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Campus Library Map
Click on the image below to see a larger interactive version of the campus library map.
You can also view/download a PDF map of library locations. For library contact information and building addresses, visit our directory.
Doe, Main Stacks, Moffitt Library Floorplans
Looking for a location or call number in Doe, Main Stacks or Moffitt? Try the floorplans, or ask for assistance!
Off-campus Access to Library Resources
Before you can access Library resources from off campus make sure you have configured your computer with proxy server settings.
After you make a one-time change in your web browser settings, the proxy server will ask you to log in with a CalNet ID or Library PIN when you click on the link to a licensed resource.
Library Prize for Undergraduate Research
The Library Prize for Undergraduate Research recognizes excellence in undergraduate research projects that show evidence of significant inquiry using the library, its resources, and collections and learning about the research and information-gathering process itself.
Printing and Scanning in the Libraries
All libraries on campus are equipped with "bookscan stations," which allow you to scan documents and save them to a USB drive, or to scan documents and then send them to a printer.
In order to scan documents, you must have the following:
A Cal 1 Card, with money loaded onto it (go here to make a deposit to your Cal 1 Card account). This is not the same as meal plan points! Your Cal 1 Card debit account is a separate fund on your card.
A USB drive (you cannot email a scanned document from a bookscan station; you must save your document to a USB drive)
Scanning and saving to a USB drive is 5 cents a page for students.
Scanning documents and sending them to the printer is 10 cents a page for students. Color printing is 60 cents a page.
In order to send documents to the printer from any of the public computers in the libraries, you must have the following:
A Cal 1 Card, with money loaded onto it (see above)
A document that's on the Web or attached to your email (the public computers in the libraries will not open files from a USB or other drive)
Printing is 10 cents a page for students(black and white). Color printing is 60 cents a page.
The UC Berkeley History Collection News blog will keep you informed of new digital collections, trials of resources, workshops, events related to History collections, and other news of interest to researchers in History. Options for accessing the blog include:
Your searches will be more successful if, in your preliminary research, you identify specific:
names of relevant individuals and organizations
dates of events
places
what terminology was used at the time by participants and observers? (ex: negro or colored instead of african american)
Organizations with manuscript collections make their collections accessible with finding aids. The tools below allow you to search the finding aids by topic, helping you identify collections available around the world that may inform your research. The Online Archive of California includes finding aids from historical societies, government agencies, libraries in California, including Bancroft Library, and is your best choice for locating archival collections in California.
ArchiveGrid Searchable descriptions of nearly a million historical documents, personal papers, and family histories kept in libraries, museums, and archives worldwide. Includes information on how to examine and order copies.
Use OskiCat to locate materials related to your topic, including books, government publications, and audio and video recordings, in the libraries of UC Berkeley. OskiCat will show you the location and availability of the items that we own.
Use Melvyl to locate materials related to your topic located at other campuses in the UC system, or worldwide. You can use the Request button to request an item from another library, if we don't own it.
Using Melvyl (but not OskiCat) you can find articles as well as books, easily format a citation for copying into a bibliography, and see images of book covers, when available. Melvyl will also show you the location and availablity of items that we own.
Melvyl has changed as of January 2012, and now includes many more articles. Detailed Melvyl help.
HathiTrust
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HathiTrust (Hathi is pronounced hah-tee) is a partnership of libraries that works towards the goal of developing a shared digital access, preservation, and storage solution for the materials held in the member libraries. The contents of HathiTrust are similar to that of GoogleBooks, but the collecting focus is on scholarly materials and the resource includes content and features (such as indexing and manipulation of results) not available in Google Books.
Downloading PDFs
To limit to “full view” (public domain materials) in your search, check the “full view only” box.
From the “full view” of any item, click on Download whole book (PDF).
Click login.
Choose the University of California, Berkeley from the drop down list and click login.
Enter your CalNet ID and passphrase.
Click Download whole book (PDF).
PDF will load and you will choose to either open it or save it.
Tips for searching HathiTrust:
Phrase Searching: Use quotes to search an exact phrase: e.g., "occult fiction"
Wildcards: Use * or ? to search for alternate forms of a word. Use * to stand for several characters, and ? for a single character: e.g., optim* will find optimal, optimize or optimum; wom?n will find woman and women.
Boolean Searching: Use AND and OR between words to combine them with Boolean logic: e.g., (heart OR cardiac) AND surgery will find items about heart surgery or cardiac surgery.
Tips for doing a full-text search:
Phrase Searching: Use quotes to search an exact phrase: e.g., "occult fiction."
Multiple Term Searching: When your search terms are not quoted phrases, avoid common words (such as: 'a', 'and', 'of', 'the', etc.) to speed up your search.
