Annual Report FY 2023-24

How could we possibly capture a year in the life of the UC Berkeley Library? As it turns out, it’s as easy as A, B, C.

On this page, you’ll find highlights of some of what we’ve accomplished together — a list of our alphabetical achievements.

This year, we fueled discoveries both inside and outside of the classroom. We provided welcoming spaces where students can work, learn, and connect. And we helped our community see things in new ways through eye-opening exhibits and events, friendly research help, and broad access to our collections.

Welcome to our year in letters.

Cataloging is in our nature. So it’s probably no surprise that our Arts & Humanities Division curates and shares unique themed book lists almost every month. This year, we centered diverse voices in literature for Black History Month, Native American Heritage Month, and Latinx Heritage Month. We also recommended seasonal literary delights, from beach reads to Halloween horrors.

Since Moffitt Library opened in 1970, students have taken to it like butterflies to a garden. But after a half-century, the library needed a refresh. In 2016, students fluttered to Moffitt’s newly renovated upper two floors. Thanks to a capstone gift from Nadine Tang M.S.W. ’75 and support from other generous donors, the library will soon undergo a renovation of its lower three floors. Tang’s gift will bring to life the Carol T. Christ Center for Connected Learning, and honor the recently retired chancellor, above left, Tang’s longtime friend. The project will add hundreds of new spaces for students, fulfilling a critical need on campus.

Analysis by Leah Packard-Grams, above, defied expectations in the field. Will Sieving’s research solved a century-old puzzle. Undergraduate and graduate students in The Bancroft Library’s Center for the Tebtunis Papyri shed new light on 2,000-year-old fragments of papyri, enhancing our understanding of the ancient world.

In the spring, bespectacled staff members, above, took a fun approach to inviting their colleagues to a screening of the 1998 film Smoke Signals. The event, sponsored by the Library Equity and Inclusion Committee, offered employees an intermission from the busy semester and an opportunity to discover diverse voices in cinema.

Canticle Farm, above, is a hidden half-acre oasis in Oakland pulsing with life. Students in a UC Berkeley geography class — with help from the Earth Sciences & Map Library — traced the history of the tract. The project provided an opportunity for hands-on learning about injustice and the hidden world in our own backyard.

The future of the Library came into clearer focus in April with the launch of the organization’s updated strategic plan. At the center of that plan is a renewed commitment to core services, which support students, faculty, and scholars worldwide. Other priorities include: communication, inclusivity, and access.

In January, UC Berkeley named Suzanne Wones, above, its next university librarian, introducing her to the community through an in-depth Q&A. Wones has 20 years of leadership experience in academic libraries, most recently as associate university librarian for discovery and access at Harvard University. In the conversation, she tackled topics such as accessibility and artificial intelligence. She pledged to bring an equity-focused lens to her work while striving to build “a culture at the Library where we acknowledge that we are constantly learning, growing, and working together to create local and global change.” Wones began her new role on July 1.

Students love the Library as a place to work — and not just on their academics. The Library employs hundreds of students in its Work+Learn program, and they serve in key roles. With convenient campus jobs, students can pay some of their tuition costs and expand their professional skills in areas such as digitization, instruction, and communications.

The Library’s Scholarly Communication & Information Policy team provided 4,505 consultations; protected research rights of scholars who use artificial intelligence, a cause backed by University of California President Michael V. Drake; and served as a national leader in supporting text and data mining research.

When Dorothy Lazard, above, recognized that aging meant losing some of her formative memories, she did what any longtime librarian might — she cataloged them. The Oakland author and Cal alum shared selections from her dazzling debut memoir at the 2024 Luncheon in the Library, where she lauded libraries as places of refuge and self-discovery.

The stars aligned at the Art History/Classics Library in March for an event focused on the total solar eclipse. At the “Eclipse and Revelation” event, enthusiasts browsed eclipse-themed items from Library collections and heard from experts in multiple fields.

We may be telling our story in letters. But we’ve got plenty of numbers too.

