University of California, Berkeley Libraries

UC Berkeley Libraries

The north side of Doe Library with Memorial Glade in the foreground
Established	1868
Branches	18 subject libraries; 10 affiliated libraries
Collection
Size	10,000,000 (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	$50,000,000 annually
Director	Jeffrey MacKie-Mason
Staff	1,000 (212 librarians; 188 staff; 600 student employees)
Website	http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/

The University of California, Berkeley's 32 constituent and affiliated libraries together make it the fourth largest university library by number of volumes in the United States, surpassed only by the libraries of Harvard, Yale, and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. As of 2006, Berkeley's library system contains over 10 million volumes and maintains over 70,000 serial titles. The libraries together cover over 12 acres (49,000 m²) of land and compose one of the largest library complexes in the world. 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.

Charles Franklin Doe was the benefactor of the 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 Gardner Main Stacks and Moffitt Undergraduate Library, 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, 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.