UC Berkeley Libraries | |
---|---|
Established | 1868 |
Branches | 20 subject libraries; 7 affiliated libraries |
Collection | |
Size | 14 million (books); 70,000 (serials) |
Access and use | |
Population served | 43,000 Cal faculty, staff and students in addition to the bay area |
Other information | |
Budget | $50 million annually |
Director | Suzanne Wones |
Employees | 1,100 (212 librarians; 188 staff; 700 student employees) |
Website | http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ |
Twenty-seven constituent and affiliated libraries combine to make the library system of the University of California, Berkeley the sixth largest research library by number of volumes in the United States.
As of 2024, Berkeley's library system holds materials in more than 400 languages and includes more than 14 million volumes. [1] The libraries together cover over 12 acres (49,000 m2) of land and compose one of the largest library complexes in the world. [2] In 2003, the Association of Research Libraries ranked it as the top public and third overall university library in North America based on various statistical measures of quality. [3]
Charles Franklin Doe was the principal benefactor of the eponymous main library. The Doe Memorial Library, built in 1910, originally housed the main collections. A strictly Beaux-Arts Classical building, it was designed by campus architect John Galen Howard as one of the original structures in the "Athens of the West" campus plan. The library was meant to be the first building students and visitors saw when entering the university, although today most students enter from the opposite side at Sproul Plaza. Most of the main collections are now housed in the Main (Gardner) Stacks and the Northern Regional Library Facility, while Doe serves as the library system's reference, periodical, and administrative center.
Inside Doe are the two largest reading rooms in the university, named the North and Heyns (East) reading rooms. The North Reading Room features a large barrel-vaulted ceiling capped with a tall Roman-arched windows at each end. The Heyns Reading Room, [4] named after Roger W. Heyns, Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley from 1965 to 1971, is the smaller of the two and exhibits hand-carved wood ceilings depicting the names of famous academics throughout history, as well as the companion piece to Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware , Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth. The piece was originally a gift to the university in 1882 by Mrs. Mark Hopkins but was soon forgotten after it was stored in the Hearst Women's Gymnasium. It was not until the 1960s, when Dr. Raymond L. Stehle was writing a biography of Leutze, that it was rediscovered and placed in the Heyns Reading Room.
The North Reading Room features enormously high ceilings and was restored in 2005 to its original 1910 state. The renovated room features refinished historic tables and chairs, replaced floors, and task lighting similar to the original table lamps. [5]
The lobby of Doe features perpetually changing exhibits and also houses the Morrison Library. This library was a gift to the university by May T. Morrison in 1921 and is known as the university's “living room.” Many of its collections are works of classic or contemporary fiction. The library was featured in the 2000 Abercrombie & Fitch Back-to-School Catalogue.
Underneath Doe is the Main (Gardner) Stacks, named after the 15th University of California President and Berkeley graduate, David P. Gardner. Built in 1994, these stacks contain 52 miles (84 km) of bookshelves and were intended to accommodate the growing library collections. [2] Main Stacks consists of four underground floors, each roughly one-and-a-half football fields long and a football field wide. Although underground, it was built with four skylights that allow natural light to permeate even to the bottom floor.
On the east side of Doe is the Bancroft Library, "one of the most heavily used libraries of manuscripts, rare books, and unique materials in the United States." [6] This library contains over 60 million manuscript items, 600,000 volumes, 2.8 million photographs, 43,000 microforms, and 23,000 maps. The library originated in 1905 as a center for Latin-American History and Western Americana when it acquired the collections of Herbert Howe Bancroft and gained prominence under the leadership and research of Director Herbert Eugene Bolton. Today, the library also houses the largest collection of ancient papyri in the Western Hemisphere, 300 medieval manuscripts, and thousands of rare and first-edition early European and American works. Some of the most famous library holdings are the Mark Twain Papers, a collection of letters, journals, and nearly 600 manuscripts of unpublished works by Samuel L. Clemens, and pieces of Homer's The Odyssey and Euripides's work from ancient Greece.
