On your left is one of Berkeley’s quietest treasure rooms... the Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library, tucked up on the fourth floor of McLaughlin Hall. From the outside, it does not announce itself like a grand monument. And that is part of its lesson. Some of a campus’s biggest ambitions hide in ordinary hallways, behind office doors, in places devoted not to display, but to use.
This library began in nineteen forty-eight, and its first great keeper was Beverly Hickok. Harmer Davis chose her when the Institute of Transportation Studies started in nineteen forty-seven. In his own recollections, he remembered the early library in a temporary building by the slough across from the main campus library. Hickok did something simple and powerful: she kept researchers constantly aware of what had newly arrived. That made her indispensable. She was not just shelving books. She was helping people imagine roads, railways, airports, traffic systems... whole networks of movement.
And the collection grew astonishingly wide. Today it holds more than one hundred eighty-three thousand monographs, thousands of serials, one hundred fifty thousand microfiche - those flat sheets of tiny photographed pages used to store huge numbers of technical reports - plus videos, discs, and government publications. It became especially strong in urban transportation, highways and traffic engineering, aviation, rail, and intelligent transportation systems. Nearly every federally sponsored U-S transportation report since nineteen seventy-four found a home here.
But here is the turn in the story: this is not just a vault of facts. It is also a machine for access. The staff catalogs hundreds of records every month, sends materials across campuses, supports researchers at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, and Los Angeles, and feeds national databases so knowledge can travel as efficiently as the people and goods it studies. It even developed the P-A-T-H database, once the world’s largest online database on intelligent transportation systems. A library about movement became a moving system itself.
And somehow, for all that scale, it kept a human touch. The library sets out a candy dish for visitors. People call it the living room of the institute. It hosts seminars, receptions, workshops, even ping-pong tournaments. That feels very Berkeley to me: a place can be intensely specialized and still make room for conversation, curiosity, and welcome.
Hickok herself carried a larger, more personal history too. Long after building this collection, she wrote about coming out in the nineteen forties. So behind all this infrastructure and data, there is a human life - careful, brave, and often overlooked - much like the library she helped create.
If you remember anything here, let it be this: a landmark does not need a grand facade. Sometimes it is an upper-floor room where people quietly organize the future. From here, Cloyne Court Hotel is about a six-minute walk. If you want to come back, the library is generally open Monday through Friday from one to five in the afternoon.
