In 2009, the original Blueprint for the Digital University set the stage for UC San Diego’s many accomplishments in cyberinfrastructure over the following decade. Many contemporary services and infrastructure used across campus have their origins in this document and subsequent projects. But research evolves, new needs arise, and new requirements are placed on researchers. Thus, campus leadership recognized the need for a new, updated Blueprint, helping point the way to the next generation of support.

To compile this new Blueprint, the Research Computing and Data Services Governance Committee engaged in a multi-year process to obtain expert input into the future of research and research technology, including consulting a faculty advisory group, surveying campus faculty, engaging in in-depth interviews with UC San Diego administrators such as the Executive Vice Chancellor and Vice Chancellor for Research, and conducting faculty focus groups.

This document outlines the priorities and directions our University must take to maximize new discoveries, increase funding, facilitate science, comply with regulatory demands and propel us forward in the decade to come.

The themes described in this document come from trends in research processes and workflow, and are not specific to UC San Diego. This document is being shared publicly with the hope that it will be of assistance to other institutions facing similar generational evolution in both the conduct of research and in their research support infrastructure.

During Winter 2020 - Summer 2021, the UC San Diego Library participated in the Ithaka S+R multi-institutional research study “Supporting Big Data Research”. The purpose of this study was to learn more about how researchers on the UC San Diego campus work with big data in their research and provide a set of recommendations to enhance and develop resources and services that will directly support and benefit this research. While definitions of “big data” may vary by discipline, we use the term here to refer to datasets large enough to be challenging to analyze within a traditional spreadsheet, or on a single computer. 

In-depth interviews with twelve UC San Diego big data researchers of various academic ranks and departmental affiliations were conducted, with questions focusing on various aspects of collecting and analyzing big data, infrastructure needs, research communication and data sharing, and training and support needs. Based on these interviews, we identify three primary themes for big data researchers on the UC San Diego campus: Curation, Open Science, and Training. For each of these areas, we offer a set of recommendations for the campus to better support existing big data research at UC San Diego, as well as develop capacity to support future big data initiatives.

The Chronopolis Digital Preservation Initiative, one of the Library of Congress' latest efforts to collect and preserve atrisk digital information, has completed its first year of service as a multi-member partnership to meet the archival needs of a wide range of cultural and social domains. In this paper we will explore the major themes within Chronopolis.

This report provides the rationale and design for a campus‐wide research cyberinfrastructure (RCI) that will meet federal mandates for research data preservation, improve UCSD’s academic competitiveness, and achieve economies‐of‐scale savings through centralization of core infrastructure elements, while at the same time recognizing the diverse and distributed nature of UCSD’s research enterprise.

Informed by a campus survey conducted in 2008, as well as a number of case studies analyzed by the Research Cyberinfrastructure Design Team (RCIDT), our design focuses primarily (but not exclusively) on digital data. Driven by proliferating high throughput instruments, wireless sensor nets, and supercomputer simulations, the amount of digital data at the heart of the modern research enterprise is growing exponentially at UCSD and around the world. Our proposed data‐centric RCI will not only allow us to cope with the data deluge, it will position UCSD to prosper from it, and become an international leader and innovator in this area.