1900s and built a horticultural empire by popularizing the poinsettia and other flowers.

“We appreciate that CSUSM recognized the importance of preserving North County’s history and is making it a priority,” Paul Ecke III, Lizbeth Ecke and Sara Ecke May said. “Our family’s legacy is part of that, and we like that students will have access to it and faculty members can use special collections in their classes. The exhibits area in this new space – where history will be on display – is exciting to us.”

To learn more about this project, contact P. Vien Walker in University Advancement at 760-750-8138 or vwalker@csusm.edu.

“The more plants I brought in,” Neubacher said, “the calmer people felt – including me.”

At a certain point, the plants that she surrounded herself with began to feel more inspirational than the crisis work itself. Seeking to transform the office into even more of a sanctuary for her clients, Neubacher decided to create a terrarium inside of a glass orb, then hang it from the ceiling.

A second career was born, with Neubacher reinventing herself as a botanical artist and creating a company – San Diego-based TEND –  in 2007 to support her fledgling passion. Her work has been featured in such diverse locations as the San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego International Airport, Trash Lamb Gallery in South Park and the Sturt Haaga Gallery at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge.

This semester, the Cal State San Marcos community can get an up-close look at the fruits of Neubacher’s life transition. As part of the CSUSM library’s spring Context Exhibit Series, Neubacher took 10 weeks this winter to install a collection of plant-based sculpture and assemblage that’s now on display on the third floor of the library. The exhibit, titled “Emergence,” can be viewed in person or online through July.

Neubacher will discuss her work and her inspiration for creating this installation on April 6 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Kellogg Reading Room on the fifth floor of the library. An RSVP is required to attend.

“Her art reflects a connection between the arts and the sciences,” said Rosa Rodriguez, CSUSM’s outreach librarian. “You can see reflections of geometry, plant science, sculpture, sustainability and more. There’s a special meaning for everyone in this exhibit. Seeing her uniquely shaped pieces and her use of natural materials is very impactful. It brings what we typically see outdoors indoors and allows the viewer to be immersed in her pieces. I am very excited to introduce Britton to the campus and our community.”

“Emergence” is made up of three separate elements that tie together under a common theme. Mounted on a wall at the back of the exhibit area are a group of what Neubacher calls portals, framed pieces of earth that are designed to “portal” the viewer deeper into the natural world. The five “Fecund Fractals” are shaped like pyramids, while the two “Bloom Seeds” on either end are shaped like flowers.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is a towering plant sculpture composed of green spheres that widen in diameter as the piece grows taller. The effect is fanciful and vaguely Seussian. The sculpture, titled “Song of Increase,” is “inspired by nature’s adaptive system of optimizing wellness more and more powerfully after every setback,” Neubacher said.

She would know. While she was developing this artwork last year, her mother died.

“So what was initially a statement about loss and discovery inside the pandemic became a louder call to remake myself in the face of this very personal hardship, and emerge anew,” Neubacher said. “When I named this exhibit ‘Emergence,’ I had no idea how invitational that title would become.”

Among the materials that Neubacher used in creating the exhibit are lichen, moss, fern, foam, wood, pebble and mixed botanicals. Everything in her art, she said, is forged, found or preserved.

“I’m drawn to materials that offer texture and movement, or the illusion of movement, and love using preserved botanicals as an alternative to cut flowers and water-hungry plants,” she said. “Most of my plants and all of my mosses are preserved with non-toxic glycerin, which allows them to remain in a state of suspended animation for many years.”

Rodriguez was introduced to Neubacher's work through Char Booth, associate dean of the library. After looking at some pieces on the TEND website, Rodriguez thought she would be a great fit for the CSUSM community.

“Her art pieces connect to what the campus does as a whole for our students,” Rodriguez said. “We strive to provide new experiences, support emotional wellness and connect us with one another through art.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Rios’ photographs cover an important era in the development of San Diego’s North County region: newsworthy stories but also portraiture of locals, nature photography and images of our built environment. When he was not on assignment, he traveled the county, documenting what he observed.

Images in this collection also include negatives from a pool of diverse professional staff photographers who were also the staff writers/journalists, adding to the large output for this daily newspaper that covered North County. The library estimates that there are roughly one million images in the collection, and perhaps half of them lack context like the place of photography, the people in the images and the happenings that were photographed.

To fill in these gaps, the EHC and CSUSM library are enlisting community volunteers with memory and knowledge of this time period, roughly 1968–2001. With funding from CSUSM’s Community Engaged Scholarship initiative, the library is scanning 11,000 images and posting them on the Flickr digital media platform, where community members can comment on images about the who, what, when and where of these uncontextualized photographs.

Expanding this community memory contributes to the public good by documenting the forces, events and people that have influenced the region’s evolution, and this documentation will be available to researchers for generations into the future. With this community input, the library will update its records, making Rios’ images valuable to future researchers, students, faculty, genealogists and lifelong learners.

To participate, community members should create a Flickr account. For more information, please visit the Dan Rios Photo Identification Project webpage.

“If you ever look at someone’s shoes or you ever lose anyone who is close to you,  you see their shoes left behind and remember their history and the journeys they've taken,” said Huerta, the communications specialist for Cal State San Marcos’ College of Education, Health and Human Services.

Huerta is sharing her work through a collection titled “The Red, Pride & Blues of a Military B.R.A.T,” which is part of CSUSM’s University Library Context Exhibit Series. Each semester, the library invites artists from all over the country to display their talent. The series is designed to support student learning and research and to foster community discussion and engagement through the use of art.

The third floor of the library features 22 of Huerta’s mixed-media art pieces on display. Her collection is inspired by proudly holding the title of a military B.R.A.T., an acronym for British Regiment Attached Traveler, which today refers to a child who grew up with a parent in the armed forces.

“My grandpa served in the Navy, my dad in the Air Force, my brother, nephew, uncles and cousins were in the Army, my son and husband were in the Marines, and my daughter served in the Coast Guard,” Huerta said. “We've got all bases covered.”

Huerta has fond memories of drawing with her father, a Vietnam veteran, when he wasn’t deployed overseas. She remembers her father once coloring a deer purple in a coloring book. Huerta, who was 7 at the time, told her father that he couldn’t color a deer purple because that’s not what they look like in real life. He explained to her that there are no rules in art and you can express yourself in any way you want. 

After that, Huerta used bright, bold colors in her paintings, and she paints using the colors that she feels. The exhibit includes a colorful painting of a bison that she said reminds her to tell others about exploring art materials and discovering themselves. Sometimes she adds collages to her paintings by using glue, clay, photos and natural materials.

“You don't have to be selling art to be an artist,” she said. “We all have creativity inside of us. You can use art in everything that you do.”

Huerta said one of her most meaningful paintings in the collection is a tribute to the 13 service members who were killed in the Kabul airport bombing in Afghanistan on Aug. 26, 2021. On the floor under this piece are 13 candles and a vase with poppies; sand and red marbles symbolize the sand of Afghanistan and the blood that was shed.

“Any time a military member is lost, it affects more than just that member’s immediate family,” Huerta said. “The loss is felt across the nation.”

Another large art piece titled “Family Bloodline” includes numerous family photos glued to paper and connected by red string that represents the bloodline. The installation hangs from a long tree branch. Huerta said “Family Bloodline” honors many of the veterans in her family.

Huerta likes to create her own art style, and she loves to facilitate art healing sessions with others who are struggling. In May, she hosted an art workshop with 48 children from Santa Margarita Elementary School at Camp Pendleton. It was important for her to include military children in her work. Together, they created face masks with paint and mixed materials while sharing how it feels when their parents are deployed or when they move from one home to another.

Huerta is familiar with these experiences from her own upbringing. As a child, she would wear a bracelet with the name of a prisoner of war until they were freed. Her family welcomed service members to Thanksgiving dinner every year.

One of the art installation pieces in the exhibit is an acrylic painting of combat boots representing several veterans in her family. Under it and on the floor are four pairs of plaster baby shoes made from her children’s shoes. It not only represents her family, but all the youth sent to combat. Huerta said these thoughts weighed heavily on her when two of her children enlisted.

Huerta is a first-generation college graduate and a double CSUSM alumna with a bachelor’s degree in visual art. For her Master of Arts in Sociological Practice, Huerta focused her research on post-traumatic stress disorder, military suicide rates, and educating civilians about the military lifestyle. As a continuing advocate for veterans, she stresses the importance of hearing their stories.

