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About Mass Digitization

UC’s Mass Digitization Goals

The mass digitization of library collections has helped UC meet the following goals:

  • Enhance student and faculty research: Mass digitization increases awareness, discovery, and access to the rich materials in UC’s collections.
  • Open new fields of academic inquiry: Mass digitization enables scholars to trace the evolution of ideas and perform other sophisticated textual analysis by making volumes full-text searchable by computer, thus supporting new forms of scholarship.
  • Fulfill our public service mission: Mass digitization allows public access to works in the public domain, these include many classic works of literature as well as more unique items such as early histories of the settlement of California and the West.
  • Preserve and protect our collections: Mass digitization helps ensure the durability of our collections in earthquake and fire-prone California.
  • Enable collection management efficiencies: Mass digitization makes cross-institutional sharing of digitized collections possible which may allow for reallocation of library funds and the reclamation of shelf space.

UC’s current goal is to digitize as much of UC’s public domain content as possible to give UC students, researchers, and the public access to as many library volumes as possible.

Mass Digitization Team’s Function and Focus

CDL’s Mass Digitization team supports UC’s mass digitization projects by providing project planning, coordination, and technical leadership. We provide support and guidance for the deposit of mass digitized volumes into the HathiTrust Digital Library. We are also expanding access to born digital content by supporting collaborative web archiving projects.

Our work encompasses a broad spectrum of activities and responsibilities. The Mass Digitization Team’s goal is to provide:

  • Leadership in UC relationships with our digitization and digital archiving partners
  • Creation and maintenance of technical standards and processes
  • Guidance to UC library operational locations, information sharing across the UC Libraries, and stewardship of UC’s digitized content
  • Expertise and guidance for piloting new system-wide mass digitization projects
  • Resources for UC Library deposit and management of digitized volumes into HathiTrust
  • Web archiving tools for researchers and curators, collection development, and discovery and access