Recent uc_libraries_forum items

Mutual resilience through continued partnership: Panel discussion with the UC Council of University Librarians (CoUL)

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At the UC Libraries Forum 2025, “Standing Up & Standing Out: Libraries in Turbulent Times,” the UC Council of University Librarians (CoUL) will host and participate in a discussion panel moderated by UC San Diego AUL Roger Smith on Tuesday, October 21 from 10:45 am to 12:15 pm. CoUL members and Roger look forward to discussing approaches to and shared priorities for advancing collaborative library work, including during turbulent times.

Closing Keynote: Collecting Ourselves: Revisiting Archives, Testimonio, and Desert Wisdom

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In times where turbulence is amplified, how do the archives we sustain, sustain us as keepers of history, culture, and memory? From family photos to library collections to seedbanks, how do these archives prepare us? Along with offering material resources and guidance for everyday thriving, how do the archives we grow require other(ed) ways of knowing such as storytelling, communal reflection, and ecological wisdom? Ways of knowing that can further support collective sustenance in these times? For this keynote talk, Dr. Naya turns to diverse ways of knowing to reflect on these questions - and to create space for pause. Grounded in Black ecologies, BIPOC feminisms, and the Mojave Desert where she lives, she interweaves testimonio or personal testimony about co-creating community archives with insights from desert plants who know much about surviving uncertainty. Throughout, participants will have opportunities to personally reflect on archive-inspired prompts...

Standing Up for the Library Mission: Access, Law, and Resistance in an Age of Control

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As restrictive licensing, and privatization reshape our digital world, the library mission, to provide preservation and access to knowledge, has never been more urgent. In this keynote, Kyle K. Courtney will explore how the intertwined forces of copyright, licensing, and information control shape what we can know, and who gets to decide. Librarians must reclaim their role as defenders of access, privacy, and intellectual freedom, standing up for knowledge with courage, creativity, and conviction.

Affordable Course Materials in Unaffordable Times

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Challenges have always surrounded OERs, today we are faced with even more challenges as we navigate a landscape of budget cuts, lack of grant opportunities, and attacks on DEIA. Amid this negative climate we are more than ever in a space to bring about something positive for our students in the UC system.

At UC Irvine, we recently completed a faculty incentive initiative to move course materials to open or library-licensed materials. We awarded three grants in as many years. However, in exploring this topic further we were able to see the vast work that the faculty are doing behind the scenes. More than half of the bookstore’s grid each quarter for the last fiscal year are courses with no required textbooks, and those noting their course uses open educational resources (OER) is slowly increasing.

We are interested in hearing how other UC campuses approach affordability efforts and library-licensed course materials, including:

How does...

Leaning on Library Values: Library Workers Protecting Academic and Intellectual Freedom at UC

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Academic library workers are facing a test of our commitment to the core professional values with the alarming, widespread acts of U.S. government censorship and budgetary and legal attacks on higher education institutions and the national research infrastructure. This situation impacts the equitable exercise of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression in academic libraries, including the University of California Libraries, and in our campus and broader communities.

This critical conversation session will be an opportunity for UC library workers to discuss how to uphold our professional ethics and values as articulated by the American Library Association in the face of day to day challenges to research, publishing, teaching, and learning; the larger threats to scholarly inquiry, knowledge, and education; and questioning of efforts aimed at creating more inclusive, diverse, and equitable libraries and library related services.

As UC libraries weather shifting...

Cutting Deep: Two Campuses Navigate Abrupt and Unexpected Collections Budget Reductions

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At UC San Diego, facing significant state, university, and library budget constraints this year, collection strategists were asked to reduce local collections spending by approximately half of their $3 million spend within about two months.

At UC Berkeley, the collections budget had to be reduced by $1.7 million over the course of two years starting in 2022, driving the arts and humanities division to cut 14% across their funds.

This presentation will cover two main aspects of these projects: First, a summary overview of each project will include a discussion of the parameters and restrictions, how targets were developed for spending reductions across acquisition models and formats, the data used for decision-making, and the communication process with colleagues and campus. Second, the panel members will explore the differences in approach across a full range of subject areas when allocating funds and determining which subscriptions to keep or cancel. This will...

