October 5, 2009 - TBA
Bancroft Library Corridor Cases

This exhibit profiles the Bancroft Library's efforts to preserve the 3.6 million negatives of the Fang Family San Francisco Examiner Photograph Archive. It highlights forty-nine of the newspaper's dramatic images of the 1934 Longshoremen's Strike that closed down San Francisco’s waterfront seventy-five years ago. It also offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of archival work funded by the Save America’s Treasures grant program and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In 2006 the Bancroft Library received the San Francisco Examiner Photograph Archive from the Fang family and the Anschutz Corporation. It is a priceless visual record of the Bay Area throughout the 20th century and is the largest single gift of visual materials to the library. Its receipt more than doubled Bancroft’s photographic holdings.

Since receiving the archive, staff have been working to stabilize and preserve this irreplaceable historical record. All 3.6 million negatives have now been re-housed and placed in a cold vault maintained at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Work continues with support from the Save America’s Treasures grant program, and the collection will be open to
researchers in 2010.

The exhibit is open during the operating hours of The Bancroft Library.

Saturday, October 3rd
120 Latimer, Pitzer Auditorium
2:30-3:30pm

Led by Jack von Euw, Curator of the Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection

Powerpoint presentation featuring highlights from the Pictorial Collection, as well as current and future collecting initiatives. The Pictorial Collection, consisting of eight million items, ranges from shipboard sketches and drawings from the early voyages of exploration to California and Alaska, major western American landscape paintings and photographs from mid 19th and early 20th centuries, and the recent donation of the San Francisco Examiner photography archive to photographs of the construction of the new East Span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

September 17th, Faculty Club
12:00 noon

Led by Frances Dinkelspiel

The first Bancroft Round Table of our Fall 2009 series will take place on Thursday, September 17 at noon in the Lewis-Latimer Room of the Faculty Club. Frances Dinkelspiel, author of Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California (St. Martin's Press, 2008) will speak about her book.

Isaias Hellman was the premier California financier of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rising from humble immigrant beginnings to the presidency of Wells Fargo bank. His story captures a pivotal moment in American history: the rise of California from a frontier economy driven by the barter of hides and the exchange of gold to an economic steam engine driving the nation. Ms. Dinkelspiel's book also offers illuminating perspectives on families, as well as about the changing social role of Jews in developing California. The Hellman family has been a prodigious benefactor of the University of California, especially The Bancroft Library.

Bancroft Round Tables aim to highlight the myriad collections of our library and to demonstrate their relevance to a full understanding of our contemporary world. The campus community is welcome to join us at this informal talk which will be rich in California historical lore.

Darwin and the Evolution of a Theory

An exhibition of rare books, manuscripts, images and scientific specimens from the collections of UC Berkeley's Libraries and Museums.

The exhibit is open Monday through Friday, 10AM - 4PM.

California Gold: The Nobel Tradition at UC Berkeley

Permanent Exhibit
The Helen Kennedy Cahill Reference Center, The Bancroft Library

Nobel gold has been "mined" by twenty members of the Berkeley faculty and twenty-four alumni. Four of these are alumni and faculty. Fifty-five Nobel medals have been awarded to faculty and researchers affiliated with eight UC campuses and laboratories, twenty-two of these since 1995.

Berkeley’s Nobel tradition reflects the distinguished culture of creativity flourishing in the Bay Area, where dozens of laureates have been affiliated with the three major universities and with industry, government, and independent laboratories. UC Berkeley is particularly notable for the large number of chemistry, physics and, more recently, economic laureates, and for the very first Nobel laureate from a public university, Ernest O. Lawrence.

The Bancroft Library has also developed its own Nobel tradition, collecting the papers of fourteen Nobel Laureates, including two who were not Berkeleyans: Emil Fischer (Chemistry, 1902) and Otto Stern (Physics, 1943).

Featured in this exhibit are the Nobel medals of William F. Giauque (Chemistry, 1949) and Gerard Debreu (Economics, 1983).  Also on display are facsimiles of photographs and letters drawn from The Bancroft Library's Nobel Laureates collections.