This week on The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer we’ve invited Kresge Engineering Librarian Lisa Ngo to tell us more about the library and what resources it offers to UC Berkeley students. Make sure you check out the links below to reserve study room space, find out about library workshops and the library catalog – where you can find resources that are available online or for physical checkout.

Important Links:

Kresge Engineering Library

Engineering Library Services

Study Room Reservations

Library Workshops

Research Help

Library Catalog

Episode transcript

LAURA VOGT: Hi! My name is Laura Vogt and I’m the Communications and Events Manager for Engineering Student Services and the host of your podcast The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer and this semester I want to focus on some of the resources that we have that you might not have started using last semester but we definitely want to make sure that you’re not forgetting about them. As we get into your second semester of your first year or even if you’re a continuing student making sure that you know about all of our resources and today we’ve got Lisa Ngo from the Kresge Engineering Library which is our engineering library. Lisa tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do for the University.

LISA NGO: Sure, thanks for having me. My name’s Lisa and I’m one of the Engineering Librarians at the Kresge Engineering Library. We have two other engineering librarians one of whom is named Anna Sackmann and the other one is Brian Quigley.

LV: Can you give us just an overall view of the engineering library and what it does for our students?

LN: The engineering library is the primary library that serves the kind of research and instruction needs for the College of Engineering. Most of the students that come to the engineering library are engineering students but we also get a variety of other students and we have books and services.

LV: We’re going to talk a little bit about that. How do students use the library? Is there anything special that they have to do or a library card that they need?

LN: No your CalOne ID card is your library card and then you can use your CalOne ID and passphrase to get logged into all of our online resources.

LV: Let’s talk a little bit about those online resources. What do you have that students are able to get online?

LN: We have, I can’t even count them. We have thousands and thousands and thousands of e-books. So you know you can access these books 24/7, anytime, anywhere you are. We also have things that you might not expect that the library would have. So we have streaming video, streaming documentaries, streaming music, and then we also have lots of textbooks that you can check out. We try to purchase all the textbooks, for all of the classes, so that we have them available. If students don’t want to buy them.

LV: Oh that’s a really nice service to be able to do. I know those textbooks can get expensive.

LN: Yes, they can.

LV: If a student wants to go into the library, what are they getting if they go to that actual physical space of the library?

LN: We’re one of the most popular libraries on campus and one of the reasons for that is we have five study rooms that are reserved. You can reserve them using the reservation system on the engineering library’s website. Each room comes with a screen that you can plug in your laptop to and a whiteboard. And they’re really popular for students to do group work. Students come in and do interviews there. They do webinars. So they are really, really popular rooms. We also have some drop-in rooms if you don’t have the foresight to reserve a room or if you can’t get a reservation because they’re so popular. And then we also have some board games. If you’re just kind of killing time in between classes and you need to take your min