Digital Library Systems and UCLA: An Environmental Scan with Suggestions for Near and Medium-Term Technology Strategies and User Stories / Functional Requirements

This document presents the motivations, methods, and results of an environmental scan of digital library systems conducted by the UCLA Digital Library Program (DLP) from November 2016 through July 2017. Potential courses of action for the UCLA DLP are recommended in the concluding section. The authors arrived at these  recommendations through a careful balancing of considerations such as current and anticipated staffing models and resources, access to a community of practice and support for new system development, and the needs of the UCLA Library and its partners. In brief, the report recommends short-term use of external systems like CDL’s Nuxeo/Calisphere to manage urgent collection publishing needs while the DLP simultaneously evaluates the Samvera (formerly Hydra) environment and eventually adopts and adapts the portions of the ecosystem that are crucial to our future needs.