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.

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 departure from their ebook sales practices. And while the technology supports a level playing field for access to both subscription and open scholarship, the absence of standardized OA metadata results in chapter-based material not displaying in a book level app. As academic libraries join public libraries to use Palace, bridges are still needed in licensing, linking technologies, and reconsidering permanence in the scholarly record for perpetual ebook purchases.

Facilitator:
Michelle Polchow

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 own experiences to explore the broader implications M&As have on the UC Libraries, such as budget challenges, library staffing, evolving service models, communications, IT, and access for new user populations.

In addition to surfacing shared concerns and collective knowledge, we will strive to answer the question of how we can raise awareness among stakeholders of the importance of including the library in the early stages of M&A discussions. This panel discussion will explore strategies for advocacy, collaboration, and adaptability in the face of ongoing institutional change. The goal of this session is to bolster the UC Libraries so we can stand out as essential, resilient campus partners in a dynamic healthcare landscape.

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 first-generation stories for students, researchers, and the community. With almost 2.4 million Vietnamese Americans in the United States, the largest concentration of overseas Vietnamese resides in Southern California.

Now nearly 15 years after the initial launch of VietStories, this panel will discuss how principles of "CARE" (Collaborative, Attentive, Responsive and Engaged) have been implemented to sustain the completion of a legacy large scale community-driven digital collection over time. Questions explored in this session include:

• What are the technical and administrative challenges in ethically stewarding the completion of an inherited collection that has undergone many contributors and stewards?
• What challenges and potential political sensitivities need to be considered when providing online access to student and community created oral histories in the current political context?
• What are the goals and next steps for Viet Stories as the diasporic community commemorates the 50th anniversary of the end of the American war in Viet Nam?

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, the level of editorial participation in the training, the opportunities and challenges we have encountered, feedback we have received, and the impact of this program thus far. We will also discuss related resources from the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) at the University of California, C4DISC, and the Library Publishing Coalition, and how we aligned our training with efforts across the UC system and the broader academic publishing profession.

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.

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).

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.

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.