The General Library at UC Davis is distinguished by its collections, staff, services and facilities as well as its membership in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The Library consistently ranks in the top third of the 122 members of ARL. As a major educational and scholarly resource, the Library is an integral part of the University. Its mission is to collect, preserve and provide access to books, journals, manuscripts, documents, and other records of knowledge held in an ever expanding range of print and digital media in support of University instruction, research, patient care and community outreach.

In addition to the acquisition of books and other media, the Library currently receives thousands of journal titles in support of undergraduate, graduate and faculty instruction and research. A significant number of these journals are being produced in digital form accessible via the Library's gateway. Providing rapid and efficient access to appropriate scholarship ensures that students and faculty have the resources needed to facilitate the process of intellectual discovery.

General Library facilities are designed to promote study and research. Increasingly, these facilities are being outfitted with network and wireless connections which enable students, faculty and other users to coordinate the use of print and electronic resources in the same location. At the same time, Library investments in technology have enabled a host of alternatives to traditional library use. Remote access to catalogs, finding aids, and full text materials as well as the Internet are increasingly commonplace and fit the use patterns of a new generation of learners. On the horizon are Library initiatives to develop personalized portals that users will be able to use to customize information specific to their needs and interests.

The General Library continues to invest in technologies that allow remote access to digitized material (databases, text files, images). Based on national trends, it is estimated that as many as 75% of users prefer to access such materials remotely (i.e. students in dorm rooms or residences, faculty in their offices). Thus, the ability to deliver instructional and research materials to the user desktop will continue to be a focus.

A strong user assistance program is in place in the General Library to enrich the learning experience for students as well as the discovery process for researchers. Classes in the use of basic print and electronic tools are readily available from trained library staff via mediated classroom sessions or on-line tutorials. Special instructional sessions are also available which focus on specific disciplines or areas of research and to specific audiences from incoming freshmen to transfer students to graduate students.

For the past ten months the Health Sciences Libraries at UC Davis have moved the concept of real time digital reference to reality by offering live reference chat sessions with a librarian between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. The software selected for this program, 24/7 Reference, has proven stable and patron reactions to the service have been positive. This software allows a patron and librarian to do a live chat as well as "co-surf" the web. The Librarian can collaboratively work on pages with a patron or simply push pages to and assist a patron with developing a search strategy for the Melvyl online catalog or PubMed or other web resources. The average number of "live interactions" per day since the program began in October, 2001 has been about one per day. While all reference librarians at the Health Sciences Libraries participate in this program, one librarian has coordinated the effort by providing training sessions with librarians trading off as patrons and librarians, developing guidelines, and leading regular discussions on how the service can be improved/made easier for librarians. This has been a very efficient way to introduce new and cutting edge public service applications. Using the service is simple and user friendly and may be accessed here.

The UC Davis General Library has been participating in the UC Collection Management Initiative (CMI) supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation to assess user acceptance of electronic journals. UC Davis is monitoring the use of a group of "experimental" titles in the sciences, which are available in electronic form. The print volumes and issues of these titles have been removed from the shelves for the years that are available online, but they are available "on demand". Both the online use of the titles and requests to see the print copies are being monitored. On the Davis campus, after 9 months, a pattern is emerging that suggests that access to print material is more likely to be requested when an issue, article or other information has not been made available online. For the "control" titles, UC Davis is monitoring the print use of the journals on the shelves as well as the use of the online versions. For these titles, there is use of both the print and online. Partial data on the titles being monitored in this study is available. Overall, throughout the nine campuses, demand for print titles has been extremely low now that they have been removed from the shelf.