Art helps Huerta process and tell her story. It always has been an escape for her, a way of getting through her most difficult times.

Huerta calls her mother the most creative person she knows; from her, she learned that art can be a coping mechanism.

“Sometimes family is all you have,” Huerta said.

Knowing how art helped with her struggles, Huerta was inspired to teach art healing at the CSU Shiley Haynes Institute for Palliative Care at CSUSM. She encourages her students not to focus on creating the perfect drawing or painting, but rather to use art as a form of expression.  

“I always hear people say, ‘I don't know how to draw,’ ” she said. “Drawing is about connecting and expressing. In my artwork, my story comes out. I encourage you to do the same even if it's for yourself. Fourteen years ago, I started taking art classes. I was told that contemporary artists don’t paint like me. That's not why I do art. I do it for me. I do it for others to help them connect.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Authors whose work has been banned across history include such literary icons as Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Shakespeare, and titles that have been banned include many of the universally acclaimed classics of the 20^th century.

The practice of banning and challenging books, however, is accelerating at disturbing speed. According to a recent report from the American Library Association (ALA), there have been attempts to ban or restrict access to 1,651 different titles in 2022. That’s the highest number of complaints since the organization began tracking book challenges more than 20 years ago; the previous high occurred just last year.

The Cal State San Marcos library has recognized the national Banned Books Week (held every fall) for years. But with the trend of book challenges increasing around the country, the library decided to heighten its commitment to ensuring that students have access to material that makes them think about deeper issues, even if some find them objectionable.

What traditionally was a single book selected for the annual Campus Common Read has become, for this year, five titles under the overarching theme of banned books.  

“We chose this theme because it is so timely,” said Allison Carr, CSUSM’s academic transitions librarian. “Every day, it seems, there’s a new story about some librarian being harassed and they quit their job because they can't take it. It's not an exaggeration to say that libraries are under attack. They have been for a long time. But people going into school board meetings and city council meetings and insisting that this one book is going to be the downfall of your child, your community, is happening a lot more than anybody realizes.”

This year’s Campus Common Read campaign kicked off Sept. 8 with a book giveaway, and since then there have been five additional handout sessions of the five selections. Students can pick up a free book at any of the giveaway events. The next opportunity is Thursday, Oct. 27 during the Campus Common Read book club, a discussion about censorship and banned books taking place in the Kellogg Library Reading Room (Room 5400) at noon.

Carr and the rest of the campuswide Common Read planning group intentionally chose the five books to encompass a variety of genres and reasons for being banned or challenged, either now or in the past. The books are:

• “Eleanor & Park” by Rainbow Rowell – The 2012 young adult novel is a teenage love story that has been banned for “vile profanity, coarse language and sexuality,” according to the Banned Books Project.
• “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe – This 2019 graphic novel topped the ALA’s list of most challenged books last year because of its LGBTQ+ content and what some consider to be sexually explicit images.
• “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale” by Art Spiegelman – This 1986 graphic novel has been banned for its portrayal of Jewish people as mice and Nazis as cats, for inappropriate language and for its depiction of a naked character.
• “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich – The 2001 nonfiction book, in which the author goes undercover as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of capitalism, has been banned for promoting socialism.
• “The Snowy Day” by Ezra Jack Keats – This 1962 children’s picture book classic was challenged during its era for portraying a Black child as the main character at a time when main characters in fiction were almost exclusively white.  

According to the ALA website, a challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials based on the objections of a person or group, whereas a banning is the removal of those materials.

“We wanted to show all the different reasons why books get banned and do it across genres, too,” Carr said. “Who would think that a nonfiction book would be banned? When I first heard about that, it was it striking to me. And we were surprised that ‘The Snowy Day’ had been challenged.

“Sometimes it's not wanting to tell the stories of historically marginalized groups. Some people don't want their worldview to be challenged, and when it is, there's a lot of moral panic.”

Through the first two months of the campaign, the library has handed out almost 600 books (a donor assisted in purchasing them). Carr and her team soon will begin more outreach to faculty in hopes of increasing incorporation of the five titles into course curricula this spring as a means of facilitating more conversations about vital topics surrounding the books.  

Carr said she believes that the Common Read will retain the format of multiple books under a larger theme for at least the next few years, and that banned books could return as the theme because it has proven popular and there are so many to choose from.

“We want students to leave us being better citizens of their community,” Carr said. “And I think that making them aware of these book bans, making them aware that it's still happening today, can maybe empower them or encourage them to go out and be more involved in their community to prevent this kind of censorship in the future.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

It’s not an exaggeration, however, to say sometimes it takes a monumental event to create a revolution.

When the decision-makers within the California State University system watched events unfold that summer, they knew they had to create actionable events to respond to the great call of action coming specifically from young people. Hence was born Assembly Bill 1460, which, in conjunction with the state legislature, was signed in August 2020 and mandated that CSU students take ethnic studies as a graduation requirement.

That same summer, Cal State San Marcos’ library upped the ante by committing to develop library materials to be more representative and specifically anti-racist. And now the CSUSM library team is going even farther.

So far this year the library has acquired approximately 20 new digital information resources, many directly in support of the ethnic studies and American Indian studies curriculum. The material will go far to diversify the information, experiences and voices represented in the library’s collection.

“The library is moving beyond statements of support to action, and this includes coordinated work across the CSU system with the support of provosts,” said Jennifer Fabbi, dean of the CSUSM library.

Earlier this year, the university introduced its new strategic plan, “The Power of CSUSM.” The third goal of the plan is to achieve its vision through diversity, equity and inclusive excellence. The library’s work is an example of the university’s commitment.

“I am incredibly excited about the library's tangible commitment to developing our collections in ways that wholly represent the experiences and voices of communities and groups that have been historically underrepresented and marginalized in academia,” social sciences librarian Lalitha Nataraj said. “To me, this is a clear sign that we are moving toward a more anti-racist praxis.”

The collections include both historical documents and current content as the CSU system continues its work in becoming a progressive agent for positive change.

The biggest benefactor is the CSUSM student body. Much of the content will be made available locally for the first time, which will undoubtedly have a positive impact on students.

“Most of the new resources we have added include primary source documents, films and other resources created by and for marginalized communities, and much of the new content is not available anywhere but in these digital collections,” said Lauren Magnuson, the library’s head of collections, delivery and access. “For example, the Black Drama collection contains more than 1,700 plays written by more than 200 Black playwrights from around the world. Many of these works were previously unpublished, rare or no longer in print. Our access to this online collection allows CSUSM students and faculty to read and study these works and contribute to original scholarship that centers Black experiences and honors Black contributions to the history of drama.”

Thanks to money from the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF), the library was able to purchase access to these digital collections that go directly to support virtual teaching, learning and research. Additional funding came from the chancellor’s office – with support of the CSU provosts – following a vote of the CSU council of library deans after feedback was requested from campus faculty.

“These collections help situate students in historical and cultural moments where they have never been afforded an opportunity to see themselves,” Nataraj said. “These resources will facilitate self-reflection as well as beginning or extending vital scholarly conversations that will positively impact current and future generations by helping them feel validated within the academy.”

The library worked with the ethnic studies and American Indian studies departments when deciding which collections to pursue. A survey also was sent to all faculty early this spring to garner feedback and narrow down focus on what would have the greatest impact on students.

The new American Indian Histories and Cultures collection includes art and written work from the culture’s earliest contact with European settlers.

There is also a collection called Race Relations in America, which was an institute that investigated racial conflict and documented the fight for civil rights. It includes speeches, reports, surveys and analyses produced by the department and institute participants, including Charles S. Johnson and Thurgood Marshall.

“Actively working to center the experiences of those who have been excluded, marginalized and harmed through our shared history is essential to building CSUSM’s library collections and furthering CSUSM’s social justice mission,” Magnuson said. “CSUSM’s library collections need to represent the research interests and experiences of our students and faculty, all of whom have a right to see themselves and their communities represented when they do research with CSUSM library resources. It is critical for libraries to intentionally collect and preserve histories and narratives of people who have been excluded and marginalized from dominant culture, so that researchers can use them to surface and amplify voices that otherwise may not be heard.”

A dedicated group determined to provide impactful resources, the library also is planning community and campus oral history projects focused on campus community voices. A deep dive of the library’s print book collection also will occur to establish gaps to be filled.

