The C.V. Starr East Asian Library , which opened its doors in 2008, houses more than 900,000 volumes of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean materials, including woodblock prints, rare maps and scrolls, contemporary political posters, and Buddhist scriptures, and is home to the Paul Kendel Fonoroff Collection for Chinese Film Studies. This library consolidated the holdings of the Center for Chinese Studies Library (CCSL) and the East Asian Library (EAL) into one collection.
The CCSL began as a reading room in the 1960s and grew to become one of the premier libraries on post-1949 China in the U.S. The holdings included some 100,000 volumes in both Chinese and English, an extensive microfilm collection, a large number of newspapers and journals, and video collections. Its collection included primarily Chinese- and English-language materials, but also contained works in Japanese, German, French and Russian. The EAL, founded in 1898, housed a comprehensive research collection of materials in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan.
The C.V. Starr East Asian Library is the first freestanding library in the U.S. constructed exclusively for an East Asian collection. The facility occupies a prominent location in central campus next to Memorial Glade and Doe Library, reflecting Berkeley's role as a Pacific Rim hub for students and researchers of East Asian studies.