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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Jennifer I. Ward (510) 987-9398
jennifer.ward@ucop.edu

UC libraries highlight important initiatives and new digital services to Regents

 At today’s University of California Board of Regents meeting (May 18), the UC libraries demonstrated how collaboration across the 10-campus system has allowed them to realize financial savings and provide better access to the growing amounts of information fundamental to research, teaching, learning, patient care, and public service.

New and ongoing innovative programs have helped UC avoid costs of up to $35 million a year while improving services in the face of a number of continuing challenges, including the rapid growth of information services and rising costs of scholarly publications.

Working together, the UC libraries have assembled one of the largest digital research libraries in the world, including 23,000 journals, 500,000 digital images, and numerous digital archives. The UC libraries have also emerged as national and international leaders in managing and disseminating digital materials.

As a founding member of the Open Content Alliance, joining Yahoo!, Adobe, Internet Archive, Microsoft, and others, UC is scanning out-of-copyright and public domain materials drawn from its collection and making them accessible to anyone with Internet access. This year, the UC libraries expect to make tens of thousands of books available while exploring opportunities to extend these efforts.

UC is also nearing the launch of its newest service called Calisphere, a Web site offering free public access to historical documents, images, and works of art that reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history. A special section for teachers and students provides access to materials mapped directly to the state curriculum.

Another service developed by the UC libraries, the eScholarship Repository, enables the University of California Press, academic departments, and individual faculty to publish their work and make it freely available via the Internet. Thousands of monographs, journals, scholarly articles, as well as seminar, conference and occasional papers have been added to the repository, from which users “check out” more than 40,000 papers each week.

For more information about UC libraries:
www.universityofcalifornia.edu/cultural/libraries.html

UC libraries fact sheet:
www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/factsheets/libraries.pdf

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