President Dynes, I am highly worried about being accepted into a college of my choice. I am a senior in high school. I am very determined, and I will do whatever it takes to reach my goal of college. Will you please respond to my message detailing what I should do to reach my goal?

Thanks for your message. Our best advice to students is to work hard, take challenging courses in high school, and do one’s best in them. Making the most of the opportunities available to you and challenging yourself academically are the best preparation for a rigorous college education of the kind offered by UC. I also encourage you to seek assistance from your school’s college counselor, research your college options thoroughly, visit the campuses you're interested in, and apply broadly to maximize your chance of being accepted at a campus that will make a good fit for you. When you apply to colleges, make sure to complete a thoughtful application that gives a good idea of your achievements, what you would contribute to the campus, and some insight into you as a person. To learn more about the University of California, I encourage you to read our publication, "Introducing the University," available at www.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissions/ITU.pdf. Best wishes for a successful college search.

I am among the millions who just heard about the cooperative agreements between various hi-tech companies such as Google and Yahoo and the U of C regarding scanning of books for making them available digitally. Please do not allow any pressure group to reverse or slow down this initiative. You will not only be serving America in the finest academic traditions you will be serving humanity on a historic scale and level. Many years from now the world will look at this as the beginning of an era. I know from personal experience most of the world's citizens do not even have access to a basic public library never mind anything more substantial. Acquisition of hard copy books are luxuries to be considered carefully along with things like food. I am the guy who used to take a bus travel, 20 miles to a library that would lend me books. The year was 1966, place Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the only library that would lend us books for no charge, paper work or long explanations was the United States Information Center Library.

Thank you for your note, and for sharing with me your very moving personal story which demonstrates just how important and meaningful it is to have access to information. This is a very exciting initiative that significantly broadens our ability to give scholars and the public access to all the wonderful information in our libraries that drive scholarly innovation and public knowledge and discourse. It is part of, and substantially enriches, the efforts of many UC faculty who have, since 2002, made their own published works available freely online via the UC libraries' eScholarship repository. I think some people are anxious about the book-scanning efforts because they think we’re not going to respect copyrighted material, which is inaccurate – we intend to fully honor copyright protections.