A university library has long been a place for learning, a place to revisit the past to create a better future. Like bees pollinating to positively impact our environment, the new collections are expected to inspire learners to take their newfound knowledge from the CSUSM library and spread it into the world.

The pay-it-forward arena always has available seats.

“The library does not exist in a vacuum, inured to the structural inequities and systemic oppression that impacts Black, Indigenous and People of Color,” Nataraj said. “Our collections are organic, and library staff and faculty constantly update them to reflect the changing sensibilities of the world around us, including developing our materials to be more representative and anti-racist, addressing instances of racist language in our collections and catalog records, and analyzing our print collections to fill gaps. 

“Being anti-racist is a collective responsibility on the CSUSM campus. Since the collections directly support the teaching mission of the university, the library also commits to creating co-curricular programming for the campus community on anti-racism, systemic oppression and similar topics.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Dan Rios was new to the craft as a nontraditional student at San Diego City College in the late 1960s, but he could recognize a valuable lesson when he heard it. The words of that teacher, Bill Dendle, followed Rios when he began his career as a newspaper photographer with the Escondido Times-Advocate in 1968. They stuck with him when that newspaper attempted to dispose of its collection of photo negatives in the ’70s and Rios rescued them from the scrap heap.

The words continued to resonate as Rios amassed dozens and dozens of boxes full of negatives over the decades and stored them in his increasingly overburdened garage. And they echoed in his mind long after he retired in 2001 and had to decide what to do with the enormous collection.

Thanks to the wisdom of Dendle, the diligence of Rios and the help of some history-loving friends, Rios’ life’s work as a photojournalist now belongs to the Cal State San Marcos library in perpetuity. Donated in 2018, the Dan Rios Papers, as the library’s Special Collections department has coined it, consists of an estimated one million images that were originally stashed in more than 40,000 envelopes and almost 200 boxes. The collection also contains large- and medium-format prints, contact sheets and hundreds of letters that Rios received over the years from readers who were affected by his photos.

“I’m over the moon about this. I never thought anything like this would happen,” said Rios, 83, who lives in Escondido with his wife, Theresa. “I just wanted the negatives to go somewhere that they could be stored, perhaps used a little bit.”

The library held a private ceremony on July 23 to honor Rios and his legacy as a photographer who chronicled decades of growth in North County and beyond (Rios spoke at the event). The library also recently held a crowdfunding campaign that raised $6,600 to purchase materials for rehousing the collection in an archivally safe manner. 

“This is a collection that documents three decades of North County life,” said Sean Visintainer, head of Special Collections at CSUSM. “It documents its communities, its development, its important events, its architecture, its nature. That's very rare to have in an archival collection something that is as broad in terms of the subjects that have been photographed and as focused at the same time.

“In terms of importance, for this time period, I'm incredibly thrilled that we have this collection at CSUSM. And I think it's going to be important to our students, our scholars, our faculty and our regional community in ways that we can't even imagine yet because we don't have the work completed to see what its impact is going to be. But I know it's going to be impactful because there's not much else like it out there.”

Throughout his career at the Times-Advocate (which merged with another paper and became the North County Times in 1995), the boxes accumulated in Rios’ garage even as he had no idea what he ultimately would do with them. Members of the Escondido historical community became aware of Rios’ collection, some of them long before his retirement, and Rios finally succumbed to their good-natured pressure in 2017.

Local historian Alexa Clausen led the effort to find a home for Rios’ treasure trove. The Escondido History Center, of which she was a board member, had no room for it, and the San Diego Union-Tribune had no use for it. Other roads also hit a dead end.

Around the same time, CSUSM was forming its Special Collections department, which is designed to take on projects of such size and scope. It was a good match, too, for Rios, who first shot pictures of the campus back when it was a poultry farm and who sent two daughters to the university, including one who was part of the first graduating class.

“This fit perfectly with the mission of Special Collections, and it’s really important to our local history,” Visintainer said. “It was a natural fit for us to take this collection on.”

Visintainer was hired by CSUSM in 2019, one year after Rios donated his negatives and other items to the library. Since his arrival, Visintainer has overseen the organization of the Rios project, with most of the day-to-day work being done by Laura Nelson, a library services specialist.

During what’s called the first-pass inventory, Nelson has gone through almost all of the more than 40,000 envelopes. Some of them contain a single image, others as many as a few hundred. She is recording the title, date and other descriptive information that’s on the envelope, and all of that will be published online in a searchable database.

About half of the images, however, feature no context at all. So as an initial attempt to fill in those gaps, the library applied for and received a community-engaged scholarship grant from Community Relations & University Engagement to pay a student this academic year to digitize 11,000 images and post them on Flickr. Subsequent outreach into Escondido will try to use crowdsourcing and community memory to identify people and buildings who have been lost to history.

Rios’ assignments were mainly in Escondido and neighboring North County cities, but he also ventured south into San Diego and even Mexico. Visintainer was impressed to discover photos of the construction of the Coronado Bridge and other landmarks downtown and in Balboa Park, as well as significant happenings like a visit to Camp Pendleton by Margaret Thatcher, the storied British prime minister of the 1980s.

“A million images. Just crazy. I can’t believe it,” Rios said. “I loved being a photographer. I loved running around town like an idiot with my camera. People accepted me and were kind to me all over town.”

Notably, along with his immense collection, Rios also gave CSUSM copyrights to his images, which means that they are free for the public to use.

“You just don’t see collections of this size, documenting an area to this breadth and depth, that are publicly available,” Visintainer said. “It’s an incredibly selfless and wonderful thing that Dan did.”

The ceremony this weekend celebrating Rios’ legacy doubles as something of a capstone to an improbable life. Rios grew up in a Spanish-speaking household in the Central Valley town of Hanford, and he dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help support his family of day laborers, picking grapes or cotton or whatever crop was in season.

Feeling suffocated by the heat and a general dearth of hope, Rios persuaded his parents to move to San Diego, where two of his aunts lived. There, he and his father found work with a landscaping company, and he eventually was charged with maintaining the multi-acre lot of the La Jolla Art Center (now the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego).

Rios came to realize, though, that his lack of education was hurting his job prospects, and in his mid-20s he enrolled at City College to study English grammar and math. Photography was an accidental discovery, but Mr. Dendle changed everything.

More than 50 years later, the CSUSM library is the beneficiary.

“I can’t even express my feelings because it’s so overwhelming that they’re going to find a use for my photos and help students and researchers and people who are interested in history,” Rios said. “If that helps them do their work and advance in their careers and I’m a small factor in that, that pleases me to no end.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

The risk paid off.

Peterson eventually entered her paper on the representation of American Indians in Hollywood into the Cal State San Marcos Library Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity and came away as one of six winners, each of whom earned a $600 cash prize.

“Native Americans were actually some of the first people on film,” Peterson said. “And it's kind of a long and complicated history.”

Peterson, a junior who attended high school at nearby Mission Vista in Oceanside, began her research studying a documentary called “Reel Injun,” which walks viewers through a decade-by-decade history of American Indians in Hollywood in the 20^th century.

What Peterson’s research taught her was that American Indians were often inaccurately represented on film.

Her paper showed that it wasn’t until the revival of the Western in the 1990s that a more accurate representation of American Indians, due to creating their own films, was occurring.

The end result was an award she didn’t envision winning.

“I was really surprised and really excited,” Peterson said about her reaction to winning the award. “It felt good knowing that what I was writing about was being recognized, and that not only was it good enough to get me a good grade, but it was good enough writing to be recognized by the school.”

Submissions for the library award ranged from written research papers to creative works such as art, music, lyrics, poetry and dance.

Peterson didn’t have to look far for examples of authentic representation of American Indians. The library is currently displaying a collection of paintings by Eric Tippeconnic, an enrolled member of the Comanche nation and assistant professor in American Indian Studies. Joely Proudfit, department chair of American Indian Studies,  is the founder and executive director of California’s American Indian & Indigenous Film Festival presented by CSUSM’s California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center.

“That’s actually something that I cover in my paper,” said Peterson, who said history professor Robert Miller was a major influence in her research. “California's American Indian and Indigenous Film Festival is a group of Native filmmakers that’s supported in part by Cal State San Marcos. And so it was really cool to find that tie in.”

As for Peterson’s future, she may combine her writing background with her history major and love for film to write and critique more about media and movies.