The library system also contains many other departmental and specialized libraries, including the 580,000 volume Marian Koshland Bioscience, Natural Resources & Public Health Library, the C. V. Starr East Asian Library (the largest of its kind in the West), and the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library, which features more than 260,000 books, printed music, recordings, microfilms, and rare materials.
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is the rare book library and literary archive of the Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut. It is one of the largest buildings in the world dedicated to rare books and manuscripts and is one of the largest collections of such texts. Established by a gift of the Beinecke family and given its own financial endowment, the library is financially independent from the university and is co-governed by the University Library and Yale Corporation.
The Hilandar Research Library (HRL), located in the Thompson Library on the campus of Ohio State University, has the largest collection of medieval Slavic manuscripts on microform in the world.
The department of plant and microbial biology is an academic department in the Rausser College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. The department conducts extensive research, provides undergraduate and graduate programs, and educates students in the fields of plant and microbial sciences with 43 department faculty members.
Sterling Memorial Library (SML) is the main library building of the Yale University Library system in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Opened in 1931, the library was designed by James Gamble Rogers as the centerpiece of Yale's Gothic Revival campus. The library's tower has sixteen levels of bookstacks containing over 4 million volumes. Several special collections—including the university's Manuscripts & Archives—are also housed in the building. It connects via tunnel to the underground Bass Library, which holds an additional 150,000 volumes.
The Bancroft Library is the primary special-collections library of the University of California, Berkeley. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retain the name Bancroft Library in perpetuity. The collection at that time consisted of 50,000 volumes of materials on the history of California and western North America. It is now the largest such collection in the world. The library's current building, the Doe Annex, is in the center of the university's main campus, and was completed in 1950.
The University House is a residence and venue for official events on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. Designed by the architect Albert Pissis and completed in 1911, it was formerly named President's House while it served as the home of the president of the University of California, starting with Benjamin Ide Wheeler and ending with Robert Gordon Sproul. Since 1965, it has been the home of the Chancellor of the Berkeley campus.
The Doe Memorial Library is the main library of the University of California, Berkeley Library System. The library is named after its benefactor, Charles Franklin Doe, who in 1904 bequeathed funds for its construction. It is located near the center of the Berkeley campus, facing Memorial Glade, and is adjacent to and physically connected with the Bancroft Library. In 1900, Émile Bénard won an architectural competition for the design of the library, and the Neoclassical-style building was completed in 1911. The Doe Library building is the gateway to the underground Gardner (Main) Stacks, named in honor of David P. Gardner, the 15th President of the University of California.
The University of California operates the largest academic library system in the world. It manages more than 40.8 million print volumes in 100 libraries on ten campuses. The purpose of these libraries is to assist research and instruction on the University of California campuses. While each campus library is separate, they share facilities for storage, computerized indexing, digital libraries and management.
The James K. Moffitt Undergraduate Library, simply known as Moffitt Library, is a library situated at the crossroads of the University of California, Berkeley, designed by American activist John Carl Warnecke in the late 1960s as a cutting-edge library for undergraduates. Named after James K. Moffitt, a former Regent of the University of California, the library has been a popular destination for students for over four decades. Campus and curriculum changes in the time since Moffitt Library opened have been a catalyst for considering new purposes for this highly trafficked space. Accommodating increased undergraduate enrollments, greater focus on problem-based and research-based learning, and demand for access to technology-rich spaces have all been taken into account as part of the re-imagination of this library.
The campus of the University of California, Berkeley, and its surrounding community are home to a number of notable buildings by early 20th-century campus architect John Galen Howard, his peer Bernard Maybeck, and their colleague Julia Morgan. Subsequent tenures as supervising architect held by George W. Kelham and Arthur Brown, Jr. saw the addition of several buildings in neoclassical and other revival styles, while the building boom after World War II introduced modernist buildings by architects such as Vernon DeMars, Joseph Esherick, John Carl Warnecke, Gardner Dailey, Anshen & Allen, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Recent decades have seen additions including the postmodernist Haas School of Business by Charles Willard Moore, Soda Hall by Edward Larrabee Barnes, and the East Asian Library by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.
