SIO primarily grants Ph.D. degrees in Oceanography, Marine Biology, and Earth Sciences, and also grants MS degrees. SIO teaches 45 UCSD undergraduate courses in earth science, marine science, and environmental systems. SIO has faculty appointees, non-faculty academic research appointees, academic specialists, academic project scientists, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. Curricular groups are Geosciences, Climate-Ocean-Atmosphere, and Ocean Biosciences. Research divisions are Earth, Biology, and Oceans & Atmosphere. In 1995 and 2010, the National Research Council ranked SIO first in faculty quality among oceanography programs nationwide.
SIO Library selects electronic and print materials supporting SIO research and education, and more broadly for marine sciences. Materials in marine science are selected for UCSD undergraduate use, as well as the general reader.
By UC libraries practice, the SIO Library collection functions as a system-wide resource collection for oceanography, providing many items via ILL (net lender). In collection development documents, the UCSD Libraries has listed the SIO Library collection as a "collection of distinction." SIO Library's collection development in oceanography is comprehensive, and does not follow the fragmented scope of research at SIO. Materials are collected in oceanography that have no immediate audience at SIO, yet contribute towards a comprehensive systemwide resource collection for SIO, UCSD, and UC.
Oceanography, by its very nature, is multidisciplinary. Man studies the ocean in many different aspects, spanning many scientific disciplines both basic and applied, and including physics, chemistry, geology, biology, meteorology, climatology. Fisheries, and paleontology, as well as some social sciences including marine policy, fishery economics, law of the sea, and coast zone management.
Outside of the marine sciences, it is impossible for SIO Library to collect comprehensively for SIO needs, since their needs encompass resources much more comprehensively collected at other UCSD and UC libraries. Therefore collection development is undertaken within the context of other collections at UCSD and within UC (e.g. geology). For example, SIO Library is insufficiently funded and cannot be a research library serving research and education needs in geology, molecular and cellular biology, microbiology, chemistry, fluid mechanics, physics, etc. Therefore SIO Library is exceedingly selective in such areas, collecting around other UCSD and UC collections, and duplicating only critically important materials that should be present in the SIO Library collection to support SIO research and education.
SIO Library aims to collect materials on all aspects of the marine environment. SIO Library collects strongly but not comprehensively in climatology and meteorology, as well as geophysics, geodesy, and seismology. Geophysics, geodesy, and seismology support the research of SIO's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. Supporting materials are collected in geology, zoology, and ecology; SIO Library has the strongest collection in these areas among the UCSD Libraries. However geology, zoology, and ecology are collected with an eye to marine sciences, so that general and specific materials useful to marine science are collected, but not everything is collected that might be useful. Materials that are principally relevant to the terrestrial environment are not collected, though some limited materials may be available to round out the collection, e.g. entomology, ornithology excluding seabirds and penguins, herpetology excluding sea turtles, terrestrial ecology, terrestrial mammals, etc.
SIO Library does not generally collect in these subject areas, though some materials are purchased to round out the collection: environmental sciences; air/soil/water pollution; hydrology; water resources; wastewater engineering; groundwater resources; GIS; satellite mapping and remote sensing; soil sciences; botany excluding marine species.
SIO Library collects comprehensively in scientific expedition reports with a focus or strong component on the marine sciences. These are usually published in sets, and are retrospectively purchased when items are identified.
Natural products chemistry relevant to the marine environment is collected, and historically SIO Library has the stronger journal collection in this area on the UCSD campus.
Ocean charts (hydrographic aka bathymetric charts) are collected, particularly retrospectively, with the collection strong for 20th century charting. Active receipts are charts for US waters produced by the National Ocean Service. The Department of Defense discontinued print charts for worldwide waters in 2010. Ocean charts produced by the national hydrographic agencies of other countries (e.g. British Admiralty, Mexico's Secretaria Marina, etc.) are collected as needed when SIO interest is identified or as opportunity presents, but not comprehensively, with a focus on the Indo-Pacific and Southern oceans. Some geological and topographic maps are collected, and is a passive collection, with San Diego County geological mapping being the only area of active collection. California, Antarctic and ocean geological mapping is always retained.
SIO Archives is the foremost oceanographic archives, documenting the history of SIO and oceanography, with some coverage of local La Jolla and San Diego history
Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library
University of California San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive #0219
La Jolla, CA 92093-0219
Tel: 858-534-3274
E-mail: siolib@sio.ucsd.edu