UC Davis’ general catalog is back on an annual publication schedule, starting with the 2018-19 edition released today (April 30), and the catalog is now being published online only.

Randall Larson-Maynard of the Office of the University Registrar said the new catalog is fully database-driven using course and program information from the Integrated Curriculum Management System, or ICMS.

Other key changes:

• Courses will be updated and published as they are approved through the ICMS.
• Supplements and addendums will no longer be published.
• Programs (majors and minors) will be updated once a year for fall term only.
• Course content has been upgraded (see “About Courses”).
• A new section, “Courses by Subject Code,” provides quicker course lookup.

Also, two sections have moved to the registrar’s website:

• Campuswide bachelor’s degree requirements, with effective dates coinciding with each new catalog.
• College requirements.

The general catalog dates back 71 years, published annually until 1999 when it switched to biannual. The catalog went online in 1996-97, and, over the years, as you can imagine, more and more people used the online version — so much so that the university stopped printing the catalog in large numbers after the 2012-14 edition.

The registrar’s office partnered with the university’s print shop, Repro Graphics, to produce print-on-demand copies of the last two editions, 2014-16 and 2016-18. Repro Graphics reported selling 869 copies.

Now, even the print-on-demand option has gone away, although you can still print a catalog yourself, or selected pages, from the online version.

Larson-Maynard, senior editor, curriculum coordinator and webmaster for the general catalog, said the annual online publication date will be two weeks before Pass One registration for fall quarter.

The new online version is “slimmer,” he said, owing to his substituting links to other campus websites for “a significant amount of information” — thereby avoiding stale content in the catalog.

Archive of general catalogs

Going forward, the UC Davis general catalog is out of print. Going backward, all 71 years’ worth of catalogs are available to see, thanks to Randall Larson-Maynard of the Office of the University Registrar, who, in 2006, embarked on a UC Davis Centennial project to track down all of the university’s catalogs and have them digitized for an online archive.

Some of you might have helped him, in response to his appeal in a Dateline article: “Maybe you have them sitting on a shelf. Maybe they are in a box stuffed in the corner of your office. Wherever they may be, the university registrar is asking you to take a look for old UC Davis catalogs.”

At the time, Larson-Maynord had all the catalogs from 1994-95 to 2004-06 — and he was still looking for 1993-94, 1965-66, 1964-65, 1962-63, 1960-61 and everything from 1957-58 and earlier.

Well, he succeeded — collecting all catalogs back to the first one, 1946-47. They’ve all been scanned from cover to cover and are available here as PDFs.

Before the project, Maynard-Larson said, the registrar’s office received three to six requests a week for course descriptions and program information from years past. “That was just a ton of work to copy pages and take time to answer all those,” he said. “Scanning has solved that completely. Response has been really positive.”

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