Caring for Vietnamese American Stories: Building and Sustaining a Community Digital Collection

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Launched in 2011, Viet Stories: Vietnamese American Oral History Project, is home to over 400 oral histories, 221 oral histories are currently available online via Calisphere. The Viet Stories collection is by far our most frequently accessed digital collection with an estimated 2,606,575 total visits (~20,000 visits per month). It is used worldwide by K-12 educators, higher education, researchers, artists, students, and community members. There are over 200+ remaining oral histories with audio, video, documents and photographs we are working on processing (retrieving files off hard drives, transcribing, translating, writing abstracts, etc.). These new additions required taking into consideration how new technologies can be utilized to efficiently and effectively process and sustain the collection.

As part of the mission of the Southeast Asian Archive founded in 1987, the project contributes to expanding archives on Vietnamese Americans with the primary goal of capturing...

A New Era for Shared Access and Print Management - From Regional to Systemwide Library Facilities

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Northern and Southern Regional Library Facilities (the RLFs) were established in the 1980s to cost-effectively preserve and provide continuing access to UC’s library collections. By design, these facilities and their expert teams directly advance UC’s academic mission, while lessening campus space crises and securing significant operational efficiencies at scale. Now, an important strategic and operational transition is underway to transform the RLFs into fully Systemwide Library Facilities (SLFs). This transformation is a direct reflection of the value of these facilities to the long-term goals and resiliency of the UC Libraries. A panel of UC leaders will come together to present on the path that led to this key strategic shift, how it reinforces critical infrastructure, and the opportunities for UC Libraries moving into the future – both internally and in partnership with libraries across the country.

Creating Welcoming Spaces for Students & Staff

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Includes three presentations of 15 minutes each. A study investigating undergraduate students’ feelings of welcomeness in UC Santa Cruz Library study space and the themes that emerged. A library-wide effort to cultivate welcoming students-centered library spaces with the UC Irvine Libraries’ Student Displays Programs. An empathic design model applied to the UC San Diego Library’s Spaces Lending & Access (SLA) program to create a more efficient, supportive, and inclusive work environment.

Preserving Endangered and Unique Government Information

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Includes three presentations of 15 minutes each. A presentation describing partnership between the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) Library and the Internet Archive on a large-scale digitization project known as the Local Government Documents Digitization Project (LoCAL Dig Project). A presentation outlining the importance of making research data trustworthy and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) alongside a description of a collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) to establish a library-centered rescue effort (not recorded). An overview of a collaborative initiative to address threats posed to Ukrainian state records through web archiving using platforms such as the Internet Archive.

Learn to License Like a Pro

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Soaring economic constraints on library budgets, coupled with efforts by publishers to curtail use of content for computational research or with AI tools, mean that UC libraries must be savvier than ever in employing licensing strategies to protect scholars’ rights to use the materials on which we spend more than $60 million each year. Entry barriers to licensing work—including concerns about the legal expertise required, and the fear of “messing up”—can mean that library staff shy away from digging in. We invite you to join a half-day, practical, and hands-on workshop to hone your licensing skills and build confidence. By the end of the session, you will be able to understand key provisions of electronic resource agreements, and learn to revise agreements in ways that protect scholars’ interests while complying with UC policy.

The workshop will be taught and facilitated by licensing experts from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and California Digital...

Building Inclusive and Sustainable Digital Services

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Includes three presentations of 15 minutes each. The California Digital Library (CDL) describes its multi-faceted strategy to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II web requirements. The UC Berkeley Library shares the approaches taken, tools used, and challenges faced to create fully inclusive online spaces through its digital accessibility program. Presenters share the collaborative origins and growing connections between the UC Berkeley Library and Research IT to establish the Research Data Management (RDM) Program to support data-driven research.

Open Access Publisher Agreements at UC: an update after seven years of negotiations

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Following a UC systemwide commitment in 2018 to leverage the size of our coalition and our investment in library collections to negotiate for agreements which make UC research outputs openly available, a cross-institutional working group including faculty, university librarians, associate university librarians, and library staff was formed to oversee the shift from subscription content licenses to open access publishing agreements. In this panel session, several members of this working group will offer reports on the progress, impacts, and outlook of this negotiation effort, including its successes, failures, and lessons learned. Panelists will offer their unique perspectives on what this effort has meant for UC researchers, for the UC libraries, and for the global research community. Attendees will have the opportunity to gain insight into this important UC library initiative and ask questions of those who are deeply engaged in this work.

