Research Services

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 requirements from funding agencies and publishers to improve the reproducibility of scientific results, and to ensure that data and code products of grant-funded research are "Fair, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)," have sparked an open science revolution. While the benefits of open science are widely recognized, the burden of implementing its principles is left to researchers, and too often is unfunded.

Did you know that most links on the web become non-resolvable after 100 days and that about 70% of news-related links disappear within a day? Even if this alarmingly short lifespan is news to you, we bet you’ve probably encountered a 404 error before (if not multiple times), meaning that the content you were trying to access was no longer available.  The web is a highly dynamic and ephemeral environment; domains change, and resources relocate or disappear without notice.  As a result, today's active link may

UCSB Library now has access to BrowZine, a service that lets you browse the complete issues of e-journals that the Library subscribes to, just as if you were flipping through the pages of a physical copy.

UC Library Search went live at UCSB on July 27, 2021, providing a centralized discovery tool to search and browse materials from all 10 UC libraries. Changes are still underway. In fact, those of you who use Google Scholar will need to update your settings to be properly directed to any full text made available through UCSB Library. 

The HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) currently provides UCSB users with online access to a portion of the UC Libraries’ in-copyright print holdings that were inaccessible during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Research by students at three separate universities on a collection in the UC Santa Barbara Library that hasn’t been studied extensively since the 1970s is gaining attention - and funds - from several prestigious institutions.

When the UCSB Library and campus closed suddenly in March 2020 because of the growing COVID-19 pandemic, the expected duration of closure was estimated at a mere three weeks.

Over the past 15 months, our community has experienced a multitude of personal and professional challenges and opportunities, among them the transition to the virtual workspace.

UC Library Search will replace UCSB Library Search and Melvyl as the new unified UC-wide discovery tool on July 27, 2021. Some services and functions will be impacted starting July 7. To help you prepare for the transition to UC Library Search, review the following Q&A’s: 

What will happen to My Library Account in UCSB Library Search? Do I need to do anything? Do I need to turn books back in?

UCSB Library Search and Melvyl Retiring July 27

UC Library Search will vastly improve the user experience of faculty, students, and researchers worldwide who need to access collections across the University of California system. This new discovery tool will replace Melvyl and UCSB Library Search on July 27, 2021.