Goals The University of California libraries provide access to the world's knowledge for the UC campuses and the communities they serve. In so doing, they directly support UC's missions of teaching, research and public service. For over a century, the goal of the libraries at each UC campus has been to build and manage distinctive collections and provide leading edge information services tailored to the needs of each campus. Over the last decade, libraries have taken advantage of the rapid advances in the development and use of new technologies to create, publish, store, search for and deliver information, with the aim of providing reliable and effective access to information on each campus without having to physically possess and store it.

Measures These indicators measure library size, impact and vitality. They demonstrate that the University of California has an information resource collection that is truly unmatched in the United States. UC students and faculty are able to take advantage of these resources from any campus in the system, and they do so in larger numbers every year. While impressive, these measures provide an incomplete picture of the UC libraries. Most clearly underrepresented are electronic resources – electronic journals, eBooks, digital reference services and digitized collections – and the extensive use that is made of them online. Only an initial glimpse is available in the number of successful full-text article requests from electronic journals provided by the UC libraries. Future indicators will gauge this increasingly significant part of the UC libraries.