UC Libraries Forum 2025: Standing Up and Standing Out in Turbulent Times

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 Library. We will rely on lessons (and some limited pre-reading) from E-resource Licensing Explained—an ARL-published book that UC Berkeley co-authored to support licensing staff without legal expertise. We will couple short instructional sessions with group work and feedback, providing you with opportunities to edit publisher language on terms like text and data mining, artificial intelligence, accessibility, warranties and indemnification, and more. We will also reserve time for participants to discuss UC library licensing structures, and to reflect on ways to organize electronic resource and licensing units to leverage institutional and cross-institutional expertise. We will conclude with an opportunity to consider how these substantive and structural licensing challenges have affected library work and employees, how we have responded, and how we can best protect scholars and the university through our licensing work.