Space, Acetate, & Heavy Metals: Special Collections and Special Formats Issues

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Includes two presentations of 15 minutes and two lightning talks of five minutes. UCLA Library Special Collections (LSA) shares its implementation of a high-density storage project pilot to consolidate bibliographic materials to maximize storage space. The departments of Special Collections & University Archives and Digitization & Conversation Strategies at UC Riverside partner to classify space allocations based on size and materials needs for art / object storage and choose CatalogIt to document its art and object collection. The UC Berkeley Library Preservation Department shares a project to identify microfilm reels of acetate and convert those to polyester microfilm. The UC Berkeley Library describes the steps it took to confirm the presence of heavy metals in 19th century books and then to develop and implement protocols and procedures to allow for continued use but to prevent chronic exposure and mitigate health concerns.

Improving Collections & Access Through Data Analysis & Assessment

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Includes four presentations of 15 minutes each. Presenters highlight the effective UC Libraries collaboration for purchase of electronic collections and propose that there are additional opportunities for collaborative print collections based on a collection overlap analysis using Choreo, GreenGlass, and Alma Analytics (UC Berkeley). An overview of methods to conduct a diversity audit of an academic collection including typical outputs, advantages and disadvantages including the implementation of a checklist method to improve collection diversity (UC Davis). Use of Alma Analytics to harvest usage of electronic data across platforms that is fed into a customizable dashboard in order to provide up-to-date insights and inform collection development decisions (UC Berkeley).

Amplifying Voices, Centering Knowledge; Inspired Approaches to Outreach and Instruction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three presentations explore the following topics: UCLA Film & Television Archive highlights the digital restoration of the 1970s film WE’RE ALIVE, initiated by UCLA Women’s Film Workshop which saw student filmmakers documenting the lives of incarcerated women in the California Institute for Women (CIW). The development of a flexible and innovative granting program from the Hugo and Christine Davies Fund that has supported a myriad of music-related projects under the auspices of the Rubsamen Music Library at UCLA. Creating culturally relevant teaching to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion through framing library instruction and programming at UC Davis Library from a non-western epistemological lens.

Implementing DEIA Training for Editors of eScholarship Journals

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In line with the University of California values, eScholarship’s open access journals program works to embed diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in its training materials. In the last year, the eScholarship team has implemented a required webinar for all journal editors that provides an overview of major DEIA topics in scholarly publishing. These topics include diversifying editorial boards, staff, author pools, and peer reviewers; implementing inclusive language and style guides; and meeting accessibility standards – all important for inclusive and accessible design; representing the diversity of campus communities; reaching out to underserved communities; developing codes of conduct that protect against discrimination and harassment, and giving editorial staff the tools to confront the challenges of our current context.

In this proposed session, we will describe our goals for creating and conducting this DEIA webinar for eScholarship journal editors,...

Update from the UC Libraries Digital Preservation Working Group

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The UC Libraries has charged the Digital Preservation Working Group to develop a framework for digital preservation for the UC Libraries, focused on services, tools and products in this area. The framework will be informed by the known best practices in the field and will include the results of the high-level gap analysis survey DPWG conducted in the winter of 2024. The gap analysis was modeled after the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Rapid Assessment Model and identifies the services, structures, or staffing needed in the UC Libraries to support digital preservation. The DPWG proposes to share with the UC Libraries community the way that we approached our work and share an update on our work.

Research Amongst the Redwoods: Archival Training and Mentorship for Students in UCSC’s Special Collections and Archives

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

UC Santa Cruz Special Collections and Archives has a rich tradition of engaging students across disciplines in archival practice through programs designed for both graduates and undergraduates. Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, the Center for Archival Research and Training (CART) supports graduate student development through immersion in archival processing, research, and exhibition curation, while new models like our Undergraduate Internship Program aims to provide a similar experience to an undergraduate interested in pursuing graduate education in libraries and archives. Through these programs, archivists collaborate and share expertise in order to provide meaningful, practical experiences to students, while students share their content expertise in helping to make our archival collections accessible through collection guides and exhibitions.

The panel will include both archivists and students, who will present on three case studies: 1) processing the papers...