The William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library is the main library at Ohio State University's Columbus campus. It is the university's largest library and houses its main stacks, special collections, rare books and manuscripts, and many departmental subject libraries. The library was originally built in 1912, and was renovated in 1951, 1977, and 2009. It is named in honor of the university's fifth president, William Oxley Thompson.
Woburn Public Library, previously known as the Winn Memorial Library (1876–79) is a National Historic Landmark in Woburn, Massachusetts. Designed by architect H. H. Richardson, the Romanesque Revival building was a bequest of the Winn family. It houses the Woburn Public Library, an institution that was established in 1856. The library is also home to the Dr. Thomas J. Glennon Archives. The Glennon Archives holds many important records dating back to Woburn's early history in the 1600s. The Archives maintains more than two hundred separate manuscript collections relating to Woburn's history, several special collections of books including a rare book collection, tens of thousands of photographs, published genealogies, broadsides, maps, ephemera, and museum objects. Many of the Archives' museum objects can be viewed in the Historical Artifacts Room, located in the Octagon Room of the Richardson Building.
The Gerstein Science Information Centre is the University of Toronto's flagship library supporting the sciences and health sciences. The largest science and health science academic library in Canada, Gerstein has a collection of over 945,000 print volumes of journals and books, and also provides access to over 100,000 online journals and books. The Gerstein Science Information Centre's collection consists primarily of material on the sciences, including the health sciences, medicine, physics, chemistry, biology and their subfields, with the exception of mathematical journals and forestry, botany and geology materials. The library provides varying degrees of access to students, faculty, external researchers, and members of the public.
The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building is the flagship building in the New York Public Library system in the Midtown neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The branch, one of four research libraries in the library system, contains nine separate divisions. The structure contains four stories open to the public. The main entrance steps are at Fifth Avenue at its intersection with East 41st Street. As of 2015, the branch contains an estimated 2.5 million volumes in its stacks. The building was declared a National Historic Landmark, a National Register of Historic Places site, and a New York City designated landmark in the 1960s.
Marian Elliott "Bunny" Koshland was an American immunologist who discovered that the differences in amino acid composition of antibodies explain the efficiency and effectiveness with which they combat a huge range of foreign invaders.
Princeton University Library is the main library system of Princeton University. With holdings of more than 7 million books, 6 million microforms, and 48,000 linear feet of manuscripts, it is among the largest libraries in the world by number of volumes. The main headquarters of the university system is the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library building, named after tire magnate Harvey Firestone. Additionally, Princeton is part of the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) along with Columbia Libraries, Harvard Library and New York Public Library.
Lamont Library, in the southeast corner of Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, houses the Harvard Library's primary undergraduate collection in humanities and social sciences. It was the first library in the United States specifically planned to serve undergraduates. Women were admitted beginning in 1967.
The Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery is the main library of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in Catonsville, Maryland. It is located in the center of the campus at the confluence of Academic Row and Walker Avenue. The library features 1 million+ books & bound journals, 1.9 million+ photographs and slides, 30,000+ sound recordings, 800,000+ microform pieces, 1,200+ linear feet of manuscripts/archives, 180,000+ government documents, and 100,000+ slides. In addition to the stacks, the Albin O. Kuhn Library also features the Library Gallery, the UMBC Special Collections, the Retriever Learning Center and Math Lab, Resources Learning Center, a cafe, and administrative offices.
The Main Library is a historic library on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, Illinois. Built in 1924, the library was the third built for the school; it replaced Altgeld Hall, which had become too small for the university's collections. Architect Charles A. Platt designed the Georgian Revival building, one of several on the campus which he designed in the style. The building houses several area libraries, as well as the University Archives and the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The Main Library is the symbolic face of the University Library, which has the second largest university library collection in the United States.