![]() ![]() Moreover, each successive restatement of this overall planning strategy has extended the concepts of collaboration, sharing, and systemwide leverage into new domains of library service, from expedited intercampus lending to a shared online library catalog and regional library facilities, a shared digital collection, and beyond. These strategies have been successful in applying the leverage available to a multi-campus system of strong and distinguished institutions in order to maintain high-quality research collections and services in the face of rising costs and other challenges to traditional library models. That approach has emphasized multi-campus collaboration, application of new technology, and expanded University-wide sharing of the information resources within UC library collections. This achievement results from both strong campus support for libraries and a University-wide strategic approach to development of library collections and services. By sharing some common costs (electronic content, storage facilities, technology services) the campus libraries are better able to serve local research, curriculum, social, and civic needs. The range of services extends from onsite print and digital holdings to personalized reference support from support for information literacy to electronic reserves that are tied to locally taught courses and, from websites that customize access to a world of scholarly knowledge to civic programs that enrich and enliven the region's cultural life. The campus libraries provide high-quality and personalized services to faculty, students, and staff, and to the people in their local communities. They give competitive advantage to UC's researchers and offer inducements to faculty that are as powerful at Merced and Santa Cruz as they are at Berkeley and UCLA. Other achievements are equally significant. Melvyl, the system's union catalog, together with a fast and reliable online interlibrary loan service, assures this. At UC, all faculty, students, and staff have access to nearly all of the 31 million items that make up the libraries' collective holdings that is, access to the largest university research library in the world. This article reflects on how the UC libraries have confronted the challenge described above through collaboration and ever deepening resource sharing.įor 25 years, the University of California libraries have worked together to realize a vision in which collections available at any one library are available to the patrons of all. The UC libraries have also won an unparalleled reputation for innovation and service. ![]() The University of California has built nine campus libraries of distinction (and has launched the development of a tenth), comprising world-class collections that give a competitive edge to UC research and instruction. Failure to confront this challenge successfully fundamentally threatens the university's core mission- excellence in instruction, research, and public service. Maintaining the breadth and depth of collections is the single greatest challenge confronting university libraries today. Further, universities leverage their libraries to recruit and retain world-class faculty whose work and the eminence it reflects upon them relies in some measure on their access to scholarly information. Just as recent and major advances in the biomedical sciences are built upon comprehensive assembly of information about the human genome, advances in all frontiers of knowledge require the comprehensive collections that only great research libraries supply. Libraries assemble and conserve the world's scholarly knowledge and its societies' cultural record, and they make the assembly available in support of research, teaching, learning, and cultural and civic enrichment. In fact, great universities achieve their standing in part because of their libraries. ![]()
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