Ebook Reading on the Move: UC Davis launches Palace Ebook Pilot

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2023, the UC Libraries Direction and Oversight Committee (DOC) signaled a green light to implement a prototype of Lyrasis’ Palace ebook reader at a UC campus to allow for further evaluation. Benefiting from work at New York University and Columbia University, UC Davis launched a pilot in Spring 2025 delivering a mobile ebook reading service with over 140,000 scholarly ebook titles available to students and faculty. Additionally, a new partnership with the California State Library Palace Project, added another 300,000 ebooks and audiobooks to the collection.

This session reveals how launching a disruptive technology is only one step towards creating resilient library infrastructure.While the easy-to-use app utilizes library-developed open-source software, the project ran into substantial challenges with collection development, acquisition and metadata. The pilot’s reliance on one for-profit publisher nearly resulted in disruption as the business announced their upcoming...

Our Journeys to DevOps across UC Library Development Teams

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As our library systems adapt to ever-growing volumes of data and new security vulnerabilities, several UC Library Development Teams are adopting DevOps (Development Operations) practices to meet these challenges. DevOps practices promise to enable teams to tackle problems at a “cloud” scale. The adoption of DevOps practices comes with a significant learning curve. The traditional roles of software developers and systems administrators are blurred in the process. How ready are our library development teams to adapt to these changes?

This panel will feature presenters from development teams at CDL, UCB, SCSB, UCSC and UCSD. Each of the represented teams are at different stages of adoption of DevOps practices. Each panelist will provide a brief introduction to the DevOps practices that their teams have in place as well as their teams plans and hopes for future adoption. Each panelist will describe the challenges they are encountering in implementing these practices. Lastly,...

Critical Care: UC Libraries and Hospital Mergers & Aquisitions

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hospital mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have become increasingly common in academic medical centers, UC included. They are often driven by financial pressures, strategic realignment, and/or efforts to expand services. While much attention is paid to the operational and clinical ramifications of these changes, their impact on institutions’ libraries is often overlooked. Libraries are rarely included in early stage campus discussions about M&As, despite the long range effects these additions have on everything from licensing to service points to resource access.

This panel discussion will be facilitated by three librarians from UC campuses currently navigating the complexities of hospital M&As: San Francisco, San Diego, and Irvine. With backgrounds primarily in collection development, we will share how mergers have affected resource pricing, licensing negotiations, and collections scope at our respective campuses. We will then invite participants to share their...

Standing Up for Colleagues by Creating Inclusive Spaces and Growth Opportunities

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Standing Up for Colleagues by Creating Inclusive Spaces and Growth Opportunities

Bibliographic Records as Data: Making research use of our shared collections

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

UCI Digital Scholarship Services and Cataloging & Metadata Services have been collaborating on a demonstration project to examine the possibilities of using bibliographic metadata in digital humanities research. his presentation provides an overview of our goals and workflows, and questions about how our system-wide bibliographic data may or may not be useful to researchers beyond record discovery, especially in the context of the Systemwide ILS Project (SILS).

UC Libraries Systemwide Plans and Priorities: A panel discussion with the Council of University Librarians

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A panel discussion with the Council of University Librarians of UC Libraries Systemwide Plans and Priorities.

Classifying Chinese pre-modern books by machine: a supervised machine learning approach

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Presentation on classifying Chinese pre-modern books by machine, a supervised machine learning approach.

Opportunities to Collaborate with the UC Berkeley Oral History Center

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This talk provides an overview of the work of the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library and opportunities for collaboration. The Oral History Center puts stories in the historical record that hadn’t been there before and might otherwise be lost. We preserve thousands of voices from all walks of life, political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds through oral history interviews. We also produce interpretive materials, such as podcasts; train scholars in the field through educational initiatives, including workshops and internships; create curriculum for K–12; and write articles for scholarly and lay audiences. During shelter-in-place, we pivoted to remote interviewing, created a toolkit and hosted a webinar to train practitioners. We are committed to open access and all of our transcripts, articles, and podcasts are accessible online or in-person at no cost. We partner with other universities and organizations, such at the National Park Service and California...

