With the summer solstice now behind us, I cannot but take a few minutes to reflect on the past academic year and my first year as University Librarian at Caltech. For me, this was the year of firsts: meeting faculty, students, and staff; first presentation to the Faculty Board; first time hosting the 3MT competition; first all-library staff retreat; first Caltech commencement. Beyond the excitement of the new and of discovering nuances of Caltech’s ethos, I learned so much from all these first experiences about what makes Caltech, Caltech; and I savored each moment.
The past year marked several firsts (and hopefully not lasts) for Caltech Library as well. We had our first Giving Day on April 27, when alumni, staff, students, and faculty recognized our role and our contributions with gifts that will be put to good use. We are grateful for the support and aim to grow the seeds planted at Giving Day into a sustained fundraising effort.
This was also the year in which Caltech launched its two-year Integrated Core, focusing on energy, energy policy, and sustainability, as a pilot alternative to the standard core curriculum. The Archives has been central to the courses’ interdisciplinary exploration of the history of water and power in the LA basin and to helping students discover Caltech’s vital, multifaceted role in building the energy infrastructure that powered Los Angeles.
With the recent profusion of head-spinning changes in federal guidelines and workflows for grant applications and reporting, the library’s Research Services team has been challenged to respond quickly and knowledgably to inquiries stemming from the sometimes-confusing new policies and directives issued by government agencies. And each inquiry tackled was a first of its kind.
The year has also been marked by ongoing discussions and debates around the promise and potential pitfalls of GenAI and what it all means for our work. Work in libraries has been shaped by technological innovation for centuries, so what we see happening now in academic libraries and higher education is not new to librarians. Hence, we have embarked on exploring and testing the promise of GenAI in activities and projects unique to Caltech. Thanks to a team effort encompassing the Digital Library developers and the Archives staff, the library now has a working prototype for using AI tools in an archives processing workflow for generating metadata from digitized content and a workflow for integrating computer files into an archival hierarchy defined by paper files. This is quite a notable development and a first step in harnessing the potential of AI to help us make research content more discoverable and accessible to scholars.
This past year the Caltech Library has leaned more than ever into the opportunities afforded us as members of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) and joined a large cohort of libraries under the SCELC umbrella in the collective effort to develop and enhance our existing open-source library management system, FOLIO. Through Our SCELC affiliation we were also able to enter into an agreement with the American Chemical Society that waives article processing fees for Caltech authors who want to publish their research openly.
Leveraging communities of practice and seeking partnerships with like-minded institutions committed to the open sharing of knowledge and expertise is allowing us to upgrade the aging infrastructure hosting the Caltech repositories. As stewards of Caltech’s knowledge, we seek opportunities and solutions that enable us to improve our platforms, services, and programs in the most efficient and fiscally responsible way.
And while we take pride in first explorations, experimentations, and solutions to challenges, we are equally proud of the work we have consistently done over the years that has earned us recognition and appreciation from our user community.
We are proud of our readiness and ability to find and deliver in record time materials in the many formats needed for teaching and research—and to do it all with a smile and the satisfaction of knowing that we have made a difference.
We are happy that we can still support students during finals with nourishment breaks and that we can continue to offer events such as movie nights and creative activities in the TechHub. The health and well-being of the Caltech community is important to us, and we are delighted when we partner with campus organizations that share our commitment.
While there is not much happening in the classrooms over the summer, we know that research is always ongoing in the labs, and we are here to answer questions, provide guidance, and, when offered the opportunity, to partner. Throughout this time, we are also laying out plans and ideas for new ways to support the Caltech community in the next academic year.
To our graduates, we are proud to have known you and supported you, and as you take flight, remember that librarians ready to help and assist are everywhere. ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude may be just a click away, but librarians can advise on how to engage responsibly, ethically, and effectively with artificial intelligence in your work, learning, research or communication. It is well worth it, wherever you may find yourselves, to get to know your resident librarian.
Enjoy a happy and restorative summer!
Visitors to the Athenaeum basement’s 
Caltech Library is pleased to announce expanded storage allocations for the CaltechDATA repository, made possible through a National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure grant. All researchers at Caltech can now upload up to 1 TB of data for free. CaltechDATA is the institutional data and software repository for Caltech and can host research data files that are ready to be shared with the scientific and broader communities.
Our expanded storage allocations are possible due to the Open Storage Network, which is a shared approach for managing research data storage. We have also been able to collaborate on improvements that support hosting large files in the InvenioRDM repository platform, which powers CaltechDATA.
CaltechDATA can host a wide variety of datasets, from individual files to complex curated resources such as the Total Carbon Column Observing Network. CaltechDATA already hosts some large data collections, including the Caltech High Throughput Experimentation (HTE) Materials Experiment and Analysis Database and the Caltech Tomography Archive. We are able to host other large data collections for a $200 / TB one-time upload fee. Please contact us at data@caltech.edu if you have a large data collection you’d like to share.
This blog post is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 2322420. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.