Berkeley began as an offshoot of San Francisco, an intimate neighbor to industrial Oakland and, of course, a college town. Home to the University of California, the city has made a name for itself as a hotbed of intellectual thought and subcultural social movements.

The Daily Californian serves to inform its readers of the city’s going-ons and contextualize the confusion of daily campus life. The paper, however, represents more than just the campus’s 30,000 undergraduates or the city’s 120,000 residents. We are Berkeley’s paper of record and its only remaining regular print publication.

As such, the Daily Cal is launching Stacks to look deeper into the swirling maze of innovation and drudgery that underpins our campus and our city. From this, our name is derived. Main Stacks library: a place synonymous with the Berkeley experience in its magnitude, knowledge and chaotic order.

In Stacks, we aim to represent all walks of life — from aspiring beatniks and future dropouts-turned-CEOs to our red-eyed engineers, pedantic writers and California blondes.

Stacks is an archive of Berkeley as it is, as we think it is and as we want it to be.