Wiki Edit-a-Thon Relay

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Metadata Services Program (MS) at the UC San Diego Library partnered with Wikipedia Edit-a-thon organizers focused on creating a more diverse and inclusive Wikipedia to create a Wiki-Relay where MS staff create Wikidata entries for Wikipedia articles created during Edit-a-Thons. This lightning talk will review the benefits, the structure, lessons learned and future plans.

The Library Community Collective - Conversations on Diversity, Inclusion and Equity

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the wake of the racial violence occurring in the United States in 2020, the UC San Diego (UCSD) Library created a collaborative, non-hierarchical, employee-led group that allowed for a new way of sharing and listening across the organization. The Library Community Collective (LCC) is a collaboration between the Library Community Building Committee and the Library Diversity and Inclusion Committee and has provided an ongoing platform for challenging discourse on topics such as white supremacy, allyship, anti-asian violence, fat phobia, race and health disparities and microaggressions. In hopes of providing a model and inspiration for other libraries to pursue similar initiatives, we will provide background on the LCC and its creation, methods, outcomes and challenges.

Connecting with researchers via local data curation: the UCSB experience with Dryad deposits

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Since March 2021, the UCSB Library's Research Data Services (RDS) became the first UC campus to be part of Dryad's workflow and responsible for curating campus affiliates' deposits to the repository before public release. Our assistance ranges from data files and metadata inspection to more involved processes, including data transformation and documentation augmentation to maximize deposited data's reproducibility and potential reuses. This experience has allowed our department to establish a closer relationship with researchers and better understand their data-related needs while helping us promote data literacy and make our services more well-known on campus. This presentation will cover our internal workflow and curation steps; a debrief of the most common curatorial actions performed, the feedback we have received from depositors, and how we plan to move forward with our curation services.

Stronger Together: Shared Collection Development for Africa

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Research interests in African Studies range from anthropology to zoology, with source material produced in an array of languages -- indigenous, colonial European and Arabic. To support this research, the Library of Congress collects and catalogs material from 29 African countries, and both UCLA and UC Berkeley participate in their Cooperative Acquisiton Program. This year, for the first time, UCLA and UCB created a shared collection development approval plan, taking advantage of the new integrated library system and fulfillment network to provide a richer and more diverse information ecosystem to students, faculty and independent scholars.

An API request: tools and the Alma/Primo APIs

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Call for collaboration surrounding use of the Alma/Primo APIs and tools for automation. At UC Santa Cruz, we have used the program Postman to automate the process of deleting electronic collections in bulk. As part of the P2E process of our migration from Millennium, some records had electronic collections created as inventory, instead of electronic portfolios. For proper display in Primo, they needed to be converted to electronic portfolios. As a librarian with limited coding experience, Postman allowed me to use the Alma API to automate some of this work. As we complete the SILS migration, I believe it could be valuable to create a space or community to share work around the Alma/Primo APIs and tools that we find helpful. Postman allows for the use of workspaces and easy sharing of API work without sharing institution-specific information, and there are other library-developed tools that utilize the Alma/Primo APIs.

UC Davis Organizations in Wikidata

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

UC Davis participated in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) Wikidata Pilot, to investigate the use of wikidata as an authoritative source for cataloging. From that experience, we hope to use the Wikidata items created for UCD organizations, such as departments, colleges, and research centers, etc, in our Aggie Experts project as our source for our campus academic organizational structure. This lightning talk describes why that’s a good idea and how to do it.

Wrangling UC Usage Data for HathiTrust's Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS)

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Presentation on usage data for HathiTrust's Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS).

UCSC's Participation in HathiTrust's Publication Date Review Project

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tens of thousands of HathiTrust volumes are closed for reading access simply because they lack the metadata necessary for HathiTrust’s automated rights algorithm to make a confident assessment. In the spring of 2020, HathiTrust’s Copyright Review Manager eyed an opportunity and stepped into gear to create a simple project that would enable volunteers from HathiTrust’s member institutions to open up more HathiTrust volumes for reading access while working from home due to Covid19 closures. And the Publication Date Project was born!

Three staff from the UC Santa Cruz library volunteered to join the project and were trained by a CDL staff member who is an expert reviewer in HathiTrust’s Copyright Review program.

Our lightning talk will focus on our experience working on this project.

Making Email Archives Discoverable through ePADD

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Presentation on archiving email records using ePADD.

Becoming Better Allies Committed to Equity in UCSC Libraries