THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY:
A FRAMEWORK FOR PLANNING AND STRATEGIC INITIATIVES

APPENDIX C
Organizational Frameworks for the University of California Digital Library

Alternatives

The Executive Working Group has identified the following potential organizational forms as an initial framework for the UCDL. Brief sketches appear here. Should UC decide to move forward with a new structure, far more detailed planning would be necessary.

There may be a natural tendency on the part of some to simply suggest that the Division of Library Automation (DLA) evolve into the Digital Library or that the Digital Library be a part of DLA. In this regard, the Executive Working Group would like to assert that while robust technical capabilities, such as those possessed by DLA, are essential to the success of any library today, whether it be paper-based, digital or some combination thereof, the UCDL is not a technological entity. The Digital Library's primary role focuses on scholarly content management, with technology serving the role of tool and enabler, but not driver. DLA's mission and expertise has been in technology implementation and support and not in content management.

UCDL as "co-library"
The UCDL would be created as a separate organizational entity, equal in status to the nine campus libraries. Its primary responsibilities would be the licensing and acquisition of an electronic content core which it would make available to all faculty and students as well as appropriate services which could best be handled centrally rather than duplicated across the nine campuses. The UCDL would be the framework and nexus for the redirection and coordination of a variety of distributed initiatives for the 'common good'.

The President and the Chancellors, would determine how to allocate resources between campus libraries and participation in the UCDL, and UCOP, in consultation with the Council of Chancellors would determine a UCDL budget ('common good' budget). An all- campus advisory body would be created to guide budgetary, policy, and collecting/licensing decisions for digital content to be used on all campuses. Many individual content objects would be housed in existing campus units, whether in libraries or elsewhere, which would also serve as primary service points. The central advisory body would develop standards for access and use and provide a framework for developing and exchanging support services.

A UCDL co-library could be launched in phases as a series of discipline-based collections, beginning in areas in which digital content is most prevalent and scholarly communication is most conducive to the application of electronic technologies. New disciplines would be incorporated as academic program development required. Criteria would need to be developed for weighting the needs of various academic fields against each other, but such a structure would embed allocation of resources for UCDL purposes in planning for academic programs. A disciplinary starting point would allow differential assessment of the importance of digitization and digitalization and might provide a means of establishing priorities for shifting the print-digital mix of different collections. It is likely that the imperative to move toward digital collections will be strongest for academic programs that exist on every campus.

Potential Advantages:
Elimination of duplicative content. Institutional strength in negotiating with external vendors. Consistency in operations and resources across campuses. Easily-identified high profile. Potential for "one-stop shopping." Potential to overcome intercampus barriers to effective resource coordination. Direct budgetary allocations that would facilitate state-of- the-art collections. Ability to develop a critical mass for knowledge dissemination. Efficiencies in developing support services tailored to disciplinary requirements across locations. Ability to launch quickly in heavily digital disciplines.

Potential Challenges:
Complex transactional relationships with campus libraries. Potentially confusing lines of authority for UCDL and campus units. Competition with campus units for budgetary resources. Difficulty of integrating systemwide UCDL planning into campus academic planning. Potentially high financial and organizational start-up costs.

UCDL as an extension of the existing organizational structure
Operating within a budgeting structure that subsumes library funding under block allocations to individual campuses, chancellors and librarians would identify areas in which collaboration would yield obvious benefits and develop appropriate relationships across and beyond campuses. These might include nine-campus agreements to share specified databases or bilateral partnerships to develop specialized on-line help services or single- campus contracts with specific content creators or user groups outside UC. Such efforts could be driven at different times by chancellors' assessments of budgetary, research, or instructional support priorities, by library identification of opportunities, or by pressure from constituencies outside UC.

Potential Advantages:
Builds on existing organization with least disruption. Maximizes local decision-making power. Allows flexibility for voluntary case-by-case contractual relationships in which participants identify and maximize their own interests. Builds on-campus ties between library and administration, with potential for linking to non-library units in locally appropriate ways. May encourage entrepreneurship at the campus level.

Potential Challenges:
Universitywide coordination and participation will be difficult to orchestrate when campus administrations operate under incentives to off-load cost centers. Local administrations may be reluctant to provide funds for activities that are not contained on the home campus. Potential to generate intercampus inequities in access to information. Potentially destructive intercampus competition. Lack of critical mass for innovation. Difficulty of achieving unified UC stance for leadership in developing business models and technical standards. Funding stability dependent upon financial decisions made on each campus.

UCDL as freestanding not-for-profit.
A UC-owned not-for-profit would be established to provide coordination and brokering services between UC and external providers and users. It would manage a seamless collection that would include both UC and external content. Relationships with campus units would be by contract. Not-for-profit organizational structure would facilitate revenue generation from customer populations.

Potential Advantages:
Potentially more flexible than University administration. Capacity to enter markets on competitive terms. Enhanced ability to enter consortial agreements with other institutions.

Potential Challenges:
Suggestion that a core University function is being spun off with corresponding diminution of commitment. Complexity of relationship with campus and Universitywide units. Potential lack of accountability to core academic missions. Dilution of UC identification. Difficulty of predicting unintended consequences in an unstable environment. High set-up and overhead costs.

