Year Four Update on the Library’s Strategic Plan

As we wrap up the fourth year of the library’s five-year strategic plan (2022-27), we are excited to share our progress to date in implementing the priorities identified in our plan.

Priority 1 • Buildings & Online

Priority 1 of our strategic plan focuses on making our library buildings and online environment welcoming and accessible to all members of UC Davis’ increasingly diverse campus community.

This year, we continued our work to make key areas of Shields Library more welcoming and inclusive — particularly for students, who comprise over 90 percent of library visitors. (Goal 1.1)

Themed Group Study Rooms: The eight group study rooms at Shields Library are constantly in high demand. To make them more welcoming for students, we’ve given each room a UC Davis theme, including Eggheads, Bikes, Water Towers, and more. Creating these “mini-exhibits” would not have been possible without the remarkable donations from other campus units — including Athletics, Animal Science, Unitrans, the Arboretum and the Bike Barn — which helped us bring campus history to life. After months of planning and installation work, we hosted a tour of the group study rooms for those who had donated pieces, allowing representatives from a wide range of campus departments to meet and connect in the community spaces they helped to create. The themed rooms have also been received with enthusiasm by students. (Goal 1.1)

Student artwork in student spaces is another way we have been working to make Shields Library more welcoming by adding color to formerly uninspiring areas and celebrating the work of their peers. (Goals 1.1 and 2.3)

• In partnership with the ASUCD Aggie Arts Committee, we held a student art contest to create five new paintings for the Shields Library 24-Hour Study Room.
• In Spring 2026, we partnered with a faculty member in the Classics Department to showcase student artworks created as final projects by three of her classes. Displaying pieces that might otherwise never have been seen outside of the classroom not only brought awareness to some fascinating courses — from “Death and Dying” to “Fakes and Forgeries” — it supports the library’s role as a space for student creativity, community, and academic and intellectual pursuits.
• During Spring Quarter, the library also collaborated with Jose Arenas and his ART/CHI 171 class to bring a student-created mural into the library. Inspired by themes that represent the library and rooted in community engagement led by the class, the mural adds an inspirational note — Saber es Poder (Knowledge is Power) — to one of the library’s most popular study spaces.

Shields Library has over 300 pieces of art on display, including works by some of UC Davis’ most well-known former Art Studio faculty and alumni. But how does art impact the library visitor experience? Do members of today’s campus community see themselves reflected in these works? During spring quarter, the library launched a research project in partnership with Design MFA student Maev Dunning to understand visitor perceptions of the art on display at Shields Library. (Goal 1.1)

Website accessibility is a key component of ensuring that all members of our campus community can find and use library resources and services. Over the past year, we embarked on a detailed review of the library’s website — adding alt text to images, captioning videos, correcting heading hierarchy, and updating link text, forms and PDFs — in addition to providing more resources for library website content contributors so we can make these best practices part of our routine workflow. If you encounter an accessibility barrier on this website or need content in an alternative format, please contact us at library.accessibility@ucdavis.edu so we can help. (Goal 1.2)

Priority 2 • Education & Academic Success

Priority 2 focuses on ways the library can support undergraduate and graduate student academic success, lifelong learning, culturally diverse programming, and other aspects of the university’s educational mission.

The library’s Humanities Listening Tour team conducted interviews with 19 researchers, including faculty, graduate students, and a postdoctoral scholar, to better understand the research, teaching, and engagement needs of humanities and related disciplines. Participants represented a broad range of academic fields across UC Davis. The project gathered broad and diverse input that will inform the library’s ongoing efforts to strengthen support for teaching, research, student success, and inclusive engagement across humanities communities. (Goal 2.2)

The Norma J. Lang Prize for Undergraduate Information Research celebrated its 10th anniversary (learn about our 2026 winners), while the Library Graduate Student Prize recognized its third cohort of winners. Each group of prize recipients was selected by a combined panel of UC Davis faculty and librarian reviewers, and celebrated at an awards ceremony. We congratulate each of the prize winners on their work, which exemplifies the high caliber of student research and scholarship at UC Davis.

