Benefits of Library Collaboration

By sharing some common costs, the campus libraries are better able to serve local research, curriculum, social, and civic needs.

Integrated services: The recently updated Melvyl catalog serves as the main access point to the collective UC library materials, integrating the holdings information of the UC libraries as if they were part of a single collection. In 2011, the UC Libraries moved the central catalog to the OCLC WorldCat Local interface. More information about the changes to Melvyl can be found on the CDL website. Other services include Request, which streamlines interlibrary loans, and UC-eLinks, which enables libraries to link from a citation to the full text of an item.

Building on and complementing the work done to upgrade the Melvyl catalog, the Next Generation Technical Services (NGTS) initiative (begun in 2011) will redesign and improve technical services workflows across the full range of library services to take advantage of new systemwide capabilities and tools, minimize redundant activities, improve efficiency, and foster innovation in collection development and management for the benefit of UC library users.

Shared facilities: Current holdings at the Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF) in Richmond and the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF) at UCLA total around 11 million volumes. By sharing facilities, libraries are able to economically accommodate low-use print materials and thus devote a greater portion of their local shelving space to new, current, and high-use ones. In addition, a shared preservation repository is being built to store and manage digital information for the long term.

Shared licensed collections: The UC libraries act as a single entity in developing a shared collection of licensed digital materials, which significantly reduces the license cost and administrative overhead. The shared collection enables the UC libraries to provide persistent access to electronic journal titles and database holdings, and also allows a reduction in print holdings where electronic equivalents exist.

Digital collections: The UC libraries collaborate in the development of online collections by digitally reformatting local print and other analog holdings. By adhering to standards and supplying a range of enabling services (such as brokering or subsidizing data and metadata creation, supplying data creation tools, and offering aggregation and portal services), the UC libraries continue to lower the cost of developing collections such as the Online Archive of California (OAC), and Calisphere.

Scholarly communication: Through the CDL's eScholarship program, the UC libraries provide leadership that facilitates innovation in scholarly communication. The program includes disciplinary-based archives of working papers and research results, support tools for submission, expanded peer review and access, and new scholarly products, such as working papers series and peer-reviewed digital journals.

Applied research and expertise: Through their collaborative efforts, the UC libraries have developed numerous methods and applications that have gone on to become industry standards, including Z39.50, UC-eLinks, Encoded Archival Descriptions (EAD), the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), and the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Scheme (METS).