The current collection over 9,000 volumes, approximately 150 journal titles, magazines, maps, slides, and other ephemera. Our vast literature holdings cover the entire history of French writing from the earliest chansons to francophonie and the bande dessinée. Subjects such as history, linguistics, criticism, theater, film, and philosophy are also well represented. New items are being added to the collection on a periodic basis.
Thanks to a generous donation by Steve Snow in honor of Priscilla D.”Petie” Snow, we were able to create a leisure reading section in the library featuring a wide selection of materials ranging from general interest in French language and culture, to children’s literature, to art and travel books.
LOCATION
4229 Dwinelle Hall
LIBRARIAN OF FRENCH THOUGHT (Spring 2023)
Amber Sweat
frenchlibrary@berkeley.edu
Regular Hours Spring 2023
Monday / 11am-1pm, 1:30pm-3:30pm
Tuesday / 11am-1pm, 1:30pm-3:30pm
Wednesday / 9am-1pm
Thursday / Closed
Friday / 9am-1pm
Visitors are welcome to use the room to study, read for class or fun, work on group projects, and play our board games; with moderate amounts of talk permissible. Special events must reserve the library in advance.
Students are welcome to use the coffeemaker located in the reading room. Students may bring drinks in closed containers; however food is not allowed at this time. Drinks are not permitted in the stacks.
Borrowing Policies: All students enrolled in a French course --including those taught in English-- may check out any circulating item (books in the stacks, general reading books & magazines). Non-circulating items include reference materials, rare books, journals, and the Pléiade collection. Course Textbooks and Course Reserves can only be checked out for two hours at a time.
Students enrolled in French 1, French 2, French R&C, French 43A, & French 80, can only access the stacks by proxy. I.e. Students should look up the item in the catalog and ask the librarian to fetch it for them.
Students enrolled in French 3-4, 13-14, 35, C76 and above, in addition to French majors and minors, may physically browse the stacks.
Graduate students in French, Comparative Literature, and RLL (from all participating RLL departments) also have full borrowing privileges; graduate students in other departments should contact the librarian at the address above if they wish to borrow material from the French library.
Please use this form to check out library materials
Please email the librarian if you wish to renew a borrowed item. Do *NOT* fill out the check out form a second time.
Accessibility: Some of the rows in the stacks are not wheelchair accessible and have limited lighting. Students who need assistance should check the catalog for their items, which the librarian can then fetch for them.
OTHER HELP outside of the Library of French Thought
Student who need reference help, day or night, can always use the Ask A Librarian service. It’s live research help 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Ask A Librarian is a consortium of reference librarians from over 1,400 institutions.
Claude Potts
Librarian for Romance Languages
Research and Collections
218 Doe Library
(510) 642-6052
cpotts [AT] library.berkeley.edu