Partnerships and Projects
Current Initiatives
Through independent research and innovation and partnerships with other institutions, the UC Davis Library conducts an active research program to develop systems and technology platforms that advance scholarly communication, library operations, and knowledge sharing.
The UC Davis Library plays a leading role in the University of California’s efforts to advance free, public access to UC research. Leveraging the “power of 10,” the 10 UC campus libraries are using our combined negotiating power to strike a new kind of agreement with journal publishers: agreements that redirect our budgets for traditional journal subscriptions to help pay the publishing costs for UC-authored research papers in addition to providing the UC community with reading access to those publishers’ journals.
Impact: Traditionally, journal subscriptions have been expensive, preventing many people—from government agencies to community health clinics to the general public—from accessing and benefiting from the most up-to-date research. Open access publishing makes research freely available for anyone, anywhere to read. More than 50 percent of UC research articles are now eligible for funding support from the UC libraries, making it easier and more affordable for their authors to choose open access.
The library is developing the UC Davis Aggie Experts system as a single point of discovery for research, scholarship expertise and professional information about UC Davis faculty and scholars.
Impact: Through Aggie Experts, researchers can discover potential collaborators for interdisciplinary projects, members of the media can find expert sources on a wide range of topics, and scholars can store, export and reuse their own content to generate CVs for grant applications, departmental websites and other needs. An early prototype was rolled out to support UC Davis’ efforts to accelerate research on COVID-19.
The library’s Online Strategy team is developing a streaming data processing platform that will simplify and consolidate core GOES satellite data for the State of California.
Impact: By showing the location of lightning strikes in real time, the CaSITA (California Streaming Imagery for Terrestrial Applications) platform will serve as the source of a notification and alert system for locating and monitoring the sites of potential wildfires.
As a Google Books partner, the library is accelerating our efforts to digitize print books from our collection and make them more widely available—both to our own users and through the HathiTrust Digital Library.
Impact: Digitized books have an expanding role to play in lawful access to resources, including text-mining and natural language processing, print disability access, and access when physical libraries are closed due to public health or safety emergencies. By digitizing more of our collection, we open up greater potential for future scholarship.
The UC Davis Library is shaping the future of how libraries use linked data — machine-readable standard formats for and relationships among datasets — to catalog their collections, connecting them to the web and making them more easily discoverable. Through leadership roles in international organizations, such as the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) and partnerships with global organizations, communities and vendors including OCLC, Share-VDE and Ex Libris, members of the library’s Content Support Services department are advocating for and assisting with the development of linked data standards and tools.
Impact: Linked data enhances the discoverability of information on the web. Moving library data onto the semantic web boosts the visibility and relevance of library collections.
Project LEND (Library Expansion of Networked Delivery) is a UC initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to investigate potential strategies to advance robust legal access to digital books in support of research, education and clinical care. The two-year project is being led by the UC Davis Library.
Impact: Project LEND will shed light on how our library users might be able to leverage expanded access to digitized books to improve research, education, and clinical care, while also conducting important research on intellectual property law and ethics, the scope of UC’s digitized collections, and the technology that might be needed to provide expanded access.
Past Initiatives
Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, this two-year project investigated the future of library cataloging and related workflows in light of modern technology infrastructure, including the web and new cataloging standards and formats such as Resource Description and Access (RDA) and BIBFRAME, the new encoding and exchange format developed by the Library of Congress.
Impact: With new standards and technologies coming online, it was clear that research libraries needed to adapt our practices, workflows, software systems and partnerships. BIBFLOW evaluated how library resources are described—both the current landscape and the desired future state—and charted a path forward for the library community.
Traditional systems of research publication, academic credit, research quality assessment, and even the meaning of “publication” are changing rapidly. A collaboration between Mario Biagioli (UC Davis School of Law), MacKenzie Smith (UC Davis University Librarian) and Jonathan Eisen (UC Davis Genome Center), and funded by a UC Davis Interdisciplinary Frontiers in the Humanities and the Arts (IFHA) Program grant, the ICIS project was designed to analyze these changes and help shape the future of scholarly communication.
Impact: The scholarly communication system—how research is evaluated, published and shared—affects scholars and scientists across all fields and levels. It affects funder decisions and the technologies through which libraries deliver academic literature. Through research, innovation, workshops, and knowledge sharing, ICIS increased understanding and shaped the direction of these changes at UC Davis and beyond.
The Label This project used crowdsourcing to add descriptive data to 5,000 vintage wine labels collected by former UC Davis Professor of Viticulture and Enology Maynard Amerine, making the wine label collection searchable and accessible to wine lovers everywhere.
Impact: As a set of scanned images, one could enjoy browsing through Amerine’s collection of pre- and post-Prohibition wine labels, but there was no way to search them. By adding data such as vintage, varietal, region and image descriptions, the collection became searchable. Crowdsourcing software allowed library users to help transcribe this information, enhancing the library’s metadata for the wine label collection.
The University of California, under the leadership of the UC Davis Library and California Digital Library (CDL), and with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, conducted a major research project to investigate the institutional costs of converting scholarly publishing to an entirely article processing charge (APC) business model. This system, often referred to as “gold open access,” shifts the costs of publishing academic journals from a traditional subscription model, in which individuals and research libraries pay for reading access, to one in which researchers or their institutions pay to publish each article, which is then freely available online for anyone to read.
Impact: Open access, which makes published research freely available to everyone, is widely accepted as a public good and an important part of UC’s mission as a public university. A question remained, however, about whether a fully open access publishing system would be financially sustainable for institutions like UC that publish a large volume of research. Pay It Forward shed light on this question and suggested the potential for a shared funding model that paved the way for UC’s approach to its open access publishing agreements in subsequent years.