Strategic Framework: 2013-2021

Increase UC Davis’ research impact

• Offer appropriate data curation services
• Support research collaboration tools
• Provide alternative publishing strategies

Maximize the community’s access to the comprehensive collection of knowledge

• Provide access to comprehensive and excellent collections
• Digitize print collections
• Preserve scholarship in all formats

Improve UC Davis’ educational quality by preparing students for lifelong learning

• Teach lifelong information research skills
• Document impact on student success
• Bring the library to the online classroom
• Provide access to online educational materials

Create a world-class virtual library environment

• Create a compelling “virtual library”
• Provide easier access to digital collections
• Improve online infrastructure, tools and services

Maximize the library’s effectiveness and impact in pursuit of our mission

• Update organizational structure and implement organizational excellence
• Improve assessment and data-driven decision-making
• Stabilize funding
• Strengthen governance

Revitalize library spaces for a growing community of learners and a changing research environment

• Improve study spaces
• Rethink building uses for current campus configuration
• Facilitate staff in-person interaction

UC Davis is a large and growing university. Yet, many library services were designed for a much smaller community: in-person or one-on-one interactions that are difficult to maintain with a larger population. Everything we do must be designed to work for a large, diverse and physically distributed community.

Library budgets are dominated by the costs of scholarly communication products (e.g., books, journals and databases, in all formats) and of increasingly expert staff. In times of constrained resources, we need to steward those resources carefully and invest them wisely, anticipating future costs and needs so that our services are as efficient as possible and can adapt to changing financial circumstances.

The university is known for its interdisciplinary research and innovations, and the library has a key role to play in helping scholars collaborate and generate new knowledge in this way. Students and researchers who are effective at knowledge discovery in their own discipline are often challenged to be as effective in other disciplines with which they engage, and the library must facilitate that continuum of expertise and data-sharing across disciplines.

Many of the library’s resources and services can only be efficiently developed in partnership with others at UC Davis, across the UC system, or with other library, education and technology organizations. Each of our goals asks who our partners might be and what can be achieved collectively, while not encumbering future library leaders with dependencies that lead to inflexibility.

The library, like the university, is committed to organizational excellence, a strategic program to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of administrative processes and make them “lean, effective, transparent, service-oriented and innovative.” Its goals include achieving cost savings that can be redirected to academic programs (such as the library’s collections and research services), harnessing existing expertise from within the university, and adopting a mindset of continuous improvement.

UC Davis aims to support and sustain healthy, equitable communities in which all have access to the benefits of education and discovery. The library, as the university’s repository of knowledge and a conduit for communicating its research, shares this goal of ensuring broad public access to knowledge.

As the intellectual hub of the university, the library plays a critical role in fostering a vibrant community of learning and scholarship and improving students’ educational outcomes.

UC Davis is increasingly global in its community, its research and its partnerships. The library must support members of this community wherever they come from and wherever they are in the world, and facilitate global research through our approach to collections and research services.

Like the universities they are part of, libraries are asked to better articulate the value that they bring to their constituents: students, faculty, researchers, practitioners, staff and the public. To do so, we need to link our collections and services to the goals of the institution, and measure our progress toward meeting those goals. We are developing metrics or other means of assessing progress against each goal, holding the library accountable to its mission.

UC Davis seeks to advance the economic prosperity of our region, fostering California’s burgeoning life-science, agricultural and clean energy industries and investigating and sharing socially, politically, economically and environmentally relevant solutions to global problems. The library can support these goals by advancing the scholarly reputation of the campus, for example, by increasing access to faculty research publications or providing an online faculty profile service.