Access to Collections Locally and Worldwide

UC San Diego collections at all nine libraries are available through our online catalog, Roger, named after Roger Revelle (1909-1991), an oceanographer and proponent for the founding of the University.

The San Diego Circuit is a consortium of local libraries including UC San Diego, California State University San Marcos, San Diego County Library, San Diego State University, and the University of San Diego. All UC San Diego faculty, staff, and students may take advantage of the Circuit to obtain resources we do not own.

As part of the wider UC System, we have access to the rich historic collections of print books and journals located at other campuses and two off-site high-density storage facilities, the Northern Regional Storage Facility and the Southern Regional Facility. These UC-wide collections appear in the Next Generation Melvyl Pilot database, a union catalog of all materials owned by the University of California Libraries.

Next Generation Melvyl is a subset of a much larger database, OCLC WorldCat, which contains over 90 million records in over 400 languages from over 100 countries. Many of these resources are available to UC San Diego faculty, staff, and students via Interlibrary Loan document delivery services.

UC San Diego is also a member of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL). The CRL is a consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries. Their mission is to support research in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences through cooperation with their members and partners. The CRL supports area studies research through a Global Resources Network, various Area Studies Programs, and has rich collections of newspapers, international documents, foreign dissertations, microform, and other international resources. In addition, the CRL is beginning a digitization program for some of their unique collections. Resources owned by CRL are available to UC San Diego faculty, staff, and students via Interlibrary Loan document delivers services.

UC San Diego is also participating with the Google Book Search Library Project to digitize several million books from the world's top universities and libraries. The UC San Diego Libraries will contribute thousands of volumes from the East Asian language collections and from the International Relations & Pacific Studies Library, in such diverse subject areas as history, literature, public policy and economics. The Google search engine allows anyone to search the full text of books from libraries and publishing partners. For books in the public domain, readers will be able to view, browse, and read the full texts online. For books protected by copyright, users can access basic background (such as the book's title and the author's name), a few lines of text related to their search, and information about where they can borrow or buy a book.

In the area of Digital Preservation, the UC System is collaborating with a consortium of educational and governmental agencies, including the Library of Congress, to develop a means to capture and preserve the Web at Risk. U.S. Government agency web sites and political campaign and elections web sites are at risk of disappearing after the elections or a potential party change. The information contained in these sites is of vital interest to current and future generations of scholars and researchers of our nation's cultural political heritage.