Budget and Planning

The UC San Diego Libraries Collections budget funds the purchase and subscription of resources in all formats. Increasingly, a larger percentage of our budget is devoted to continuing subscription of electronic resources, including databases and large packages of electronic journals and other resources. This is especially true as prices increase at a higher rate than our budget allocations.
Given the dim prospects for sufficient increases to our state budget allocation to keep up with rising costs, we are working on a number of strategies to support collections:

• • Consortial purchase agreements, enabling us to negotiate lower prices due to larger orders. Of the portion of our budget devoted to electronic resources, an increasing percentage consists of UCSD’s portion of resources negotiated and licensed by the California Digital Library (CDL) on behalf of the entire University of California System. We are also working with other UC libraries to further develop cooperative UC collections.
  • Participation in campus and UC wide discussions of the Scholarly Communications model and working to rethink campus reliance on the current, unsustainable model which requires the Library to purchase from publishers the product of UC-faculty research, often at exorbitant prices.
  • Enhancing endowed support for collections and growing our endowments, while also building and further developing our distinct collections with the 20th and 21st century research of our distinguished UC faculty.

The following charts and graphs present this information in a visual way.

1. UC San Diego Library Collection Statistics

• Collection Budget
• Collection Expenditures
• Collection Funding Sources
• Continuations & CDL Coinvest Expenditures
• Traditional Formats & Online Access to Current Serials
• Volume Count
• E-Books

Download a print-friendly pdf version of the all the charts.

2. University of California Library Statistics

3. From the UC Libraries' Open Letter to Vendors on the California Budget Crisis:

The University of California Libraries ask all information providers with whom we negotiate content licenses to respond to the major fiscal challenges affecting higher education in California in a spirit of collaboration and mutual problem-solving. We expect to work with each of our vendors at renewal to develop creative solutions that can preserve the greatest amount of content to meet the information needs of the University of California's students, faculty, and researchers. 
Read the full letter here.