UC Berkeley Earth Sciences and Map Library Info

The UC Berkeley Earth Sciences & Map Library collection consists of more than 140,000 print volumes, including at over 60,000 books, dissertations, and reports. The collection covers all areas of the earth sciences including geology, geophysics, seismology, atmospheric science, and oceanography. The library also actively collects in physical geography and purchases selected titles in human geography.

» Maps

The library has the largest collection of maps in northern California and one of the largest university map collections in the United States. There are over 500,000 maps and aerial photographs in its collection, issued by local, state, and federal agencies, foreign governments, international organizations, and commercial firms.

The collection mainly consists of original maps from the 20th century and later, and facsimiles of pre-1900 maps. The maps in the collection cover all countries of the world at various scales. The library's collection contains general maps as well as thematic maps showing a wide variety of cultural, economic, and physical subjects.

» Air photos 

The library has over 80,000 images covering California and other selected areas. Historical coverage is available for some areas from 1931 to the present, with scales between 1:2,400 - 1:40,00. The majority of the collection is 9 x 9 inch contact prints with stereographic coverage.

The library's collection emphasis is on San Francisco and the East Bay; however, our collection responsibilities also include the nine counties surrounding the San Francisco Bay and northern California, exclusive of the Central Valley. For areas of the state not collected by Berkeley, cooperative collection responsibilities are in place with the map collections of other UC campuses and Stanford University.

» GIS

The Earth Sciences & Map Library supports geographic information system (GIS) software and data services across all disciplines for the UC Berkeley campus. The library has two GIS workstations available for UC Berkeley student, staff, and faculty use. These workstations have fully licensed versions of ArcGIS 10 for Desktop installed. Library users can use these machines for GIS work whenever the library is open.

GeoData@UC Berkeley (http://gis.lib.berkeley.edu/) is the UC Berkeley Libraries' geoportal where users can search, preview, display, map, and download geospatial data in a variety of formats.

The Earth Sciences & Map Library collects GIS data for areas around the world, with an emphasis on the nine county San Francisco Bay Area and northern California, and makes it available for use on the GIS workstations. Library users can download freely available data to use in their projects.

» Come see us!

The Earth Sciences and Map Library is open to the public. Our staff can help you find any kind of map, air photo, atlas, or GIS data you might need. The library offers large format scanning services for a fee (http://lib.berkeley.edu/EART/scanning) and has 11x17 scanners available for public use.

If you can’t come to the library, make sure to check out us out online:

Websites: http://lib.berkeley.edu/EART/ and http://gis.lib.berkeley.edu 

Blog: http://blogs.lib.berkeley.edu/eart.php

Oskicat (library catalog): http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/

Written by:
John Ridener, GIS Specialist/Map Cataloger
Earth Sciences & Map Library, UC Berkeley
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@geobiblio