University of California Berkeley

Sather Tower (the Campanile) at UC Berkeley, looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais.

Photo credit: Author: Tristan Harward. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

The University of California, Berkeley is the flagship campus of the University of California system. It is considered by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings as one of six university brands that lead in world reputation rankings in 2015. It is broadly ranked first in science, third in engineering, and fifth in social sciences. Cal co-manages three United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Berkeley faculty, alumni, and researchers have won 72 Nobel Prizes, 20 Turing Awards, 45 MacArthur Fellowships, 20 Academy Awards, 11 Pulitzer Prizes and 105 Olympic gold medals.

In 1997, the university's Gilman Hall was recognized by the American Chemical Society as a National Historic Chemical Landmark. The society noted that "Work performed at Gilman Hall helped advance the fields of chemical thermodynamics and molecular structure, and has resulted in multiple Nobel Prizes."

The university has been a frequent setting in fiction, TV and movies. Science-fiction author Philip K. Dick briefly attended. Other notable alumni include cartoonist Rube Goldberg, author Jack London, Star Trek actors George Takei and Chris Pine, and many, many others.

Library access: Berkeley's 32 libraries tie together to make the fourth largest academic library in the United States. Doe Library serves as the library system's reference, periodical, and administrative center, while most of the main collections are housed in the subterranean Gardner Main Stacks and Moffitt Undergraduate Library. The Bancroft Library maintains special collections that document the history of the western part of North America, with an emphasis on California, Mexico and Central America.

Most campus libraries are open to the public. Exceptions include the Art History/Classics Library and Moffitt Library. Members of the public can use computers within the libraries to access online resources, including licensed databases in the .edu., .org, and .gov domains. Access to items in the Gardner Main Stacks requires a stacks pass. Free library cards with borrowing privileges are available for visiting scholars; retired UC Berkeley employees; members of any UC alumni association; California K-12 public school teachers; Cal State and community college faculty; and students, faculty and staff from other UC campuses. Other California residents can purchase a one-year library card for $100. See the library website for additional details.