Boolean Searching: Use AND and OR between words to combine them with Boolean logic: e.g., heart OR cardiac will find items containing the word heart or the word cardiac; heart AND cardiac will find items containing both words. Use a minus (-) to remove words from the result e.g., heart -cardiac will find items containing the word heart that do not include the word cardiac.
Choose the University of California, Berkeley from the drop down list and click on login.
Enter your CalNet ID and passphrase.
Click on Create a New Collection and name your collection (the description is optional).
Indicate whether it is a "Private" or "Public" collection.
Click on Add.
In the future if you want to edit, change the private/public setting, or delete the collection, your collections will always be listed in the "My Collections" tab whenever you are logged in to HathiTrust.
OskiCat Searching Tips
Search for author's name using the author search: Auster, Paul
Search for topics using a keyword search: labyrinth and borges
Use an asterisk as a wildcard: author* finds authority, authorship, etc.
Limit results by language (Modify search)
You can browse topics using the Subject links. To find secondary literature on a particular author, look for "criticism and interpretation" subject links such as these:
Find Dissertations by searching Dissertations and Theses (Dissertation Abstracts) Full Text, which indexes graduate dissertations from over 1,000 North American, and selected European, graduate schools and universities from 1861 to the present. Dissertations published since 1980 include brief abstracts written by the authors and some feature 24-page excerpts. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and some full text coverage for older graduate works.
Also see Find Dissertations and Theses for other specialized sources. Dissertations completed at UC Berkeley can be found in OskiCat, using the feature allowing you to limit to dissertations/theses:
Older dissertations not available full text may be obtained through Interlibrary Loan or using the "Request" option in Melvyl.
Google Books
Google Books contains millions of scanned books, from libraries and publishers worldwide. You can search the entire text of the books, view previews or "snippets" from books that are still in copyright, and read the full text of out-of-copyright (pre-1923) books. Want to read the entire text of an in-copyright book? Use Google Books' Find in a Library link to locate the book in a UC Berkeley library, or search OskiCat to see if UC Berkeley owns the book.
Why use Google Books?
Library catalogs (like OskiCat) don't search inside books; using a library catalog, you can search only information about the book (title, author, Library of Congress subject headings, etc.). Google Books will let you search inside books, which can be very useful for hard-to-find information. Try it now:
History Article Databases
Historical Abstracts Indexes over 2,000 journals, as well as historical book reviews and dissertations, published worldwide about all aspects of world history (excluding US and Canada) from 1450 to the present. Articles covered were written from 1954 to thepresent
Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) Lists books, articles in books, articles in some 700 journals; covers historical writing dealing with the British Isles, and with the British Empire and Commonwealth, during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the present. It is the successor to the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History, available online from 2002 to 2009. To access database, click on Enter databases, then click on Bibliography of British and Irish History.
America: History and Life Indexes over 2,000 journals published worldwide on the history of the US and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes all key English-language historical journals; selected historical journals from major countries, state, and local history journals; and a targeted selection of hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities.
Central and East European Online Library Online archive which provides access to full text PDF articles from 442 humanities and social science journals and re-digitized documents pertaining to Central, Eastern and South-Eastern European topics.
PAIS International Indexes books, journals, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference reports, and web sources related to public policy, politics, economics, and social issues worldwide. Includes publications from over 120 countries. Some of the indexed materials are published in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The Archive covers English-language material only. (Search all CSA/Illumina Social Sciences databases.)
JSTOR Includes over 1000 scholarly journals with access to more than 2 million articles. JSTOR is an archive which means that current issues (generally the most recent 3-5 years) of the journals are not yet available.
Where's the PDF?
Many article databases contain information about articles (citations or abstracts), not the entire text of the article. Once you've used an article database to find articles on your topic, you may need to use this button: in order to locate and read the full text of the article. The UC-eLinks button appears in nearly all the databases available from the UCB Library website.
UC-eLinks will link you to the online full text of an article if UCB has paid for online access; otherwise, UC-eLinks will help you locate a print copy on the shelf in the library. If UCB doesn't own the article in print or online format, UC-eLinks can also help you order a copy from another library.
For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 4 min.)
You can also set up UC-eLinks to work with Google Scholar. For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 2 min.)
Citation Help
"Ethics, copyright laws, and courtesy to readers require authors to identify the sources of direct quotations and of any facts or opinions not generally known or easily checked."--
Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press), p. 594
Why cite sources? Whenever you quote or base your ideas on another person's work, you must document the source you used. Even when you do not quote directly from another work, if reading that source contributed to the ideas presented in your paper, you must give the authors proper credit.
Citations allow readers to locate and further explore the sources you consulted, show the depth and scope of your research, and give credit to authors for their ideas. Citations provide evidence for your arguments and add credibility to your work by demonstrating that you have sought out and considered a variety of resources. In written academic work, citing sources is standard practice and shows that you are responding to this person, agreeing with that person, and adding something of your own. Think of documenting your sources as providing a trail for your reader to follow to see the research you performed and discover what led you to your original contribution.
