Scholarly Resources: About UCB Scholarly Resources

We welcome your comments:
scholarly-resources@lists.berkeley.edu

Vision

The UC Berkeley Library employs strategic practices, used for over 150 years, that have created one of the world’s leading research and cultural heritage collections of scholarly resources. We select, collect, curate, and provide access to the diverse and unique resources needed to support current research and instructional programs at Berkeley; to enable scholars to use materials in keeping with their needs; and to preserve resources for future generations. We collaborate and partner with UC Berkeley campus departments, other UC campuses, the California Digital Library, and other institutions and organizations to provide support to research throughout its lifecycle. We are committed to advancing open access enterprises, open educational resources, open source partnerships, and digitization initiatives. 

The UC Berkeley Library, like our peer research libraries, looks for strategies both to create budget sustainability and to improve scholarly resource-related services. This often requires the balancing of research and instructional interests and methodologies with changes in publisher formats and business models. Strategies include selecting resources in a variety of formats mindful of both content and usability; evidence-based selection; consortial acquisition and licensing; building collaborative partnerships for both collection building and access; leasing; interlibrary borrowing and lending; and commercial document delivery.

The Scholarly Resources goals support the following University Library Strategic Plan directions and strategies:

Improve how scholars access resources

Strategies:

• Optimize the usability and impact of scholarly resources through effective and collaborative curation, acquisitions, licensing, preservation, discovery, and accessibility.
• Create and preserve digital collections that expand use of our historic and current materials through widespread digitization and new access services.
• Equip scholars with robust, user-centered services and tools to successfully navigate the complex information landscape.
• Develop long-term solutions that address Berkeley’s space and preservation needs and challenges.

Grow as an adaptive learning organization.

Strategies:

• Build and sustain a library-wide program of assessment, focusing on user-centered needs to inform decisions on collections, services and operations.

Scholarly Resources Goals for 2018-2020 (to be reviewed and updated annually)

1. Develop diverse, focused, scholarly resources to support research, teaching, and learning on campus.

2. Achieve a sustainable budget that supports research and teaching at Berkeley, in the face of current budget reductions, ever-increasing costs, and the campus need for new types of materials.

• In FY 2017-2018, respond to the immediate budget reduction by shrinking the scholarly resource expenditures by $1M.
• In FY 2018-2019 and FY 2019-2020, re-balance budgetary expenditures in order to embrace new formats, to remediate collection gaps, and to support research needs in light of the evolving budget climate.
• Seek new sources of funding.
• Review alternate ways of providing access to scholarly resource content.
• Engage in regional, national, and international partnerships to facilitate broad access to, and effective stewardship of, scholarly resources.

3. Improve access to scholarly resources for our faculty and students.

• Support efforts to increase open access to library materials.
• Maximize ease of access to the entire UC Berkeley collection of scholarly resources for Library users.
• Facilitate access to content beyond the UC Berkeley Library scholarly resources.

4. Identify gaps in our long-term preservation strategies for Berkeley scholarly resources.

5. Work with the Scholarly Communication Services program.

• Support transformative, sustainable publishing models that address the economic challenges associated with the commercial control of the scholarly record.
• Collaborate and support our Scholarly Communication Services program to preserve the scholarly output of Berkeley faculty and graduate students.

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