“The Library connects students with stories online and offline,” Library Communications intern Rika Pokala says.
WHAT BETTER WAY to learn than by doing? The Library empowers student workers by taking their education beyond the classroom, presenting them with a panoply of opportunities to learn and grow. Tasks include assisting with the preservation of old materials and processing foreign-language collections — perfect for students with skills in German, Korean, Thai, and more. With jobs in graphic design, oral history, and digitization, to name a few, the Library invites students to help share our wealth of scholarly resources, and our stories, with the world.
Students gained work experience as employees for the University Library.
A BOOST FOR STUDENTS
Daniel M. Hungerford ’52 established an endowment in memory of his wife, Fay, to support Library student employees who enrich their own learning while working.
With 10,254,252 items, our pictorial collection is the largest in the UC system.
A special Chinese Film Collection
UC Berkeley acquired more than 70,000 periodicals, posters, photos, and ephemera contained in the Paul Kendel Fonoroff collection for Chinese film studies.
The Fonoroff exhibit was the first show in the Viola Wan-Shui Soong Gallery at the C. V. Starr East Asian Library.
The largest collection of Chinese film studies materials in North America. A book with covers fashioned from curved pieces of redwood bark. These are just some of the Library’s recent acquisitions. The Library’s collections expanded by more than 200,000 volumes this year, including materials accessible in print and online. Recent digital acquisitions include Food Studies Online, a database that provides access to primary materials, visual ephemera, videos, and classic food history — including authentic recipes from the Civil War era.
We expanded our digital lifecycle program and aim to digitize and preserve our entire collection, with your help.
How do we ensure the next generation of students, scholars, and researchers across the globe benefit from our vast collections? One word: digitization. From the correspondence of John Muir to Southeast Asian sacred texts to wax cylinders that hold audio recordings of lost languages, the materials the Library digitizes will have a cascading effect, contributing to the collective pool of knowledge today and for years to come. As former director of The Bancroft Library Charles Faulhaber says, digitization is “the best thing since sliced bread.”
Our in-house digitization team produced 92,867 gigabytes of digital content this year.
Accelerating Open Access
In March, the Library took a major step in its commitment to achieving universal open access for scholarly literature by signing the OA2020 Expression of Interest.
We employ 325 professionals, including experts in data science and digital maps.
Enabling New Types of Research
The Data Acquisition and Access Program created an improved way for Berkeley faculty, students, and staff to gain access to data that is crucial for their research.
We work to help all students develop digital literacy and research skills that inspire discovery and new ideas.
Virtual reality, fake news, do-it-yourself web design — what do these have in common? All are explored in a new initiative, Level Up, which aims to help students navigate the changing information landscape through a robust menu of workshops and online guides. “We want to empower students to create new media, experiment with emerging technologies, and be critical consumers of information in an age when bogus stories are increasingly common,” says librarian Cody Hennesy, who is designing and implementing the program.
