Budget Reductions and Collections Changes

Like all campus units, the Library has faced ongoing budgetary constraints requiring difficult decisions across all operations, including collections expenditures. In response, we reduced spending on information resources in both FY 2025 and FY 2026.

Due to the cumulative impact of prior budget reductions and rising costs, the Library needed to reduce overall expenditures by nearly 17% for FY 2026. This reduction plan included a $1.5 million cut to collections spending. To ensure these savings could be realized in FY 2026, decisions about what to discontinue were made by the end of FY 2025.

While access to most of these resources will continue until existing subscriptions expire, access will gradually phase out at various points throughout FY 2026.

Decision Process

To determine which collections to reduce or eliminate, librarians at the UC San Diego Library reviewed usage data and cost metrics, drawing on their deep subject expertise to make informed decisions. Redundant access — such as having both print and electronic formats — was prioritized for identifying local collections for cancellation. In some cases, we reduced local costs by changing subscription types, such as discontinuing print while retaining electronic access or giving up perpetual access rights.

More than 80% of our collections budget supports systemwide licenses negotiated collaboratively across the 10 UC campuses. These shared licenses deliver significant value to the UC San Diego community, so we worked to preserve systemwide content whenever possible. At the same time, budget challenges across the UC system required coordinated action. To address these issues, the Council of University Librarians (CoUL) charged a group with recommending selected cuts to systemwide resources, in addition to expenditure reductions campus libraries were making locally. The group developed a list of candidate resources for cancellation, representing a 3.6% ($1.7M) reduction in systemwide expenditures, which CoUL approved. Access to these resources will continue until the current subscription period ends, which varies by resource but will largely conclude by January 2026.

These decisions were not made lightly. We recognize that these core resources are central to teaching, learning and research at UC San Diego, and we are working to sustain the most impactful materials to the greatest extent our budget permits.

In total, we discontinued approximately 1,000 local titles from our current journal and recurring purchase lists, along with 16 systemwide journal packages or databases. View a complete list of canceled titles (Google Sheet).

How to Access What You Need

While we have had to make difficult choices, the Library remains committed to supporting your learning, teaching, and research needs. If you encounter access issues, try the following:

• Request articles or books through our Interlibrary Loan service.
• Search for open access versions using the Unpaywall browser extension or search the database to find access to open access content.
• Contact authors directly — many may be willing to share copies of their published articles.
• If you encounter challenges accessing a resource, please let us know via an email to ask-us@ucsd.libanswers.com.

Questions and Feedback

If you have questions or feedback about the recent collections reductions, please contact us at ucsdlibrary@ucsd.edu.