For now, it’s a hobby. Her senior year will determine which direction she’ll go next.

But wherever her career takes her, it will be greatly influenced by history.

“Learning about the place that you're from is really important,” Peterson said. “Not just for historians but for everybody. Taking a class relating to California history was really enlightening for me. And it's a subject that I was passively interested in. But this made me a lot more cognizant of when I watched movies, how people were represented and how that affects the way that we see other people in film.”

Library Award Winners

• Daniel Crescencio Castro, “American-Anime: How Japanese Anime Influenced American Cartoons”
• Kennedy Caudle and Courtney Johnson, “Examining the Impact of Human Presence on Native Insect Pollinators in Coastal Sage Scrub Habitat in North County San Diego”
• Emily Culbertson, “Modernized or Industrialized”
• Ariana Null, “The Hermits”
• Katelyn Peterson, “Native Americans in Hollywood”
• Ruben Sanchez, “Before Christ, There Was Augustus: Comparing the Imperial Cult in Hispania and Gaul”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The practice is especially important in a state like California – which is home to 110 federally recognized tribes, the most of any state – and at a university like Cal State San Marcos, which is located on the traditional territory of the Luiseňo/Payómkawichum people.  

Not long after Eric Tippeconnic was hired as a tenure-track professor in the American Indian studies department in summer 2020, he was approached by Toni Olivas, CSUSM’s engagement and inclusion librarian, who’s in charge of the library’s Context Exhibit Series. Olivas knew that Tippeconnic, besides being an expert in Native history, was a painter of national renown.   

Encouraged by Olivas, Tippeconnic came up with the idea of an art exhibit that would serve as a visual land acknowledgment.  

“Land acknowledgements are vital,” said Tippeconnic, an enrolled member of the Comanche nation. “Native history largely has been erased, so the land acknowledgement is one way for us as a society to recognize the peoples who have belonged to this land since time immemorial. It’s a way to pause and reflect on whose land we are walking on and provide them with the proper respect.

“You can do the same thing visually: ‘We’ve said the words, we’ve acknowledged it, now let’s celebrate the resiliency of this land's original inhabitants through imagery.' "

That was the inspiration for the art that’s now on display on the third floor of the CSUSM library as part of the spring Context Exhibit Series. The collection, titled “Our Existence Is Our Resistance” (which borrows from the motto of CSUSM’s American Indian studies department), contains 12 acrylic paintings on canvas by Tippeconnic that tell a story of resiliency and pride in multi-layered Native American cultures that are deeply rooted in honor and tradition. The title, Tippeconnic says, is an allusion to federal and state policies that decimated the numbers of Native peoples in the 19^th century. By some estimates, between 1849 and 1900, the Native population in California declined from about a million to only 17,000. 

“The very fact that these people are still here and still celebrating their culture and passing on their traditions through their song and dance is a testament to their resilience,” Tippeconnic said.  

The exhibit is both in person and virtual, and will remain on display through July 31. The library will host an event to celebrate the artwork on May 4 at 6 p.m. in the Kellogg Reading Room (it also will be streamed live). Tippeconnic will speak at the event along with President Ellen Neufeldt and Joely Proudfit, chair of American Indian studies. 

“Our department is so fortunate to have Eric’s work featured so prominently for the entire campus to share in the vibrant, contemporary depiction of living cultures of Southern California Indian people, bringing our department motto to life,” Proudfit said.   

Tippeconnic created nine of the 12 paintings for this exhibit specifically. Almost all of them feature Native people either bird dancing or bird singing, which are traditional rituals performed by tribe members in the state.  

Two of the subjects in the artwork are current or former CSUSM students. “California Girls” is a tribute to alumna Mejaumi Rosales, who’s depicted dancing with her two sisters. Tippeconnic remembers meeting Rosales during his first day on campus as a lecturer several years ago. Tippeconnic was lost, both in terms of where to go on campus and how to use the classroom technology, and Rosales helped him on both fronts, in the process displaying a level of kindness and collegiality that stuck with Tippeconnic. 

“Over the years, we’ve developed a really good relationship, and since she has graduated, I’ve been able to watch her and her young family grow,” he said of Rosales, a member of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians. “To me, they're the ideal young Native family. Mejaumi is not only leading by example by procuring a college education that will benefit her Native community, but she has introduced her children to the dance arena."

Two of the paintings, “California Soul” and “California Sun,” portray Kiara Love Flores, an American Indian studies major who’s active in the American Indian Student Alliance (AISA) at CSUSM. Tippeconnic said Flores is representative of many students in the department in that she’s Native not just by blood but by behavior – by actively participating in her culture and passing traditions on to her younger siblings.  

Flores also assisted Tippeconnic by posing in her tribal regalia for photos taken on campus by Ilianna Ramirez, the AISA president, and then sending them to him for inspiration with the paintings. 

“The whole exhibit is collaborative,” Tippeconnic said. “I might be the artist, but it wouldn’t be possible without all of these other people.” 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

“History has always made me the happiest,” said Teater, who’s partial to the modern civil rights era herself.  

Teater earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Cal State San Marcos in 2018 and is now in her second year of the university’s master’s program, with plans to graduate in December. When an opportunity arose to do a paid internship through CSUSM’s library focused on oral history projects, she leaped at it.  

Teater is one of four history graduate students working for the library this semester as oral history interns. The pilot program is intended to give the students a real-world taste of a vital public history activity of documenting the experiences and stories of the local community.  

“While the learning component is an awesome part of this internship, we are doing actual work, and it will be encapsulated in the archives at CSUSM long after we all graduate,” Teater said. “Being paid makes my work feel valuable, and it gives me some footing for the future. I hope this is a trend that continues, especially at CSUSM.” 

Teater and the other interns can be paid for their work thanks to the generosity of a Rancho Santa Fe woman with a deep and abiding love of history and libraries. Before she died last year, Ellie Johns set up a gift fund to support internships exposing students to the field of library science and archives.  

The internships are funded by an agreement between CSUSM, the Rancho Santa Fe Foundation and the Library Guild of Rancho Santa Fe, Johns’ longtime former organization. 

“Ellie was very passionate about the field of library science, and she wanted her legacy to reflect that,” said Jennifer Fabbi, dean of the library. “From the time I was first introduced to Ellie’s work in 2015, she was very clear about her desire to impact the futures of those interested in library work.” 

Eleanor Rix Johns was born in California in 1924. Attending UC Berkeley as an English major, she met her future husband, Cecil “Seese” Johns, in 1943 and accompanied him as an officer’s wife in his assignments in Asia and Europe. She joined the occupation forces in Japan and served as a writer for Stars and Stripes.  

After her husband retired from the military, the couple settled in Rancho Santa Fe. A lifelong lover of books, Johns became a member of the city’s library guild and served on the board as president and membership chair, personally recruiting more than 200 new members. As an early organizer of the Book Cellar, the guild’s used bookstore, she sought to create an ongoing income stream to support the guild. The result is a store staffed by volunteers that operates to this day and grows annually.  

Following her time serving on the guild board, Johns moved on to become a librarian at the Rancho Santa Fe branch of the San Diego County library and worked for many more years, finally deciding to retire in her late 80s.  

“Ellie was committed to education, the power of literacy and lifelong learning,” said Chris Sichel, president and CEO of the Rancho Santa Fe Foundation, which administers the endowment funding the initiative. “At RSF Foundation, we work with donors to establish ways they can support the causes closest to their hearts, even after they are gone, and this scholarship fund is one such example of the power of legacy giving. 

“Ellie knew the value of being a lifelong learner, and her legacy will be carried out by people who visit the CSUSM library and find answers to their questions or are inspired to delve deeper and learn even more about how we better the future.” 

Teater is now one of those people carrying out Johns’ legacy. She and the other library interns are working on an oral history project focused on Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) who have created change in North County. Under the guidance of Sean Visintainer (head of Special Collections) and Jennifer Ho (Special Collections archivist), the interns are learning the ins and outs of the craft, and after spring break they will begin interviewing sources for the oral history.   

Teater is also an intern for the Lambda Archives of San Diego, and she’s working with that organization on her master’s thesis about queer people of color during the rise and height of the AIDS crisis in San Diego. She plans to pursue a career in archives or library science and might enroll in a Master of Library and Information Science program as soon as the fall semester.  