How do you cite sources? The means to identify sources is to provide citations within your text linking appropriate passages to relevant resources consulted or quoted. This can be done through in-text parenthetic notes, footnotes, or endnotes. In addition, a bibliography or list of works cited, is almost always placed at the end of your paper. The citation system and format you use will be determined by the citation style you choose.
Below are links to guides for the three major styles used for most academic papers or research in the humanities, social sciences, and some scientific disciplines:
APA Style Guide (Purdue) - From the American Psychological Association. Often preferred in the fields of psychology and many other social sciences.
MLA Style Guide (Purdue) - From the Modern Language Association of America. Often preferred in the fields of literature, arts, humanities, and in some other disciplines.
Turabian & Chicago Styles Guide - From the work of Kate Turabian at the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Press. Often preferred in history and many other disciplines.
How do you choose a style? Ask your instructor which style sheet he or she wishes you to use and if there are other special formatting instructions you should follow.
Where do I find the most authoritative information about these styles? If you have questions or citations not covered by the Library's guides, please consult one of the following official style manuals. If you consult other, less official manuals or online style guides that purport to explain these style, please be aware that these sometimes contain errors which conflict with the official guides:
APA Style
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. 6th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010 (call number: BF76.7.P83 2010, multiple libraries). Official APA style guide.
MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009 (call number: LB2369.G53 2009, multiple libraries). A somewhat simplified guide, adequate for undergraduate and most other research papers.
MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. 3rd ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008 (call number: PN147.G444 2008, multiple libraries). For graduate students, scholars, and professional writers (more depth on copyright, legal issues, and writing theses, dissertations, and scholarly publishing).
Turabian Style
Turabian, Kate L. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 6th edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 (call number: LB2369.T8 1996, multiple libraries).
Chicago Style
The Chicago Manual of Style. 15th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003 (call number: Z253.U69 2003, multiple libraries).
Chicago Manual of Style
The Chicago Manual of Style includes two slightly different documentation systems: (1) notes and bibliography (NB) and (2) author-date. The notes and bibliography style is preferred by many in literature, history, and the arts.
In the NB system, you mark within your paper where you have cited something by adding a number, which refers to a detailed reference either at the bottom of the page (footnote) or at the end of the paper (endnote). These notes indicate the specific place in your source you are referencing.
The bibliography includes complete information for each item, with the items arranged in alphabetical order by author's last name.
Purdue's Writing Lab provides an example of a paper formatted using Chicago NB style.
Citation management tools help you manage your research, collect and cite sources, and create bibliographies in a variety of citation styles. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but any are easier than doing it by hand!
Zotero: A free plug-in that works exclusively with the Firefox browser: keeps copies of what you find on the web, permits tagging, notation, full text searching of your library of resources, works with Word, and has a free web backup service.
RefWorks - free for UC Berkeley users. It allows you to create your own database by importing references and using them for footnotes and bibliographies. Use the RefWorks New User Form to sign up.
Book a 30-minute appointment with a librarian who will help refine and focus research inquiries, identify useful online and print sources, and develop search strategies for humanities and social sciences topics (examples of research topics).
This service is for Cal undergraduates only. Graduate students and faculty should contact the library liaison to their department or program for specialized reference consultations.
Warning Signs
"Top Ten Signs that you may be Writing a Weak History Paper" (from Alfred Kelly's Writing a Good History Paper, p. 34):
10. You're overjoyed to find that you can fill the required pages by widening all the margins. 9. You haven't mentioned any facts or cited any sources for several paragraphs. 8. You find yourself using the phrase "throughout history mankind has..." 7. You just pasted in another 100 words of quotations. 6. You haven't a clue about the content of your next paragraph. 5. You're constantly clicking on The Britannica, Webster's, and Bartlett's. 4. Your writing tutor sneaks another look at her watch as she reminds you for the third time to clarify your thesis. 3. Your main historical actors are this, it, they, the people, and society, and they are all involved with factors, aspects, impacts, and issues. 2. You just realized that you don't understand the assignment, but it's 3:00 A.M., the paper is due at 9:00, and you don't dare call your professor. 1. You're relieved that the paper counts for only 20 percent of the course grade.
Scheduling a consultation
Some reference questions can't be easily answered over e-mail and I am happy to talk with you in person or over the phone if your question is more complex or if you'd like a more in-depth consultation. Trying to schedule appointments via email is time-consuming. Here are some alternatives:
1. Call me at 510-768-7059
2. Use bCal to find my calendar (dorner@berkeley.edu) and locate a free slot between 9-5, Mon-Fri. You can propose an appointment in bCal or contact me by email asking me to reserve that slot for you.
3. If you don't use bCal yet and you have a gmail address, you can send that to me and I'll grant you access to my calendar.