Collection Services

Scholars and students, institutions, local historians, genealogy experts and family historians have visited the Judah L. Magnes Museum on a daily basis to gain access to its collection for decades. The move of the collection to the University of California, Berkeley and the creation of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at The Bancroft Library is geared towards improving accessibility to all holdings.

Once the transition is completed, the collections of the Western Jewish Americana archives and the rare books will be made available to the public at the Bancroft Library. The entirety of the museum holdings will constitute the visible storage in the new facility located at 2121 Allston Way, in downtown Berkeley, near the UC Berkeley Campus and public transportation.

The museum collections will be open for research in the Fall of 2012. Until then, all loans, rights and reproduction services, and in-depth research in the collections will be unavailable in preparation for the opening of the new building. 

Please refer to our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information about The Magnes Collection and current updates on the move, and plan to visit The Magnes to see the exhibitions on view and the visible storage display. 

A growing number of manuscript and pictorial collections in the Western Jewish Americana archives are becoming progressively available to scholars at The Bancroft Library. Updated information on their availability can be found here. 

During the transition, all researchers are encouraged to make full use of this website, as well as of a variety of online tools: 

• The Magnes collection database, with detailed descriptions and images of thousands of collection items (a search guide is available here) 
• A page listing the Western Jewish Americana archival collections already available to researchers at The Bancroft Library can be found here
• A current list of processed Western Jewish Americana archival collections can be found on the Magnes OCLC WorldCat profile 
• The descriptions for many of the collections in the Western Jewish Americana archives 
• A variegated online presence through an innovative use of social media, including over 8,000 collection images on Flickr 
• The advanced search functions of this website 

We look forward to once again granting access to researchers onsite after the new facility opens in the Fall of 2011. 

If you have specific requests about the collections, and you wish to plan your research at the Magnes once the move has been completed, please submit a Research Information Form and a curator will get back to you as soon as possible. (Please note that, due to the current focus on our impending move, your queries may be not be answered right away, and that it may take several days for our staff to get back to you).