Science Library under construction

The year 2004 marked the 10th anniversary of the Science Library at UCI. With over 130,000 square feet of space, collections of over 550,000 volumes, and a staff of 106 providing services 128 hours a week, the Science Library has come to play a central role in the academic life of faculty and students. The Science Library receives nearly one million visits each year from people who obtain personalized assistance from library staff, use collections for research and class assignments, take classes, study, use sophisticated and specialized computers, and pursue personal explorations and interests.

In the summer of 1994, the Libraries’ science and medicine collections were gathered from the overcrowded Langson Library (then the Main Library) and from smaller facilities in the College of Medicine, the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Physical Sciences. Those collections were integrated in a beautiful new library facility designed by acclaimed British architect James Sterling. The new building provides ample space for the collections to grow and also housed UCI’s first state-of-the-art computer labs and technology-enhanced classrooms. The placement and design of the Science Library provides convenient access as people travel between the Biological and Physical Sciences quads, the School of Medicine, and the new University Research Park.

Science Library today

The first decade of the Science Library has coincided with the phenomenal growth of electronic scholarly resources. In addition to print collections, the library now provides digital full-text to thousands of scientific journals, databases, and reference tools, some in science disciplines that did not exist a decade ago. As UCI’s academic departments have expanded cutting-edge research and teaching into new areas, science librarians have collaborated by developing collections in a wide range of emerging disciplines including nanotechnology, neurosciences, biomedical engineering, cosmology, and more.

The Science Library has served the campus well since 1994, but patterns in how the building is used have changed as communication technology, research methodologies, and staffing patterns have evolved. We are currently planning how to best reconfigure space in both the Science and Langson libraries to provide the most effective library services.