Johns, no doubt, would have been proud.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

“She always greeted you with a smile, and she was so kind and gracious,” said Jennifer Fabbi, dean of the library. “Everyone who knew her talks about how she loved to dance, but I also recall several conversations with her about the importance of self-defense classes. She was very self-reliant and admirably tough.” 

Boyd, a library services specialist, died unexpectedly last Nov. 16. She was on the eve of a well-earned retirement after 25 years of service at CSUSM and had been looking forward to spending more time with her family. 

The most important thing in Boyd’s life was her close-knit family. She is survived by her husband, who she was married to for 65-plus years, two daughters, four granddaughters and five great-grandchildren. 

The library has created a crowdfunding campaign, ending on March 2, to raise $5,000 for a memorial bench to be located adjacent to the library. This bench will serve as a place for the campus community to remember Boyd and to reflect on her spirit of service, positive outlook and generosity.   

Her contributions to the library, and particularly to the Collections Delivery and Access department (CDA), cannot be overstated. Boyd’s colleagues remember her as always quick with positivity, humor and enthusiasm, ready to pitch in at a moment’s notice to help or share a joke or good story, whatever was needed. Her patience and wisdom were the glue that held the CDA department together during stressful times.

In her role, Boyd tracked the usage data for the millions of online resources the library provides access to. Because of her careful work in this area, over the years the library has been able to ensure that every collections dollar is being spent on resources that are being used, and to make informed choices as curriculum and research needs have developed over time.  

Boyd also managed the library’s government document shipments and physical processing, and had knowledge and expertise in repairing damaged books, saving many books and resources over the years. In addition to all of this, she found time to oversee and supervise acquisition student employees, track student employee budgets, and order and keep track of CDA’s supplies and annual supply budget.  

Boyd is greatly missed, and the library thanks all who are willing to join us in making a memorial gift in her honor. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

As the date of the long-awaited unveiling approached in mid-July, Ellen Hawthorne was tasked with leading a team that would excavate the capsule and catalog its contents in preparation for a formal ceremony in early August. So Hawthorne, the director of event planning, gathered two workers from Facility Services to begin digging.

They logically started at the site of the plaque, but the time capsule wasn’t there. A couple of other holes dug nearby also bore no fruit.

Hawthorne realized she had a problem. None of the people who attended the original burial in 1996 still worked at CSUSM. And no one working at the university today knew where to find the capsule.

A lead emerged in the person of a former CSUSM facilities employee who helped bury the capsule and still lives in the area. Hawthorne called the ex-employee, Mike Rivera, who remembered the capsule being small (about a foot long), close to the surface and near the edge of the circle, where the flagpoles are. Rivera even agreed to meet Hawthorne in the circle one night to spray paint a few X’s where he thought the capsule might be located.

The next day, however, proved fruitless as well, and enlisting the aid of a second ex-facilities worker (in addition to a backhoe to expedite the process) brought the group no closer to its prize. By this time, several days had elapsed and at least half a dozen holes dotted Craven Circle, eliciting looks of curiosity and confusion from campus passers-by.

“It was like a treasure hunt, but you never find the treasure,” Hawthorne said. “It was really quite a comedy of errors. And every day, (physics professor) Chuck De Leone would ride by on his bike, saying, ‘Ellen, did you find it yet?’ ‘No, we didn’t find it.’ ”

Growing with the number of empty holes was the fear that the time capsule accidentally had been dug up or damaged when the circle had undergone re-landscaping about five years earlier. Close to throwing up her hands in defeat, Hawthorne got approval to hire a company that uses ground-penetrating radar to unearth buried items.

Sure enough, the radar did its job and pinpointed the capsule, about 6 feet away from where the initial hole had been dug. As it turned out, the stone marker had inadvertently been moved during the landscaping project.

What did the team expect to see underground? It was mostly a mystery. Among the few things known were that the time capsule was a PVC cylinder donated by the local Vallecitos Water District and that it was buried in August 1996. It was dedicated to “Uncle” Henry Rodriguez, a Luiseño elder who served as a significant community consultant to CSUSM since its founding and who attended the burial ceremony with then-President Bill Stacy and several other local leaders.

According to The Pride newspaper (the forerunner to the Cougar Chronicle), which covered the event, the capsule was filled with “photographs, historic maps, news clippings, letters to the future, catalogs, research papers, poetry, issues of The Pride and other memorabilia.” But no formal inventory was ever made by Associated Students (no “Inc.” yet), which collected the items.

Judith Downie was a library staff member back in 1996 but was not involved in the time capsule process. This summer, though, Downie was to be heavily involved; as a longtime history and Special Collections librarian, she would be gathering the materials in the tube and archiving them for posterity.

Downie was one of about a dozen people present for the surfacing of the capsule. When she noticed water starting to fill up the hole, she assumed that a sprinkler line had been struck.

“Someone said, ‘No, it’s coming out of the time capsule,’ ” Downie said. “I really thought I was going to throw up. My heart dropped, and I was like, ‘Please, let them be wrong.’ But then I could see that the seal had cracked and that water was pouring out. When they pulled the tube out, they had to take most things out of the capsule, and I saw these sodden garbage bags, and I said, ‘It’s done, there’s nothing here.’ ”

Well, there was something. There was a repulsively foul smell emanating from the cylinder, which turned out to be 5 feet long and 16 inches in diameter. There were blocks of mud that used to be sheets of paper. There were live earthworms.

“It was quite an acidic soup from the water and the soil blended together,” Downie said.

As a librarian, Downie loves a good preservation challenge, and her attitude quickly switched from despondence to determination as she put on what she calls her “How can I save this?” hat. The entire capsule, mess that it was, got transferred to the loading dock of the Kellogg Library, where Downie set up folding tables and went to work with Sean Visintainer, head of Special Collections, who dressed himself in clear plastic bags to keep from getting too muddy.

 Over several days, they brought all their skills to bear on an overwhelming salvaging operation. Downie, for example, was able to save three nearly disintegrated T-shirts by washing them by hand in her bathtub with an archivally approved cleaning agent. Other items that survived include old student parking permits, a CSUSM pennant and an alumni bumper sticker. One of the end caps of the tube was signed by some of the students who organized the capsule 25 years ago.  

The material that was best preserved was 147 pieces of paper, stored in heavy-duty plastic and compiled by Uncle Henry himself. They consisted of newspaper clippings and legislation and testimony related to water rights for the local tribes, which was a major concern of Rodriguez’s. For his work on behalf of CSUSM, he received an honorary doctorate from the university in 2001 and died a year later at age 82. 

Tishmall Turner, tribal liaison for CSUSM, said Rodriguez would be inspired by the evolution of the university into one that boasts a center for California Indian culture and sovereignty, an American Indian studies major, and the highest percentage of American Indian students in the 23-campus CSU system.  

“I think that he would be very proud of the commitment that Cal State San Marcos has made to honor the local indigenous people, and that he probably wouldn't have thought that this relationship would look like what it does 25 years later,” Turner said. “That short time of his investment in CSUSM has really benefited our campus community and its knowledge of the Luiseño people, the traditional homelands of where the university is built.” 

The items that Downie and Visintainer preserved will be stored in an archive within Special Collections. But Downie had trouble not dwelling over the things that had to be discarded and will be lost to history. Three envelopes of photographs in which the ink had run, rendering them indecipherable. A photo album with sheets featuring an adhesive that turned to glue. A binder of letters and pictures solicited from community members that was overrun by mold.  

“These were all originals, and I’m sure there are no copies anywhere,” Downie said. “A lot of those people are no longer with us, so there’s no way to piece it back together. There was a lot of mourning. It was like, ‘All these pictures are gone, I don’t know what they were, and I’m very sad about that.’ ” 

Downie said the students who supervised the time capsule in 1996 surely meant well, but that the planning would have benefited greatly from the input of a librarian with archival or preservation expertise. 

“Materials could have been more securely packaged, and I think questions would have been raised about the design of the capsule and how it was sealed,” she said. “I talk to lots of other archivists who have dealt with damaged time capsule contents — it seems to be a common occurrence. It’s pretty much the same story. Not to knock anyone, but preservation for the long term isn’t that simple. This is like wiring a house; you want someone who is trained.” 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

So when she decided to write and produce a film for her final project assignment for a world cinema course, she accessed the creative side of her brain, the part that produced many a drawing and painting while growing up in nearby Oceanside.

