November 15, 1999
California history and culture available online
By John Ober
UC Office of the President
The California Digital Library has received $1.5 million from three federal programs
to support the ongoing construction of a major digital collection of photographs,
manuscripts, organizational records, and other significant materials from organizations
in California that contribute to the rich history of the Golden State.
Through a collection called the Online Archive of California, patrons of the Digital
Library can access a fascinating array of materials that include photographs
of the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, diary pages from a member
of the ill-fated Donner party, and sketches and artwork created by early California
residents.
The materials, comprising well over 100 separate archival collections with digitized
materials, also include scenes of early agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley, views
of the borax industry, photos of early travel in California's national parks, gold
rush mining towns, and the state's oil industry, as well as objects held by UCLA's
Fowler Museum and UC Berkeley's Berkeley Art Museum.
Patrons can also consult online the inventories, or "finding aids," of
more than 3,000 collections of archival materials housed in more than 40 separate
libraries, museums, historical societies and other California organizations.
These inventories document and describe materials as rich and varied as California's
multi-faceted past. Collection themes range from the television and film industries
to the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley; from papers associated with individuals
involved in politics, literature, and architecture to a county sheriff's wanted notices
at the turn of the century; from organizations such as the Sierra Club to the California
Federation of Teachers to the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California.
Digital access to the finding aids and to the primary source materials has been highly
praised by the scholarly community and has been incorporated experimentally into
the curriculum of primary and secondary schools in California through special collaboration
with UC Berkeley's California Heritage and Interactive University projects.
The new financial support supplements an ongoing commitment by the University of
California to enhance the Online Archive of California (OAC) both by extending the
number of organizations and their finding aids, and by digitizing and making available
much more of the primary source materials -- the photographs, manuscript pages, artworks
and papers -- within those collections.
A $400,000 grant from the Library Services and Technology Act to the California Digital
Library (CDL), administered by the California State Library, will enable the creation
of the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive. Plans include digitizing text,
visual material, and audio content drawn from oral histories, plus designing OAC
finding aids to navigate the material.
This will be a cooperative project involving nine OAC participants: UC Berkeley,
UCLA, the Japanese American National Museum, California State Universities at Fullerton
and Sonoma, the University of the Pacific, the University of Southern California,
the California Historical Society, and the California State Archive.
Because the Japanese-American population at the outbreak of World War II was largely
in California, the holdings of California libraries on relocation issues are especially
strong, including, for example, the official Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement
Records at UC Berkeley, the records of the Manzanar War Relocation Center at UCLA,
and numerous collections of personal papers of prominent Japanese Americans who lived
through the relocation.
With a $500,000 National Leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library
Services, the CDL, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley
will lead a group of eight museums in evaluating the capabilities of the digital
finding aid technology, known as Encoded Archival Description, to integrate their
collection descriptions into the OAC virtual archive collections.
An additional $600,000 from the Library of Congress (LC) will support cooperation
between OAC and LC's National Digital Library Program. Funds will be used for digitizing
materials related to several important historical themes with a strong connection
to California. These include a focus on the Japanese-American relocation materials,
as well as the Russian presence in early Northern California; California Missions
and their role in the settlement of the state; and the especially strong holdings
of OAC member libraries related to the westward migration, collections that powerfully
complement and expand existing Library of Congress digital collections in its American
Memory program.
The convergence of shared goals, standards, technical capabilities and program commitments
presents a unique opportunity for the Library of Congress and the University of California
to leverage, mutually reinforce, and enrich their digital collections of unique primary
source material.
"The combination of these three independent sources of support and collaboration
for the Online Archive of California is a vote of confidence for the importance of
the materials as well as for continued leadership from California in building digital
collections," said Richard Lucier, university librarian and executive director
of the CDL.
"We're proud of and thankful for the collaboration represented by the OAC. Collaboration
is inherent in its success and funding, has been essential for development of the
supporting technologies, and is the only way to build these important digital collections
for scholarly and public use."
Enhancement of the Online Archive of California and digitization of additional primary
source materials will make them readily available to thousands of scholars, community
leaders, writers and artists, students, and citizens who are unaware of these unique
collections or unable to travel to dozens of California archives to use them.
Complementing the physical libraries on the nine campuses of the University of California
system, the California Digital Library focuses on selecting, building, managing,
preserving, and providing access to shared collections of high-quality digital materials
for UC and its partners.
Browsing and searching tools at the CDL provide enhanced access to the Melvyl®
Union Catalog of book materials held by UC campuses and a number of partners, a union
list of periodicals located in more than 500 libraries in California, electronic
journals from major scholarly publishers, journal abstracting and indexing databases,
and the archival finding aids of the OAC. Many of these resources, notably Melvyl,
the California Periodicals database, and the OAC, are available to the public.
More information can be found at these Web sites:
California Digital Library
Institute of Museum and Library Services
Library of Congress
Federal library funding
administered by the California State Library
