On October 28, the University of California recognized the UC Santa Barbara Library and the UC San Diego Library with the Yvonne Tevis UC Collaboration Silver Award at the UC Tech 2024 Conference in Davis. The prestigious award recognizes the productive partnership between the two libraries on Project Surfliner, a five-year collaboration to develop a suite of digital library applications supporting the creation, management, preservation, and discovery of library digital collections.
Project Surfliner exemplifies the essence of the Yvonne Tevis UC Collaboration Award through its transformative impact on digital library platforms, fostering cultural shifts, and embodying the spirit of cross-campus cooperation and innovation within the UC system. The project’s framework embodies principles of shared code, agile development, and open communication, which helped the libraries to collaborate across campus boundaries and allowed each campus to benefit from the other's expertise and resources. The collaboration has recently expanded to include the UC Santa Cruz Library as a formal contributor to the project.
Project Surfliner applications are designed to be ready-for-use across UC campuses, while giving each institution control over its content and how it is organized and displayed. The software is free and open source so it can be easily adopted by outside collaborators and extended to support a wide range of content types.
Founded in 2001, the annual UC Tech Awards Program celebrates individuals and teams within the university’s technology community who have contributed to areas of strategic importance to the university using technical approaches. Teams compete across seven award categories, each reflecting a key skill or value that supports technological advancement – design and IT security, as well as innovation, operational excellence, UC-wide collaboration, leadership in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and sustained impact.
This is the second time Project Surfliner was recognized with a UC Tech Award. In 2020, the UCSB and UCSD Libraries were awarded the Golden Sautter Award for their work on Starlight, an open-source, cross-campus collaborative project to create a UC-specific platform that enables librarians, curators, and others who are responsible for digital collections at the UC libraries to create attractive, image-rich websites that highlight these collections.
Project Surfliner Team Members
UCSB Library
- Tom Brittnacher, Curator for Geospatial and Digital Collections
- Michael Craig, DevOps Engineer
- Alexandra Dunn, Digital Library Architect
- Margaret Kibi, Digital Library Developer
- Alissa Pierce, Digital Library Front End Developer & User Experience Designer
- David Moles, Associate Director for Digital Library Engineering
- Chrissy Rissmeyer, Director of Digital Library Development
- tamsin woo (*now in a new role at UCSB)
UCSD Library
- Thor Brickman, Sr. DevOps Engineer
- Vivian Chu, Applications Developer
- Matt Critchlow, Applications Developer
- Kristian De Castro, Applications Developer
- Jessica Hilt (*now at UC San Francisco)
- Arwen Hutt, Metadata Specialist
- Tim Marconi, Director of Technology and Digital Experience
- Gabriela Montoya, Service Manager for Digital Initiatives
- Longshu Situ, Applications Developer
- Ron Stanonik, Sr. DevOps Engineer
- Michael Stuart, IT Operations Manager
- David Trujillo, Applications Developer
- Amy Work, GIS Librarian
