The Library Planning and Action Initiative was undertaken in the Fall of 1996, in light of a broad interest in enhancing the UC library system in substantive and cost-effective ways. The University Librarians, the Executive Budget Committee, the Academic Planning Council, and the Academic Senate agreed that a universitywide approach to library planning was essential in order to maximize the information resources available through the libraries and take best advantage of emerging technologies.

The overall goals of the Library Planning and Action Initiative was to propose specific recommendations for improving the organizational, functional and budgetary context within which the UC Libraries operate, as a framework for library evolution over the next five to ten years. In particular:

• Recommend a sustainable business model or models for the University Library System to accommodate the changing funding, intellectual, service, collection development and technology environment;
• Develop viable options for collaborating with other segments of the State's educational system, with industry, and with other educational and research institutions to improve access to information resources and effectiveness of library services across the State;
• Determine the most effective ways to exploit digital technologies to provide new opportunities and to mediate changing demands, exponential growth, and rising costs; and assess how the presence of these technologies may shift the role and scope of libraries, librarians, and library services; and
• Initiate actions and strategic projects that can both provide information critical to planning and address immediate issues faced by the University's Libraries.
  

Additional goals were to strengthen on-going efforts to:

• Assess the effects of campus library acquisitions decisions on current demands of scholarship and teaching, and project future adequacy in the light of trends, academic programming, and changing faculty interests; and
• Enhance sharing of information resources and services among UC's libraries, including: greater coordination of collection development; increased non-bibliographic resource sharing; greater leveraging of the University's purchasing power; and more effective interlibrary loan processes.

LPAI Final Report

UC Digital Library Report