The result was the film “The Routine,” which looked at the struggles associated with the pandemic in general, but specifically the struggles associated with being a college student during this time. Her creativity and technical abilities earned her a 2020-21 CSUSM University Library Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity.

Glorioso was one of 12 students to win the award, which came with a $600 prize.

“I just really wanted to convey the struggles that college students are going through right now with a pandemic and being virtual and just being stuck at home and that type of environment,” said Glorioso, who is the College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences representative to Associated Students, Inc. “I wanted to do a film that touched on the COVID-19 pandemic, and kind of this social commentary type of film that's really relevant with what we're all experiencing right now; and touching on how it is being a college student and doing things virtually. So that was my inspiration on my film and making it using the neorealist conventions to get my story across.”

Glorioso’s film inspirations were Italian filmmakers Roberto Rossellini and brothers Vittorio and Paolo Taviani, some of the neorealist directors she was introduced to in her world cinema course. Not a veteran of foreign films by any means, she was able to view many of their films through the library database.

She filmed most of it with a DSLR camera inside her house because of the pandemic. At the end, she wound up at the beach “because that's something I would have been daydreaming about.”

Her theme of escapism came across to show how it was unclear whether the end was a dream in the middle of the pandemic or the hopeful reality ending of being at the beach when the pandemic's over.

In a little less than two years, Glorioso has made the most of her opportunities on campus, including working at the library last year before the pandemic.

In addition to being the CHABSS representative to ASI, she is an ambassador to The Alliance to Accelerate Excellence in Education.

“I really want to get the most out of my time here,” she said. “In my first year, my main goal was just to get involved on campus as much as I could and take advantage of as many opportunities as I could. While I'm here, whatever opportunity comes across to try to apply for something I definitely want to take that opportunity.”

As for her post undergraduate plans, she’s interested in a career in either law or the public policy side of government. Whether it means writing public policy, being an advocate or being a practicing attorney, she knows she wants to make a positive impact on her community.

And perhaps one day pursue a career as a filmmaker?

“Maybe,” said Glorioso, with a laugh.

Visit the library website for a complete list of winners.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Elinne Becket, assistant professor, biology

Daun Everforest, pre-health faculty advisor, biology

Becket (pictured top) and Everforest were both nominated for their commitment to ensuring the well-being of their students during these challenging times while also working diligently to find new ways to help students continue to learn with less stress.

“They are two of the faculty who have had the most sleepless nights over how to reach their students since the pandemic began,” the nominator wrote. “They replaced high-stakes exams with guided worksheets, testing them out, revising, then trying them again and finding that they are working.”

The nominator praised Becket and Everforest for their collegiality and humble perspectives. It was noted that students said learning from Becket and Everforest was much deeper than what typically comes from studying for exams. Students said it was clear that Becket and Everforest have a deep devotion not only to learning but also about the students on a personal level.

Regina Frasca, director, Safety, Health and Sustainability

Frasca was nominated for leading efforts to help the university adapt to the pandemic environment while keeping campus community members as safe as possible. One nominator made special note of Frasca’s work to help the College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

“Regina listens to our needs and does her best to minimize disruption to campus operations while meeting all regulations and working safely,” the nominator wrote. “She works to understand the goals of any requests. If we cannot do what was requested, she ensures we can figure out a way to actually reach the goals in another way. She is a true partner in educating our students as well as keeping them safe.”

 Another nominator highlighted Frasca’s work with the biology department.

“She has also worked closely with us to identify safe strategies that have allowed us to teach some critical in-person laboratory courses, providing students with the hands-on experience that simply cannot be achieved virtually and/or via simulations,” the nominator wrote.

Debbie Blair, library services specialist

Sonia Jimenez, library services specialist

Natalya Serge Magazino, library services specialist

Blair, Jimenez (pictured bottom) and Magazino (pictured top) were nominated for their contributions to the resource sharing and interlibrary loan team, which helps students and faculty obtain materials that aren’t part of Kellogg Library’s inventory.

The nominator noted that the team has innovated extensively to adapt services to enable the library to mail books to users’ homes and route requests for digital resources to be acquired for users through the library’s Digital on Demand service.

“The resource sharing unit is completely user-centered and responsive, ensuring that questions about resources and requests are answered as soon as possible – and most requests for digital materials are handled within 1-2 days,” the nominator wrote. “So far this academic year, resource sharing has received over 5,000 requests for resources and is able to provide or fill more than 95% of requests by borrowing from other CSUs and through partnerships with universities around the world. We are extremely fortunate to have such an amazing team that supports faculty teaching and research and student learning!”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

On the final day of 2012, Ecke had completed the sale of his family’s storied Encinitas ranch to the Leichtag Foundation, a local nonprofit. As part of the transaction, he had negotiated a one-year lease-back, which meant that he had one year of access to every square foot of the sprawling property – one year to sift through literal barns full of stuff accumulated during more than a century of business for a family that had become, in Ecke’s telling, the Microsoft of growing poinsettias and selling them around the world. Such was their market dominance.

What to do, Ecke wondered, with the overwhelming cache of business records, flower catalogs, family photos, correspondence, maps and other documents that surely possessed historical value, given the Eckes’ prominence in the building of North County going back to his great-grandfather’s immigration from Germany in the early 1900s?

“Most people just have to clean out their garage once in a while, or they move,” Ecke said. “We hadn’t moved in 100 years. So I found myself digging through 100 years of Ecke stuff, and it was quite a task.”

As Ecke dove into the initial legwork, spending months sorting and organizing and, yes, purging with the help of a local historian, he thought more and more about a permanent home for his family’s archives. What better place than a local, growing university that could give the collection the attention and space that Ecke thought it deserved?

What better place than the Cal State San Marcos University Library?

By the end of 2013, Ecke had donated hundreds of boxes worth of materials to CSUSM, thus establishing the foundation of what became the library’s Special Collections department. Eight years later, the partnership between the Ecke family and CSUSM is stronger than ever.

Late last year, the Eckes gave $80,000 to the university in continued support of a collection that formally is called the Paul Ecke Ranch, Inc. Business Records and Family Papers. That raised the family’s total giving to more than $350,000 dating back to their first gift in 1996.

“There are so many benefits to having this collection at the library,” said Jennifer Ho, an archivist for Special Collections. “Local history is the main thing. When most people think of San Diego, they think of the coast or downtown or the border areas, but there’s not enough attention given to the North County area. So that aspect is huge. The business was started by an immigrant, so you’ve got that immigrant-hustle, American Dream story. And it started as a small business, so you have some business history there.

“And, of course, the poinsettias angle. We think of poinsettias as the traditional holiday flower, but it’s just because of the Eckes’ incredible marketing that that’s the case.”

Ho’s position as the archivist in charge of the Ecke collection exists thanks to funding from the Eckes. A 2007 alumna of CSUSM, Ho was hired in November 2019 to build on the work of her predecessor, Aditi Worcester, who organized and created an inventory of the materials in the collection.

One of the first things Ho did upon arriving at her alma mater was take a tour of the ranch at the invitation of Paul Ecke III and his sister, Lizbeth. Paul whisked Ho and colleagues Jennifer Fabbi (library dean) and Sean Visintainer (head of Special Collections) around the property in a golf cart, under the theory that it’s easier to understand the history of a place once you’ve seen it with your own eyes.

“It was a really great all-day tour, telling us about the buildings and the home they used to live in and all the research and development,” Ho said. “They’re lovely people. And we email a few times a year about materials they want to add to the collection or photos that I’ve put online.”

Ho had been in her job for only a few months when the coronavirus pandemic struck and forced the closure of CSUSM’s physical campus, including the library. For nearly a year, Ho has been able to work from inside the library just one day a week, which has slowed the progress of her primary task: scanning the reams of documents and turning them into digital files. She anticipates that the pace will pick up considerably when campus reopens and the library can bring on student workers to assist her.  

Having pored through most of the collection himself before he donated it, Paul Ecke has some personal favorites. A canceled check for a 50-cent sack of flour from the Great Depression. The annual catalogs that detailed the ranch’s stockpile of poinsettias and other flowers. Large aerial photos of the property arranged for by his grandfather, Paul Ecke Sr., nicknamed “Mr. Poinsettia” as the man who cultivated the business into a global force.  

“For me, those photos are a fascinating historical record for an era before Google Earth,” Ecke said. “I think they’re going to be great for future generations.” 

