Did you spend much time there before they stopped letting in "the public" ...? Berkeley, especially the area around campus, is, um, special, often accompanied by it's own, um, special odor. "The public" often came to the library to do other than scholarly research ... :-)
>> Didn't you hear that California has a budget crisis?
>
> Caused by overdue library fines?
Cause and effect are hardly ever related; they decided they couldn't spend all the money they wanted to (gosh!) and something had to give. I'm okay with the idea that they chose collection building and serving the University community over supplemental janitorial services in a few of the buildings.
Anyway, the "UC Berkeley Library" is huge and only Moffett (the undergraduate library, you don't want to go there anyway) and the Gardner Stacks aren't open to the public. And of course if you want something there, you're welcome to use Inter-Library-Loan ... I'm surprised that you happened to pick the place you weren't allowed, and that you weren't directed to another of the libraries. What were you looking for? You weren't in the "main" library, because that's open to the public (though not the stacks).
Whine whine whine.