Discovery & Delivery

Discovery & Delivery provides users with seamless access to the collective materials of the UC Libraries and also the world’s libraries.

We make progress towards this mission by working with our partners to build, maintain, and grow discovery and delivery services on behalf of the UC Libraries. We contribute expertise in multi-institutional technical infrastructure within the UC Libraries, with our partners, and in the global library community.

Some of our current long-term work toward this mission includes:

working with our fellow University of California libraries to run and improve our systemwide catalog and our interlibrary loan system;
working with HathiTrust to create, analyze and improve their catalog;
working with shared print initiatives and other organizations to build and make available a collective collection drawn from hundreds of libraries;
working with the international library community to make discovery easier by improving the quality and scope of metadata at all libraries; and
working with the national library community to improve access to and delivery of materials in ways that are most useful to users.

While our portfolio is diverse, a common thread among our products remains the strong focus on supporting a consortial mindset among the UC Libraries and other partners: facilitating collective data analysis, nurturing collective decision-making, and being the consortial experts on the many aspects of library technology integration. An integral aspect of our work is understanding and leveraging back-end software, as well as understanding and leveraging the needs, strengths, and resources of our partners.

The D2D portfolio can be split into two significant tracks: major products for which we are collaborators, supporters, and service providers but not the main decision-makers (e.g. WEST/AGUA, Zephir, SILS, etc.); and other projects that we might choose to pick up and investigate as drivers or partners, decision-makers, and experimenters (e.g. AI projects). We spend the majority of our resources collaborating on, but not necessarily driving, these major products; the remaining time we spend researching ways to innovate within those areas to provide growth opportunities for the UC Libraries. In other words: D2D provides both expertise for essential services as well as expertise in experimental and innovative ideas.

D2D Principles

Kindness and respect are the bedrock on which our team is built.
We maintain a focus on the user experience.
We value collaboration and cooperation, and believe that an outcome is stronger for being built on diverse perspectives.
We are dedicated to being responsible stewards of the resources we manage.
We cultivate skills and domain knowledge in order to meet future needs.
We value continuous improvement, and making forward progress through small and actionable steps that make a difference for users.
We are committed to doing our work thoughtfully, which means allowing time to analyze and evaluate our work before, during, and after a project.