In line with the library’s commitment to providing a ‘third place’ for gathering and connection for all members of our diverse campus community, the library hosted a wide range of events and exhibitions this year. (Goal 2.3)

• Exhibits at Shields Library highlighted materials from our collections on queer art and culture, women’s journeys through California in the first half of the 20th century, and the history of the UC Davis Arboretum, the Davis Farmers Market, the coffee industry, and Route 66.
• Archives and Special Collections created pop-up exhibits for events ranging from an author talk on disability studies, presented by the Davis Humanities Institute, to Punjabi Week, hosted by Middle East/South Asia Studies (ME/SA). We also co-hosted a celebration of ME/SA’s 20th anniversary and the gift of Professor Emerita and ME/SA founder Suad Joseph’s papers to the University Archives. 
• We were also proud to partner with the UC Davis School of Law’s Labor and Community Center to launch a photography exhibition documenting the lives of California farmworkers by labor photographer and journalist David Bacon, in honor of the 60th anniversary of the 1965 Delano grape strike.
• Inspired by student feedback and growing local and national interest in reading clubs, the library hosted a monthly Silent Reading Hour as a space for longform reading in community with others. Students were invited to read silently or listen to audiobooks for an hour, with time to socialize and connect afterward.

The library’s Acquisitions team launched a tool for library staff to look up the accessibility status of electronic resources provided locally by the UC Davis Library (versus those licensed by the UC system). This information enables us to provide transparent service to users while we proactively work to resolve remaining accessibility issues with vendors. (Goal 2.4)

The library successfully launched our undergraduate internship program to offer students a hands-on opportunity to contribute to meaningful, project-based work that advances the library’s mission to support learning, research, and discovery. Our first cohort of interns worked on projects in various library departments (DataLab, Library Administration, Scholarly Impact, and Student Services). (Goal 2.5)

Our AggieOpen program now offers year-round awards for instructors to adopt open educational resources (OER) in their undergraduate courses as an alternative to required commercial textbooks. We also offer open textbook review awards to evaluate and submit a review of an existing open textbook. (Goal 2.6)

Priority 3 • Research & Data

Priority 3 focuses on the library’s role in advancing research, collaboration, data sharing, and equitable access to knowledge.

The library convened a task force on Reproducible Research Practices, which developed a reproducibility guide as source and reference material for instruction and self-study. (Goal 3.3)

The library charged a task force on Responsible Data and Data Science to explore formally incorporating data ethics learning objectives into DataLab workshops and library instruction, and to expand data ethics awareness and curricular resources. Related to this overall focus, DataLab developed and taught a workshop on “Using AI Responsibly” as part of its AI Literacy & Logic training series offered in partnership with the College of Letters and Science on five dates in Spring 2026. (Goal 3.1)

Priority 4 • Collections

Priority 4 works to ensure that our collections reflect diverse populations and adapt to meet clinical care, research and educational needs.

As part of our ongoing efforts to support local communities and campus units that are looking to preserve their archives and histories (Goal 4.3), the library:

• Continues to support campus units and departments with capturing and preserving their websites using Archive-It; this year’s most notable addition was the Center for Regional Change (CRC) website.
• Partnered with the Psychology Department to host a community archiving event during which faculty participated in short interviews and reflected on their experiences at UC Davis and the Psychology Department.

• Performed scan-and-return digitization for the Chicago Cafe Collection, one of the oldest Chinese restaurants in the United States; the collection will be made available online via the library’s Digital Collections.
• Provided community archival consulting for the Filipino American National Historical Society – Sacramento-Delta Chapter, Locke Foundation, and Manilatown Heritage Foundation.
• Provided an “Intro to Archiving” workshop for the Shift Collective 2025 Historypin Summer Institute.

Priority 5 • Organizational Culture

Priority 5 is dedicated to strengthening the library’s organizational culture as an inclusive, equitable and supportive workplace.

• Completed the recruitment for an expanded Director of Human Resources and Organizational Development position to play a leadership role in organizational effectiveness. The new incumbent officially joined the library in June 2026. (Goal 5.4)
• Drafted an internal survey focused on employee satisfaction initiatives such as flexible work arrangements, remote work, and intralibrary communication. Timing for the survey will be determined in partnership with the new Director of Human Resources and Organizational Development. (Goal 5.3)

• Library HR rolled out the BEST Rewards Program in March to support employee recognition. Early participation has been very encouraging, with employees actively recognizing and celebrating the contributions of their colleagues. (Goal 5.1)