Digital Scholarship

Professor Ian Walker relies on a century of coastal history to better understand the future of California’s environment.

When Samuel Liu noticed workplace friction among fellow Resident Assistants (RAs) at UC Santa Barbara’s San Nicolas Residence Hall, he decided to investigate. As a senior majoring in Communication and Sociology, Liu turned his personal and professional observations into an award-winning independent research project. His study, titled " 'It’s Not Just a Job, It’s Literally My Housing': Resident Assistants, Job Embeddedness, and Dissent," earned first place and a $750 prize at the 2026 Library Award for Undergraduate Research (LAUR).

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.

A new $484,455 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will support the next phase of the University of California Open Source Program Office (OSPO) Network as they work to make OSPOs a permanent part of the UC system. With this new funding, the UC Santa Barbara Library’s Open Source Program (OSP) will continue to develop and deploy initiatives that raise awareness and support for open source software and hardware at UCSB.

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 University of California has been awarded a grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the development of a UC-wide network of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs). This award leverages the work of the Open Source Program Office at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) and funds a collaboration of UC campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Diego with UCSC to promote open source research, teaching, and public service. 

UCSB Library has been awarded a $349,993 grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for the American Record Corporation (ARC) Access Initiative of the American Discography Project.

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

The UCSB Library and the Office of Research would like to announce the launch of a new web resource: 

Research Computing and Data 
https://rcd.ucsb.edu