Overview
The UC Berkeley Library is dedicated to helping faculty members and instructors access and use materials for their own scholarship and to enhance their teaching practice. Let the Library team support you as a scholar and teacher through the following resources.
Access
- Borrowing — Your Cal 1 Card serves as your library card for borrowing materials and for access to the Main (Gardner) Stacks, Moffitt Library, and the Media Resources Center.
- Pay for printing — Use your Cal 1 Card to pay for printing in the libraries.
- Renewals — Familiarize yourself with the options and rules for renewing materials.
- Loan periods vary by library and material. Most books are checked out to faculty for six months, and one week for serials.
- The Interlibrary Loan department assists faculty to obtain materials that are not available at UC Berkeley. International borrowing is also available.
- Off-campus access to electronic resources — Access online resources from home using EZproxy or VPN with your CalNet ID.
- Disability resources — Find equal-access Library services and research assistance for persons with physical and print disabilities.
Research support
- Contact your subject librarian — Specific librarians are designated to support each academic department and program, and serve as the first point of contact for all research and teaching related inquiries.
- Designate a proxy user — Faculty may authorize a research assistant(s) as a proxy to check out materials on their library account. New proxy cards are generally available the next business day at noon. Pre-existing proxy cards may be renewed using the same online form and are also available the next business day at noon. Please note that as we are no longer accepting paper proxy request forms; the online form must be used.
Teaching support
- Course reserves — The Library can help make required books and videos available to students.
- Course readings in bCourses — How best to link to library-licensed content in your course bCourses site.
- Guide to copyright and bCourses — A guide to help instructors answer the question “Can I post this content to my bCourse site?”
- Add library guides to bCourses — Learn how to add links to specific library guides in the course navigation section of bCourses course or project sites.
- Ask a librarian to meet with your class — The Library offers instruction on library research for undergraduates and graduate students tailored to courses, assignments, and students’ research topics, both in person and online.
- Contact your subject librarian to arrange library instruction in science, engineering, and graduate-level courses in humanities and the social sciences.
- Designing effective library assignments — Suggestions and example assignments to help teach students to navigate the academic research process.
- Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research — Faculty in all disciplines should encourage undergraduate students to apply for the Library Prize, which recognizes students’ sophistication, originality, and/or unusual depth or breadth in the use of library collections in the creation of a course project.
Data services
- Dryad — An open-source, research data curation and publication platform. Berkeley is a partner and offers Dryad as a free service for all Berkeley researchers to publish and archive their data. Datasets published in Dryad receive a citation and can be versioned at any time. Dryad is integrated with hundreds of journals and is an easy way to both publish data and comply with funder and publisher mandates.
Scholarly communication and copyright
- UC open access policy — Passed by Academic Senate of the University of California in 2013, this policy ensures that research articles authored by faculty at the 10 University of California campuses will be made freely available to the public on eScholarship. For more information, contact your subject librarian or oapolicy@lists.berkeley.edu.
- Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) — Financial support for faculty members, post-docs, and graduate students who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication.
- UC copyright education — A wide range of materials related to the use of copyrighted and public domain materials at the University of California. See also, the UC Berkeley library copyright and fair use page.
- eScholarship — This is the California Digital Library’s open access scholarly publishing platform, providing digital publishing services to the University of California that enable departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship.
The Library welcomes suggestions for titles to consider purchasing from our faculty and instructors.
- Use the Purchase request form to send us your suggestions.
More information
- Unisex, single-stall, gender-inclusive, and other restrooms on UC Berkeley’s Central Campus