Graduate Students

Generations of researchers who rely on primary sources faced a frustrating hurdle. Conducting original historical research typically required traveling to distant archives, navigating cost-prohibitive interlibrary loans or adjusting a project’s scope based on access to sources. For students engaged in a senior honors thesis or a graduate seminar, these logistical barriers frequently stifled academic curiosity before research even began. As a result, scholarship was often limited to those with the resources to access specific geographic locations or well-funded departments.

DECEMBER 2025 UPDATE: For the remainder of the 2025-2026 Academic Year, UCSB Library will open to the public at 7:00 AM Monday-Sunday and remain open to UCSB students, faculty, and staff from 1:00 AM to 3:00 AM on Sunday-Thursday nights for Study Commons. View building hours.

On July 1, 2025, the UC Libraries will migrate to a new Interlibrary Loan (ILL) management system. The new system will make it easier for patrons to view and manage transactions by merging the contents of My ILL Requests into My Library Account, creating a single platform for patrons to view all active ILL and circulation requests and loans, place renewal requests, and view fines and fees.

Picture students divided into groups in a classroom, each group intently focused on a pile of Lego® building bricks. You’re probably picturing children at an elementary school, but in this particular case, they are graduate students at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara. Their task? To build a fantasy creation of their liking, with the proviso that they must describe their construction, in writing, in a way that it can be replicated.

New tool enables UC authors to look up journals covered by UC’s open access publishing agreements

The University of California (UC) has launched the Journal Open Access Lookup Tool (JOLT), a new service designed specifically for UC authors to easily determine if a journal qualifies under one of UC’s open access publishing agreements. 

The interface of the database list on the Library homepage will change on Tuesday, September 17. Library website users who click on the “Articles & Databases” button or the “Articles & Databases” link in the main navigation menu will be redirected to the new interface, https://guides.library.ucsb.edu/az/databases. 

The new interface will make it easier for Library users to discover available databases and electronic resources by offering several improvements:

A convenient way to make scholarly work public under UC’s Open Access Policies

UC Santa Barbara Library is pleased to announce the much-anticipated opening of the new UCSB Makerspace on January 8. Located on the first floor, Ocean Side, of the Library, the Makerspace is open to all UCSB students, faculty, and staff for academic, research, or personal exploration.

On Monday, September 18 we upgraded the proxy server that is used to access Library subscription electronic resources from off campus.  Review the changes below to see what changed.

What Changed?

The University of California has entered into a two-year transformative open access agreement with SAGE Publishing. The agreement runs from January 1, 2022, to December 31, 2024, and covers open access publishing and reading access to SAGE’s hybrid and fully open access journals. The agreement includes open access publishing of an unlimited number of articles by corresponding authors at all ten UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and provides researchers throughout the UC system with expanded reading access to the full portfolio of SAGE journals.