Gary S. Lawrence
Director of Library Planning & Policy Development
University of California, Office of the President
Abby Smith
Independent Consultant
John L. Ober
Director, Policy, Planning and Outreach
University of California, Office of the President
The digital products of scholarship rapidly are becoming more numerous and more diverse, and represent an increasingly massive investment by faculty, instutitions, and funding agencies. Yet these assets generally remain unaccounted for and unmanaged. The University of California, at the request of its Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, is launching a preliminary investigation of the issues and institutional options involved in a systemwide program to capture and manage UC’s digital scholarly information assets, to comprehend: the various kinds of content produced by faculty, students and staff in digital form; the purposes for its production and its potential uses; the provenances of its production (e.g., whether sponsored research, instructional materials, etc.) and their implications; the economic and scholarly value of this content, and the risks to which UC might be exposed if it fails to effectively account for and manage these resources; and the major technological, administrative and political/policy issues, including privacy, copyright, and other restrictions, that might be entailed in a comprehensive UC strategy. The anticipated outcome of this inquiry is a planning framework for addressing these issues, incorporating consideration of the responsibilities of various UC constituencies in their roles as authors/compilers, users, and stewards of this content at various stages in its life-cycle. The presentation will provide an overview of the aims, audience, and proposed methodology for conducting the study, while exposing some of its guiding assumptions for review and discussion.
Handout (MS WORD)