Collections Policies

UCLA Library builds and stewards collections that support our communities' teaching, learning and research needs. Our collections are reviewed continuously for accuracy, currency, usage, diversity and subject area gaps.

Access to materials beyond UCLA is provided by the Library's participation in the international interlibrary loan community, the California Digital Library, the Center for Research Libraries, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research and other library organizations. For more information, see the UCLA Library Fact Book(opens in a new tab).

Read on for more information about our collections and the policies that guide them.

The UC System is a leader in the fight to reduce paywalls to publicly-funded research while working toward more financially sustainable agreements for the paywalled content that we do purchase. The UCLA Library supports this by adopting publisher agreements that maximize access to resources while minimizing costs.

UCLA librarians systematically evaluate the use of open resources, whether as alternatives or in addition to existing traditional resources. Our four-pronged strategy is as follows:

• Promote the open and broadest dissemination of scholarship consumed and created by UCLA scholars.

• Leverage strategic partnerships and technologies to meet the current and anticipated needs of UCLA faculty, staff and students for access to resources and knowledge.

• Create and cultivate distinctive collections of unique materials, both those that are international in scope and those that document the histories and cultures of Southern California’s diverse communities, and makes them discoverable and deliverable to scholars worldwide.

• Steward information resources through state-of-the-art discovery, delivery and preservation programs, including open metadata strategies, to ensure access and usability now and in the future.

UC Open Access policies reserve rights for UC faculty and other employees to make their articles freely available to the public as they see fit. This may be done through the UC’s eScholarship(opens in a new tab) site or another repository. We also prioritize making associated research data accessible. The UC has partnered with the publishing platform Dryad(opens in a new tab) to promote the publication of research data.

In carrying out our strategy, the Library commits to principles of openness, including those expressed in the Open Access Policy of the University of California and our own E-Book Value Statement. For more, read about Open Access Resources at the UC Libraries(opens in a new tab).

As an academic research library, we must provide broad public access to a range of materials from around the world and from many historical eras. Some of the ideas, images and words presented in these materials may be offensive, harmful or difficult for users. Nevertheless, these materials provide evidence of disparate ideas throughout history that scholars can interrogate through critical lenses. Inclusion in any UCLA Library collection does not imply endorsement of these materials or the ideas, images, or words contained in them. Please use our feedback form(opens in a new tab) if you would like to alert us of an issue with one of our collections or how it is described.