African elephant, also on Arcadia Fund's roster.

The University of California at Los Angeles Library has received its largest gift ever for its collections—$5 million dollars from the Arcadia Fund. According to the UCLA website, “The library plans to use gift funds to support efforts to further develop, preserve and make accessible its collections, which are among the finest in the country and, in some subjects, the world.”

A very grateful University Librarian Gary E. Strong said, ” The library is exploring specific uses of the gift that will best achieve this goal of transformative change. Among the possibilities under discussion are projects that build new collections, enhance existing ones, re-purpose already digitized materials, expand digitization efforts into new areas of concentration, and explore and develop new types of recorded knowledge.”

UCLA’s library is considered to be among the top ten research libraries in the United States, with collections of over 8 million volumes, as well as archives, audiovisual materials, technical reports and other scholarly resources. The Arcadia Fund’s mission, as described on their website , is “the preservation of cultural knowledge and materials and environmental conservation. This includes near extinct languages, rare historical archives and museum quality artefacts, and the protection of ecosystems and environments threatened with extinction.”

The Arcadia Fund seems to have struck the perfect balance between preservation of knowledge and conserving endangered species by giving such a generous grant to a library.