Member Spotlight: California Digital Library: Standardizing Digital Practices Across the University of California System

The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997 to take advantage of emerging technologies that have transformed the way digital information is published and accessed. Since its inception, in collaboration with the UC libraries and other partners, the CDL has assembled one of the world’s largest digital research libraries and changed the way that faculty, students, and researchers discover and use information at the University of California and beyond.

The CDL is organized into five distinctive programs emphasizing the development and management of digital collections, tools and systems for online discovery and delivery, innovation in scholarly publishing, and digital curation and long-term preservation, which together provide a wide array of services on behalf of the University of California, its libraries, its pursuit of scholarship, and its public service mission

Notable CDL initiatives include the Melvyl shared online catalog, the Online Archive of California (OAC), Calisphere, the CDL Web Archiving Service (WAS), eScholarship publishing services, and the UC Curation Center (UC3). CDL also operates an extensive licensing program on behalf of the UC campuses and organizes University of California participation in large-scale digitization initiatives with Google and the Internet Archive, including founding participation in the HathiTrust shared digital repository. With more than 220,000 students, 170,000 faculty and staff, and more than 35 million volumes in its combined library collections, the University of California Libraries together comprise the largest single university library system in the world.

NISO asked CDL to respond to the following questions regarding our use of standards and involvement in standards development.

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