Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee

Resolution H: Library Facilities

Resolved: As the roles and functions of library facilities grow and change as a result of the advent of digital collections and services, it will be necessary to reconsider the principles that have guided UC library space planning and capital budgeting for the last quarter-century or more. As this reconsideration is played out in the context of existing and anticipated needs and the capital budget goals and priorities of the University and its campuses, it will be important to give weight to the following principles:

• Physical (print) collections will continue to grow, both on campuses and in shared library facilities
• There will be an increasing number of options available for the use of shared library facilities for cost-effective management of physical collections
• As one of these options, there will be a greater number of print collections that are explicitly designed and developed to be shared on a Universitywide basis
• Shared facilities will be needed to support the development and management of digital collections and services
• Plans and designs for campus library facilities will need to accommodate both growth in campus collections, enrollment, staffing and research activities and the new roles and functions that the libraries must undertake to provide excellent service in the digital environment

Background: Great universities have great libraries, for two reasons. First, information resources are at the foundation of effective research, teaching and learning, and libraries provide students with access to those information resources. Second, the collections are invaluable resources for a wider community, serving as repositories of knowledge, art and expression, and functioning as key components of the cultural memory of society. For over a century, the quality of the University’ of California’s teaching and research programs have been supported by libraries at each UC campus that build and manage distinctive collections and provide leading-edge information services tailored to the needs of the campus academic program and its faculty and students. The investment by the University and the State in the UC libraries has helped to create an information resource unmatched by any other in the country. This resource is essential to support the University’s teaching and research, and benefits students and faculty of other California colleges, universities, and public schools, business and industry, and the general public, both directly and through cooperative programs with other California libraries.

Over the last decade, the information resources needed and used by campus communities for teaching, learning, and research have grown to include a variety of digital information sources, including traditional scholarly publications (journals and books) produced in digital formats by for-profit and non-profit publishers; digital materials created internally by UC or converted into digital form from existing UC collections, such as manuscripts, maps, visual images, and sound files; the information resources in all formats (and of highly varying quality and persistence) available to anyone on the World Wide Web; and other UC digital assets, such as datasets, other primary research materials, and teaching materials created in digital form by the UC community. Digital collections, thoughtfully assembled and conserved for future use, will over time come to have the same enduring value as the University’s accumulated print collections, as resources for research and archives of the intellectual and cultural record.

The advent and rapidly growing importance of digital collections as key components of library service, and of the networked information technologies that support access to both digital and print materials, raise fundamental issues regarding the University’s continued investment in the physical facilities that house library collections and, at the campuses, provide centers for the delivery of library services. The existing principles for planning and cost-justification of library facilities, first developed in the early 1980s to implement the University’s 1977 library plan, may no longer inspire confidence as guides to forecasting space needs for campus libraries and UC Regional Library Facilities. However, experience has shown that the following principles, which are consistent with current UC library development strategies, are appropriate to contemporary conditions and can be used as points of reference by campuses and the Office of the President in planning and budgeting for library space.

1. Continued growth of physical collections. Books and other print material remain central to the services of the 21st century library, and as shown in this chart, the growth in the output of published books remains unabated, notwithstanding the advent of digital publishing. The University Libraries will need to continue to acquire new print publications and to retain and preserve the print materials already acquired, and many of these print acquisitions must remain on campus, where they can be readily available to meet local research and teaching needs.



2. More options for use of shared facilities for cost-effective management of physical collections. Over the last 25 years, the University has effectively implemented a strategy to leverage available resources through effective collaboration, first through sharing of campus-based print collections, then through the use of shared low-cost regional library facilities to house infrequently-used materials of continuing research value, and finally by the development of shared digital collections that are held in common and are equally available and accessible to all members of the University community. Through the use of shared regional library facilities, the campuses have avoided capital costs of about $11 million per year, on an annualized basis, that would have to be incurred to build on-campus library facilities to house these collections. Recent policy recommendations enable further efficiencies by greatly reducing unplanned redundancies in RLF deposits and ensuring that any duplication of holdings that may be required to meet the archival and service responsibilities of the UC libraries is carefully planned and amply justified. The recent replacement of two regional library boards overseeing their respective regional facilities with a single Universitywide board will help ensure systemwide coordination of plans, policies and practices to pursue further efficiencies.



3. More shared print collections. Building upon the University’s successful experience with the shared digital collection, the libraries have launched an initiative to develop shared print collections to further optimize the management of information resources for students and faculty by reducing unnecessary duplication, leverage shared assets (such as the regional library facilities), and expand the information resources available systemwide, while meeting the unique information needs of library users at each campus. For example, through the development of a single shared print journal collection for those titles to which the University subscribes in both print and digital formats, the libraries may avoid subscription costs for print journals of up to $3.1 million per year, plus additional savings in on-campus shelf space to house those journals, while being assured that at least one print copy of each title will continue to be available if needed. In the limited number of cases where materials already held in campus collections are highly duplicated, shared print collections drawn from these resources promise even greater savings in campus library space.



4. Shared facilities to support development and management of digital collections. While digital collections promise opportunities to release and repurpose space that would have been needed for growing print collections, the support of digital collections also involves facilities considerations. The provision of archival print collections to serve as a prudent safeguard for the fragility and questionable durability of their digital equivalents, discussed above, is one example. Space, equipment, staff and utilities will also be needed for conversion of existing print resources to digital format through scanning, for the creation of new digital resources, and for support of students and faculty involved in the creation and use of digital materials. To the extent that the requisite facilities can be shared among the campus libraries to achieve economies of scale, the existing regional library facilities may be logical locations for them.



5. New roles and functions for campus library facilities. As the nature of research library collections has changed, so too have the academic community’s needs and expectations for library service. The current generation of library users has grown up with computers, multimedia, wireless communication, the Internet, Amazon, and Google. For them, the expectation is that the information they need will be easy to discover and immediately available online, from any convenient computer, at any time of day or night. In response, the expertise of library staff has changed to meet the needs of capturing and curating digital collections and creating digital tools to access them. As a result, libraries are becoming centers of know-how for the production, discovery, and use of digital information of all kinds. By most reports, more people come to the libraries than ever before, and it is increasingly evident that libraries continue to serve a critically important function even in a world of remote access to digital information. For the foreseeable future, then, campus libraries will remain the focal point for the delivery of UC library services. Growth and functional change in campus library facilities will be driven by these factors, as well as growth in campus library collections, enrollments, staffing, and research activity.

Approved by the Committee November 1, 2004