After nine years of planning and construction, and three years of exile off campus, on January 5th The Bancroft Library opened its doors again in the splendidly renovated Doe Annex Building, on the east side of the main library complex, facing the Campanile.

Bancroft is one of the great treasures of the Berkeley campus, a library even older than the university itself. It grew out of the reference collection that San Francisco book dealer and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft began to form in 1860. Bancroft initially focused his collection on California in order to compile a guidebook for emigrants to the Golden State but soon expanded it to encompass the entire American West as well as Mexico and Central America.

By the time the university bought it in 1905, The Bancroft Library was the largest library in the country devoted to the history of a given region. It still is, but it is much, much more than that. Bancroft now contains materials ranging from 4000-year-old papyri from ancient Egypt to medieval manuscripts to rare printed books from the 15th century onward to the manuscripts of such authors as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joan Didion, and, especially, Mark Twain. Pictorial collections range from 19th-c. paintings and sketches of Gold Rush California to the more than six million prints and negatives of the photographic collection, the largest in the country outside the Library of Congress. Archival collections include the records of the Sierra Club, and its president, environmentalist David Brower, the papers of master builder Henry Kaiser, whose Richmond shipyards helped win World War II, and of more than 2500 other individuals, businesses, and organizations.

Bancroft also houses the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO), founded in 1954 to record, in their own words, the lives of individuals who have made significant contributions to the history of California and the American West-the suffragettes who won the vote for women in California in 1910, photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, Cal's Nobel laureates like physicists E. O. Lawrence, namesake of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and Owen Chamberlain, and winemakers like Robert Mondavi and Ernest and Julio Gallo.

The University Archives include the records of the Regents and of the Office of the President, the personal papers of presidents Robert Gordon Sproul and Clark Kerr and numerous faculty members, and of organizations ranging from the Cal Band to the Free Speech Movement.

Bancroft staff collaborate with faculty in nineteen departments to introduce students to Bancroft's collections and the art and craft of original research. Two courses are taught exclusively in Bancroft: UGIS 39B, "Archival Research: Working with Primary Sources in the Humanities, Sciences and Engineering," examines such materials as E. O. Lawrence's original sketches for the atomic bomb; while a section of History 200X, "The Handpress Book in its Historical Context," examines the history of the book using Bancroft's rare book collection, while at the same time students, under the direction of master printers, design, set the type for, and print a pamphlet based on a manuscript in Bancroft's collections-perhaps unpublished poems by Beat poet Michael McClure, or letters by Mark Twain-on Bancroft's two 19th-century hand printing presses.

My remarks at the rededication of the renovated building last October apply just as much to Cal students, both graduate and undergraduate, as to the audience that day-perhaps even more so: "This is a special place, apart from care and strife and hurly-burly, a tranquil and welcoming place where you can spend as much time as you wish or need in the company of the men and the women who made our world what it is today, from ancient Egypt to the great figures of the Renaissance to the stalwart pioneers who rushed in to California from the four corners of the earth. We have treasures, and we will gladly spread them before you. All you have to do is ask."