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Sunday, April 30, 2023

Special Libraries at Berkeley: Going! Going! Gone? - Part 3 (occupation)

The item below is from CBSNews and dated April 24. Is the occupation of the anthropology library still going on? No mention - one way or the other - of it has appeared in the Daily Cal. So I assume it is still happening.

A group of University of California at Berkeley students is in its fourth day of an open-ended occupation of the school's anthropology library in an effort to thwart plans for its closure. The students say they will live amid the stacks 24 hours a day until the administration reverses plans to close the George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library as part of its "long-term space plan."

"We have met with the chancellor, we have tried every single bureaucratic channel," said protest organizer Jesus Gutierrez, an anthropology Ph.D. candidate.

"What is at stake here are the values and principles of the university and the resources of the curated collection," Gutierrez said.

The students say UC Berkeley administration has been trying to close the library since 2012, but a similar student-led occupation kept the doors open. Then, in February, the university proposed closing the anthropology library along with two other small specialty libraries for math statistics and for physics and astronomy and merging them with other, larger libraries.

"Regarding the Anthropology library's closure, we, too, wish the library could remain open, but that is not an option at this point," campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore said in an email...

Full story at https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/berkeley-students-continue-occupation-of-anthropology-library/.

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