Organizing principles

Operating authority for the UCDL should be distributed organizationally rather than geographically and should be delimited by functional rather than physical boundaries. The UCDL should overlie and link present library operating structures while possibly extending beyond them to include, for example, museums and laboratory-based data collections. The most viable UCDL structure is likely to contain many nodes, with a central or ìmainî node through which core collections of digital content are licensed and distributed. Relations between nodes and the coordinating body may be more contractual than hierarchical, although they are likely to evolve in a hybrid form incorporating complex relationships of cost sharing, reciprocity, and exchange.

In all of its operations, the UCDL should be driven by the principle that no member of the University of California should be deprived of access to information as a consequence of his or her physical or organizational location within the UC system. Further, the UCDL should operate on the corollary principle that UC alumni deserve special access to its resources as a means of maintaining professional currency and closer ties to the UC system; access should also be extended as far as possible to the California public, although collection development should be driven by the needs of a research university. The coordinating body should adopt generalizable principles and policies for determining which content and services and which categories of users should be underwritten by the UCDL and which will require provisions for cost recovery.

Functions of the UCDL should be located where they can be most effectively performed, with careful attention to the degree and quality of intellectual oversight required to manage them. In contrast to the Salmon plan, which defined appropriate collecting levels by the speed with which materials could be retrieved, information management levels within the UCDL should be determined by the degree of specialization associated with various kinds of content. Examples of how this principle might be implemented include:

• Collecting authority
  UCDL should negotiate Universitywide licenses for an agreed-upon body of general- purpose materials, such as full-text major journals, abstracting and document delivery services, and databases used in many disciplines. Identification of materials that should belong to this "core collection" should involve librarians, other information managers, and faculty. Selection principles should be applicable at all levels and guide collecting decisions made in specialized nodes. They should incorporate ways to make choices between competing needs. As material to be acquired or licensed becomes more specialized, selection should move closer to faculty users and librarians or other knowledge managers (e.g., museum curators and laboratory directors) who are able to judge quality and significance and set priorities. Such authority may reside in campus libraries, multicampus research units, or other entities now existing or created for this purpose.

• Standards
  UCDL staff should recommend technical standards for interoperability. It should continuously seek out and publicize examples of "best practices" in campus and other decentralized units in an effort to create a climate in which de facto standards prevail.
  

• Phase-in
  The coordinating body should identify the content or categories of content whose centralized management in a core collection will contribute most substantially to collaboration in pursuit of the knowledge mission. At the same time, it should begin identifying campus-based content that could migrate into the UCDL, create incentives for migration, and establish threshold standards that should serve as criteria for incorporating new nodes and facilitate communication and sharing between nodes. Individual nodes should be responsible for maintaining standards and meeting obligations to provide access and content. The coordinating body will face significant challenges in assisting nodes begun with grant funding to find resources for ongoing operations. Ultimately, success in this arena will depend on a shared sense of mission and benefit. Among the issues the coordinating body is likely to encounter is whether and on what terms non-UC units may be included in the UCDL and the terms on which non-UC users may have access to its collections.
  

• Access
  Although the coordinating body should establish minimum access standards according to the principle of non-deprivation, campus libraries and appropriate other units should be the gateways to UCDL collections. Such responsibility includes provision of 24 X 7 machine access with adequate bandwidth to accommodate on-campus and remote users, provision of technical assistance in using specialized material, and provision of on-demand printing capability adequate to meet demand for materials that are not collected in paper form. Responsibility for creating finding aids should be shared between central and local units, with specific tasks distributed in ways that support accuracy, completeness, and interoperability.
  

• Digitization
  The coordinating body may establish priorities for determining what kinds of paper material should be digitized. Holders of physical collections should be responsible for making specific decisions about what to digitize and for accomplishing digitization according to technical standards that ensure maximum feasible functionality, interoperability, and longevity. These efforts should be centrally coordinated to avoid duplication. If there is agreement that a "core collection" of existing texts should be digitized, provision should be made for accomplishing this in a way that is equitable, efficient, and non-duplicative.
  

• Storage
  The UCDL should require links to physically stored originals from which digitized materials have been created as well as to electronically stored data that exists only in digital form. The coordinating body should establish standards for archival preservation across generations of technology and in duplicate sites; these will inevitably generate new requirements for electronic storage on servers and in stand-alone forms such as CD-ROMs. Some storage functions should be managed offsite by external vendors, with which the UCDL should maintain necessary contracts, software, and gateway bandwidth to guarantee that UC users are able to access remote archives. Performance of this function will involve cooperation between the coordinating body and local units.
  

• Publishing
  As a repository for original works and data created by UC faculty, the UCDL's distribution function should be linked in a complementary way to the traditional publishing process. Such linkage is likely to begin with small-circulation monographs and working papers, but it may soon extend to on-line journals. The coordinating body should establish criteria and principles for UCDL publishing activity. The appropriate level at which publication decisions should be made, the formality with which publications should be endorsed as products of the University of California, appropriate editorial procedures, and partnering with other UC or non-UC entities should differ with various kinds of content. As this function evolves, it is certain to involve complex and challenging negotiations between individual nodes and the coordinating body as well as experiments that will create the knowledge from which new organizational forms should be derived.

Last updated: 31 January 1997