Collection Development & Management Program

Director: Ivy Anderson

In conducting their research and learning, UC’s scholars and students draw from the UC system's many library collections. The transformation of these holdings — a significant portion of the world's knowledge – into electronic files is changing the way our libraries and their users interact.

The Collection Development & Management Program manages and coordinates the shared library collections of the 10 UC campuses, and is responsible for the mass digitization of many of them – including hundreds of thousands of books, journals, monographs, letters, diaries, artwork, rare and historical primary source material, private papers, newspapers, and even streaming music. In addition, this program acquires scholarly content, hosts digitized materials from UC collections and other cultural heritage organizations, enables the publication of original scholarly materials, and is responsible for the system-wide negotiation and licensing of all shared digital materials for the UC libraries.

The Collection Development & Management Program's responsibilities include:

• Licensed Content: Licensed content provides the UC community with more digital material than is available at any other university, including more than 21,000 electronic journals, hundreds of thousands of electronic books, and more than 250 article and reference databases containing thousands of records. Centralizing licensing serves two important purposes: it saves millions of dollars compared to what would be spent by the campuses acting independently, and allows campus libraries to focus on local research and curriculum by economizing on costs for commonly needed materials and acquisition processes.
• Shared Print Collections: These collections of information resources, jointly purchased or electively contributed by the libraries, fulfill several goals: broadening and deepening UC Library collections in the service of research, teaching, patient care, and public service; offering economies not available through traditional models of collection development; enhancing access by the research community to important cultural assets by ensuring persistence over time; and enabling UC Libraries to develop comprehensive research collections that would otherwise be impossible to build.
• Mass Digitization: Digitizing the many volumes in the 10 UC libraries and making them freely available to users over the Internet is an ongoing project designed to enhance access to and management of our vast library holdings.