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About The Bancroft Library

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2005-2008 Seismic Retrofit

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UCB Library Catalogs

OskiCat
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MELVYL
Guide to Library Catalogs

Collections Research Programs Operating Budget Staff Public Services Circulation Internet Research and Instruction Technical Services

COLLECTION AREAS

• The Bancroft Collection, the library’s largest collection, documents the history of western North America, including California, Mexico, and Central America.
• Rare Books and Literary Manuscript collections include incunabula, rare imprints from Europe and the Americas, and collections of major European and American authors (Bret Harte, Jack London, Frank Norris, Joan Didion, Maxine Hong Kingston, and a number of prominent Beat Generation authors).
• History of Science and Technology collections contain manuscripts, rare books, and oral histories focusing on twentieth-century American science and technology, especially fields associated with the University or the Bay Area, such as physics, chemistry, and biotechnology
• The Pictorial Collection documents the history of California and the West through paintings, drawings, photographs, and other graphic materials.
• The University Archives documents the history of the University of California, and specifically the Berkeley campus, through administrative records, campus and student publications, faculty writings, handbills and ephemera, memorabilia, and photographs.

• The Mark Twain Papers and Project serves as the primary archive of the author’s material, with more than 500,000 pages of his notebooks, correspondence, autobiography, and literary manuscripts, and is preparing the scholarly editions of his works.
• The Regional Oral History Office houses approximately 2,000 oral histories of persons who have made significant contributions to California and the West. Staff continue to prepare oral histories and foster teaching and research with these materials.
• The Tebtunis Papyri Center includes the largest collection of papyrus documents in the Western hemisphere, with more than 21,000 fragments dating from 300 B.C. to 300 A.D.

PUBLIC SERVICES
The Bancroft Library is one of the most heavily used special collections libraries in the country. Bancroft serves students, scholars, and citizens of the State of California and also attracts researchers from across the nation and around the globe.

TECHNICAL SERVICES
Printed Items Cataloged	9,532
Photographs Cataloged (or finding aids)	58,847
Manuscript Collections Processed
Finding Aids	70
Linear Feet	1,015
Digital Images Created	8,964
Electronic Text Pages Generated	7,282

Fact sheet from 2003-2004