See for yourself, a few of the countless ways the Library makes a difference.

Students leveled up their media studies skills by playing vintage video games. The interactive play sessions, hosted in the Library’s Makerspace, invited students to consider what yesterday’s video games can teach us about today’s gaming industry.

The Library’s beloved Lunch Poems series continued to stir hearts and expand minds, with a laudable lineup of readings from award-winning poets. The events, held in the handsome haunts of Morrison Library, invited guests to luxuriate in language over the lunch hour. The year’s slate featured a mix of established and emerging poets, showcasing voices from a variety of communities across the literary landscape. Notable authors included dg nanouk okpik, above, an Iñupiaq-Inuit poet and winner of the American Book Award, and Courtney Faye Taylor, a writer and visual artist whose latest collection has been featured in Publishers Weekly and Essence magazine.

Got questions? We’ve got answers. The Library piloted a service that provided drop-in research help. Students could swing by Doe Library’s Circulation Desk — no appointment needed — to receive advice for their academic adventures. The Library continued to offer online help 24/7, and appointments for specialized support.

Berkeley middle schoolers paid a noteworthy visit to the Music Library. Hosted by Berkeley music Professor Nicholas Mathew, above, the students explored some of Cal’s musical treasures: a 400-year-old Amati viola and a guitar book from 1552. The trip was part of a program promoting learning through the library’s materials in the Spanish language.

Activism is part of the fabric of UC Berkeley. Archivists from The Bancroft Library and the Ethnic Studies Library held a workshop providing expert guidance to student activists on evaluating, organizing, and storing physical and digital materials to preserve a record of their tireless work.

Jeff MacKie-Mason retired in June, but his legacy at the Library still reverberates. Under the former university librarian’s direction, the Library implemented innovative research, data, and digitization initiatives. He spearheaded record-breaking fundraising campaigns and helped shatter barriers in scholarly publishing. On the eve of his retirement, MacKie-Mason received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Service Award.

The Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research honors students who create exceptional academic work using UC Berkeley Library resources. The Library announced the winners in April, with six students taking home the prize and two listed in the honorable mention category. The high-achieving undergraduates combined intellectual curiosity and investigative rigor to illuminate new perspectives. One student, for example, used an Arthur Miller play to deconstruct dangerous stereotypes about women. Another uncovered overlooked immigrant histories in the Bay Area. The students’ impressive papers shed light on social issues across time and cultures, and advocated for change.

Two Library exhibits spotlighted activist movements with ties to the Bay Area. A Camp, a Campus, and a Disability Revolution tracked the rise of the disability rights movement and its leaders’ links to UC Berkeley. Voices for the Environment explored how ordinary people in the Bay Area fought for change as part of the environmental movement.

The Library continued to unveil its treasures to the world. The Library added 53 collections of digitized materials to its Digital Collections portal. Newly added materials included architectural drawings of San Francisco City Hall, environmentalist David Ross Brower’s cache of photographs, and images from rare Japanese volumes published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

With financial support from a faculty member in economics, the Library acquired a powerful dataset that includes publicly available information on registered voters in the United States. The trove of data has the potential to fuel deep dives into our democracy and nudge scholars closer to solutions to some of our most pressing problems.

Thanks to the generous support of 3,381 donors, the Library brought in $12,915,338 in gifts and pledges in this fiscal year!

“The Library serves all the faculty and students,” said Marily A. Howekamp ’66. “But bigger than that, it serves people across the world. The more I learn about the Library, the more impressed I am, and the more I want to be involved.”

The Library’s fundraising hit a high point this year, thanks to its star donors. As part of UC Berkeley’s multiyear Light the Way campaign, the Library set an audacious fundraising goal — $150 million by the end of 2023. Thanks to 10,397 amazing supporters, the Library raised a record-setting $155,536,726. With your support, the Library is enhancing its spaces for the next generation of Cal students. Those upgrades include the development of the Carol T. Christ Center for Connected Learning at Moffitt Library. The Library also grew its collections and made its materials more accessible to people worldwide.