Materials directly related to the poinsettia business are the primary draw, but as Fabbi says, "this local history collection also provides a magnifying glass through which to examine national and global happenings over many decades.”  

• There are letters from the brother of Paul Ecke Sr., Hans, who served in World War I and died of the Spanish flu, the last time that the world was in the grips of a pandemic of such severity. A letter from Paul to Hans marked “return to sender” was how the family discovered that Hans had died. 

• There is correspondence between Paul Ecke Sr. and Japanese farmers who worked on neighboring land in Encinitas. When the farmers were placed in internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, they asked Ecke to store on his ranch things like their tractors, trucks and family heirlooms. One letter expressed the family’s gratitude for the Eckes’ role in helping to save their farm.  

• There’s an abundance of documents connected to the Bracero program, a contract between the U.S. and Mexican governments in the early 1940s to bring more than 4 million Mexican laborers north to work temporarily in agriculture because of an American labor shortage stemming from World War II. The Eckes employed Bracero workers and Paul, who was a boy when the program ended in the mid-60s, remembers his grandfather and father talking about it. “It was an important part of the ranch history because it was hard to get workers and they filled a need, especially after the war,” he said. Ho said the Bracero documents are being digitized for CSUSM faculty to use as research material for their students, in part because of the relevance of the program to the pressing immigration issues of today. “There are a lot of echoes between the Bracero program and today’s immigrants, documented or not, coming in and trying to make a life for themselves, which is exactly what these men were trying to do,” Ho said. 

Nearly a decade after he first began tackling the mountain of artifacts on his family’s ranch, Ecke feels as invested in the project and CSUSM’s work as ever. He relishes the regular check-ins with Ho and colleagues to review, explain and clarify things.  

“Maybe it’s a lifelong journey for me, meeting with Cal State San Marcos to help them get it right,” Ecke said. “There’s a bunch of stuff around North County with the Ecke name on it, but as people age, as people die, as new people come to town, the memory of our family is going to keep fading. I think they did some extraordinary things in their time, and I’m really excited that, because of this collection, if you want to know who they were, you can find out.” 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Chad Huggins, technical director, CHABSS School of Arts

Responsible for the Arts building, Huggins has been on campus numerous times during the pandemic to supervise upgrades and major repairs, including replacing the dance floor. The nominator noted that he also led and supported all on-campus efforts, including classes that met on campus during the fall and ones meeting on campus this spring.

“This has meant much work with health and safety to establish distancing guidelines, access to PPE, etc., in our classrooms and throughout the building,” the nominator wrote. “It has also meant planning and budgeting kits for students who pay lab fees for their classes. Chad has worked with shop technician Judy Ryan to budget, purchase and distribute these kits that include materials and supplies for students so they can benefit from their art studio classes. Chad has worked with technician Albert Rascon on the digital equipment, including check-out that gives access to photo and video equipment to our students.”

John Pili, library services specialist, Library User Services

Pili was lauded for continually seeking out new methods of connecting with students, including starting up Virtual Library Learn sessions and providing students with encouraging study spaces through Virtual Study Sessions.

“John has been so thoughtful and compassionate toward our students while we all attempt to navigate this virtual world,” the nominator wrote.

“John always puts our students first, and he has not let COVID-19 get in the way of that. He is using this unique opportunity to expand upon his skills in order to improve the experience of our users and ensure they are getting the most out of their experience at CSUSM.”

Blake Schilling, Inspiration Studios coordinator, IITS

Before the university moved to virtual learning last spring, Schilling contacted instructors to make arrangements for them to visit Inspiration Studios to record their lectures as quickly as possible. The nominator noted that when one instructor wanted to visit to record his lectures last fall, Schilling redesigned the learning glass technology so the instructor could record without needing Schilling’s assistance to ensure social distancing.

“Blake further revised the method of using the learning glass so the instructor could record the lectures to the cloud and have immediate access to post them for the class,” the nominator wrote. “The instructor was so pleased with the new functionality, he continued to come weekly and recorded lectures he had previously made because the quality had improved so much.”

Rosa Solorio, custodian, Facility Services

Solorio is assigned to Craven Hall, and her nominator noted her diligence in ensuring that all areas are clean and disinfected.

“I see her disinfecting all of the high-touch surfaces multiple times a day,” the nominator wrote. “There have been so many tasks and cleaning duties added to her already busy schedule, and she has taken them on with a smile and a great work ethic. I have never seen her sitting down or taking a break. I feel safe working in Craven Hall because I know Rosa is there doing her best to keep us safe.

“The work of our custodial team plays a key role in the university’s return-to-campus policies. Without their hard work and dedication, returning to campus would not have been possible. Rosa stands out in that essential department.”

Hugo Wong, library services specialist, Library User Services

Wong was nominated for his instrumental role in ensuring users continue to receive services from the library throughout the pandemic. The nominator noted that Wong’s impact extends beyond the library, as he also monitors the university’s CougarBot.

The nominator noted that during the transition to virtual hours, Wong has helped support numerous events, including the library’s virtual open house and other virtual services.

“With his constant drive to learn and help others learn, I am grateful to work with Hugo and have more opportunities to hear what new skills he has discovered and how we can use those skills to improve our services and workflows,” the nominator wrote. “Hugo has always gone above and beyond, and he continues to be an essential part of the University Library and of CSUSM.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The “Stories & Snapshots: Documenting a Year of the Pandemic” virtual exhibit showcases participants’ personal stories through photography, writing and multimedia. It focuses on the resiliency of members of the CSUSM campus and surrounding community over the last year. By looking at the daily challenges and celebrations presented by the pandemic, the exhibit and archive are especially essential to our community this year. 

“The exhibit and archive help provide solace and connection during a time of fear and separation and allow us to reflect on our thoughts and feelings regarding the pandemic,” said Toni Olivas, CSUSM’s engagement and inclusion librarian. “Both of these projects remind us of our shared humanity and shared experiences while also highlighting the beauty in a period of extreme struggle for so many people.” 

The reception will include a panel discussion about the impact of the COVID-19 virus on our community, efforts by local cultural heritage institutions to document the pandemic, and how participants of these projects have shown profound strength in sharing their personal reflections. Panelists from the San Diego History Center and San Diego State University’s library will discuss their organizations’ pandemic memory collecting initiatives. They will be joined by members of CSUSM’s University Library Special Collections and Literature and Writing Studies departments.

“Cultural heritage institutions such as libraries, archives, historical societies and museums can play an important and active role in documenting history as it unfolds. In our profession, this is referred to as ‘rapid response collecting’ and has been used to document manmade and natural disasters in almost real time,” said Sean Visintainer, CSUSM head of Special Collections. “Due to the isolating nature of the pandemic, we thought we should put together a collecting effort that could reach out virtually to our community – the people who live, study and work in North San Diego County – and enable them to participate safely from a distance.”

The virtual exhibit is part of the library’s Context exhibit series. Created in 2004, this series has brought more than 30 instructionally related exhibits to CSUSM. Before the fall 2020 semester, Context exhibits were displayed in the gallery on the third floor of the Kellogg Library building. This is the second virtual Context exhibit, shifting to an online format in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“The Context library series has been supporting student learning and research through art installations for the past 17 years, and these physical and now virtual exhibits have explored a wide range of topics, including immigration, veterans, sustainability, prisons, globalization, homelessness and activism,” said Jennifer Fabbi, dean of the library.

The exhibit reception and panel discussion are free and open to the public. To RSVP, go to bit.ly/ContextEventFeb23.

For more information about the exhibit “Stories & Snapshots: Documenting a Year of the Pandemic,” contact Toni Olivas, engagement and inclusion librarian, at tolivas@csusm.edu.

For more information about the Together/Apart COVID-19 Community Memory Archive, contact Sean Visintainer, head of Special Collections, at svisintainer@csusm.edu.

For the final project, lecturer Nancy diBenedetto instructed students to create a photo book on a topic of their choosing. Many of his classmates, Northington remembers, opted to show off their newfound shutterbug skills around such themes as family or pets or hobbies. 

“My book,” he said, “was completely different.” 

As the inspiration for his photos, Northington picked a court case from that September in which the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against an Alabama woman who had sued a company that had denied her a job because she wouldn’t cut off her dreadlocks. The court determined that the move didn’t violate Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting race-based discrimination.  

Northington decided to make a social statement with his project. He sought out Black women students across campus and shot pictures of them wearing their hair naturally, and proudly.   

“It was about Black women and what they go through in the world as far as their hair being attached to their culture – that push to make them assimilate with their hair in a particular way,” Northington said. 

Northington valued the experience and received positive feedback on the visual product. Though he had no intention of studying photography when he arrived at CSUSM, he found that he was good at it and he enjoyed it – particularly the ability to use the images to counteract deeply ingrained societal stereotypes about Black people.  

This semester, the University Library is giving a platform to the art of Northington, who graduated from CSUSM in 2019. The virtual exhibit, titled “Chasing Andromeda,” displays his favorite photos from a collection that has swelled to three professionally produced photo books in addition to the ones from the class project that started the whole enterprise.  

On Thursday from 6-7 p.m., the library will host a panel via Zoom featuring Northington, two of his School of Arts instructors (diBenedetto and professor Lucy Solomon), Black Student Center Director John Rawlins III, Marilyn McWilliams and Ariel Stevenson from the Office of Inclusive Excellence, and Sean Visintainer, the library’s head of special collections. Northington’s work will be shown in a slideshow while the panel discusses the photos as well as larger issues regarding art, photography and race in America and at CSUSM. 

Anyone who joins the Zoom discussion can submit questions during the event that will be asked and answered at the end. 

“In our programming this year, we’re really focusing on representation, and I think that this exhibit fully does that,” said Jennifer Fabbi, dean of the library. “It draws attention to members of our Black community on campus, especially students, and helps us to understand how we have been conditioned to see white as the default.  

“Jake’s photography seeks to show a more holistic view of the Black members of our campus and put that in front of you, instead of some of the negative portrayals that we see on TV and in the media. The exhibit shines a spotlight on Black beauty and the Black experience on our campus, which is not something that we tend to focus on.” 

All three of Northington’s photo books will be available for viewing in the library archives when the library re-opens. The first, “HUEMAN,” published in 2017, is his attempt to “re-image Black males on a college campus,” to depict them as regular students rather than how he felt he often was treated, as someone who didn’t belong. He recalls being the only Black person in his major and dealing with people moving out of the way as he strolled across campus.

For the book, he asked his subjects not to smile to achieve the rawest look possible. And as with all of his photos, he relied only on natural light to increase the sense of authenticity.

“The title refers to not being seen as human,” Northington said. “This is me in my rawest form, giving you my somber, melancholy look. I don’t need to smile. This is me; accept it. I’m human. But I spelled ‘human’ with a ‘hue’ because the people in the book identify themselves as many races and cultures.”

The second book, “Solar Amalgamations” (2018), turned his camera’s gaze toward Black women at CSUSM. This time, he found it easier to recruit fellow students as photo subjects because he had “HUEMAN” in hand to show them how the final product would look.

And Northington’s most recent book, “WE ARE,” published this spring, captures groups of Black students rather than individuals.

“I asked people just to naturally enjoy themselves – walking, hugging, talking, skateboarding,” he said. “I want that to feel supremely exciting. I want you to see these people loving each other and loving being college students.”

Northington intended for the three book titles to combine to form a larger message – “we are human solar amalgamations” or, as he translates it, “we are stars.” There’s a similar depth of thought behind the name “Chasing Andromeda,” the virtual exhibit that culls pictures from each of his books.

“Andromeda is supposedly a queen in Africa, and she was called that by the ancient Greeks. But in Africa, the word means something else; it’s like calling something beautiful,” Northington said. “And Andromeda is also the largest cluster of stars in the solar system. Then I came to notice that Andromeda is built like a DNA helix. It spirals and it coils, which I connected to my hair and the hair of black people. So I put all that together – chasing Andromeda is like looking for the beauty in Black people.”

Northington didn’t come to CSUSM to be a photographer, nor did he limit himself to the discipline after he started to gain some praise for his work. He contributed to “Data Stacks,” a library exhibit created by Solomon and Juliana Goodlaw-Morris, CSUSM’s sustainability director, featuring student art and data visualizations about campus sustainability. He designed a program for the annual All Peoples Luncheon. He produced logos and other promotional materials for several campus organizations, including the Black Student Center, Black Student Union and Project Rebound.

And even as an alumnus – he’s now a graduate student at Cal State Fullerton, pursuing a master’s degree in education, with a concentration in higher education – Northington continues to be involved in CSUSM’s campus culture. He was interviewed by Visintainer as part of the Black Student Center Oral History Project, a collaboration with the library that aims to record and preserve the narratives of people who were instrumental to the creation of the center in 2017.

“This is not a Black-and-white thing. It’s a person thing – how people treat each other, how students on campus treat each other,” Northington said. “A law can’t make you treat me better. If things are going to change, people need to work on changing them. We have to find different avenues for change, and some people march and protest. Other people take pictures.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

After all, the actor who became famous by playing Sulu on the original “Star Trek” series, and who has gained a new legion of fans later in life as an author and activist, is a public speaker in great demand. And when the coronavirus pandemic struck in the spring, it made a visit from Takei even less likely. 

But the CSUSM University Library, which runs the Common Read program, is nothing if not resourceful, and a creative community partnership will allow that much-anticipated appearance by Takei to happen – just virtually, of course.  

The library has joined together with One Book, One San Diego, a longtime regional literacy initiative sponsored by KPBS, which on Saturday announced that it also (and coincidentally) has selected Takei’s graphic novel, “They Called Us Enemy,” as its community read for this year. Backed by the weight of more than 80 community partners, including CSUSM for the first time, One Book, One San Diego will host Takei for two virtual events this fall. Both are free and open to the public, with no limit on attendees.  

The first is the One Book kickoff on Sept. 22 at 7 p.m., featuring Takei being interviewed by Beth Accomando, a KPBS arts and culture reporter. You can register in advance here, but registration is not mandatory and the event also will be live-streamed on sites like Facebook and YouTube.  

The second event, Oct. 27 at 6 p.m., might be more geared to some CSUSM students, as it was created specifically for the 15-20 age group. It will feature a panel discussion with Takei, his co-authors (Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott) and the book’s illustrator (Harmony Becker). CSUSM students will be able to submit to the library in advance questions for Takei and the panel by video (more information to come). 

“Our library has always relied on rich collaborations with campus and community partners to make awesome things happen for our students, but at a time when financial resources are scarce, these collaborations are even more important,” said Jennifer Fabbi, dean of the library. “The partnership with KPBS and One Book, One San Diego is taking the CSUSM Common Read to new heights this year.” 

The Common Read program began in 2011 when CSUSM partnered with local colleges to bring Rebecca Skloot, author of the national bestseller “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” to San Diego County. Each fall, a campus committee, with input from stakeholders across the university, selects five books that are put up for a campus-wide vote, and the selection for the following academic year is announced in early spring. 

“As the title suggests, the main goal is to get students, faculty, staff – our entire campus community – connected through a common read,” said Toni Olivas, CSUSM’s engagement and inclusion librarian, who chairs the Common Read committee. “This is something that brings us together, and even if we have different viewpoints, we’re still able to get together as a community to discuss an important piece of literature. 

“Also, as a librarian, one of the biggest values of this program is just to get people reading.” 

“They Called Us Enemy” is a graphic memoir in which Takei revisits his haunting childhood as one of 120,000 Japanese Americans forced into internment camps by the U.S. government during World War II. The book, named one of the best of 2019 by Amazon, NPR, Publishers Weekly and several other outlets, is the first graphic novel chosen as part of Common Read, which Olivas hopes will make it more accessible to a wider campus audience. 

“I think that was really exciting for folks,” she said. “And even though it’s set in World War II, it’s still very relevant to current events with what’s happening at the border. Plus, it’s George Takei. He’s fantastic.” 

This year, people will be able to delve into the Common Read choice more easily than ever before. Every freshman student who attended virtual orientation this summer received a welcome package that included the book, accounting for almost 2,500 total physical copies distributed. Additionally, the library has ordered 100 digital copies of the book for students, faculty and staff to check out. 

As with past editions of the Common Read, nearly all first-year students in a GEL or GEW course will study the book as part of the class. This year, Matthew Atherton, associate director of the Faculty Center, presented a workshop for GEL/GEW professors who wanted extra help in teaching the perhaps unfamiliar format of a graphic novel.  

“We’re doing what we can,” Olivas said, “to truly make it a campus common read experience.” 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306