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Online Collections

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A core component of the California Digital Library, the Online Archive of California (OAC) is a digital information resource that facilitates and provides access to materials such as manuscripts, photographs, and works of art held in libraries, museums, archives, and other institutions across California. The OAC includes a single, searchable database of finding aids to primary resources and their digital facsimiles.

UCLA LIbrary Special Collections has more than 2300 online searchable finding aids, a selection of which has online digitized content.

OAC digital content projects include:

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Library Special Collections has partnered with the UCLA Digital Library to digitize many of our most significant collections. Please consult the UCLA Digital Library for a complete list of collections. Highlights include:

center for oral history label

UCLA’s Center for Oral History Research collects oral history interviews related primarily to the history of Southern California and the Los Angeles metropolitan region.  Many of the oral history audio files and transcripts are available on the UCLA Center for Oral History Research website.

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Hosted by the California Digital Library, the eScholarship Repository was launched in April 2002 to provide rapid dissemination of scholarship authored or sponsored by faculty and academic departments of the University of California.  Library Special Collections chose as its first eScholarship project the publication of papers presented at the April 2003 conference How Shall a Generation Know Its Story: The Edgar Bowers Conference and Exhibition. Additional projects can be found on the LSC page at http://escholarship.org/uc/uclalib_dsc

"Yellowback" Novels from the Michael Sadleir Collection of 19th Century Fiction 

image of yellowback novelsEllen Truxaw, PhD candidate in English and current scholar in the Center for Primary Research and Training led a Flickr tag-a-thon to highlight “yellowback” novels from LSC’s Michael Sadleir Collection of 19th Century Fiction. Sadleir was a British book collector who amassed an extensive collection of 19th century British literature during his lifetime. The collection includes over a thousand “yellowbacks,” popular novels from the Victorian era, most of which have covers with rich color illustrations laid over a yellow background.

Ellen worked in the CFPRT with two undergraduate students, Gloria Zhang and Angela Kim, to digitize and create metadata that describes the novels and their cover art. Ellen is also conducting in-depth research to provide detailed description of the novels' contents and convey their historical significance in the Victorian era. The team has been posting the images and their descriptions to Flickr in order to promote wider public discovery. They have completed digitization and description of over 1,000 books so far!

On October 27, 2015, Ellen led a group tag-a-thon of the digitized "yellowback" covers. In the 90 minutes of active tagging, the Flickr site received approximately 49,527 views of the digitized images and all images now have at least a couple of tags each. There are 2,173 digitized covers up, of which approximately 1,100 are from the Sadleir Collection in UCLA Library Special Collections (the rest are part of Emory University’s holdings). You can see the full Flickr collection here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/yellowbacks/

Special thanks to English professor Dr. Jonathan Grossman for conceiving of and spearheading this project!

Digitization Initiatives

  • California Culturesangela davis and professor donald kalish

    A project of the Online Archive of California, California Cultures is a digital collection about ethnic groups in California and the West drawn from the extraordinarily rich resources of the University of California. Launched in 2004, this virtual collection provides an online resource that serves as the basis for historical studies, analysis, interpretation, and application to current events. Ultimately, California Cultures will consist of 25,000 images and 50,000 pages of text. Collections digitized include portions of the Ralph Bunche Papers, maps showing the distribution of racial groups in Los Angeles, paintings from the Japanese American internment camps, documents about the Zoot Suit Riots, and photographs from the Los Angeles Times archives.

  • Children’s Book Collection

    image of children's bookChildren's literature emerged as a distinct and independent genre only a little more than two centuries ago. Before the mid-eighteenth century, books were rarely created specifically for children, and children's reading was generally confined to literature intended for their education and moral edification rather than for their amusement. Religious works, grammar books, and "courtesy books" (which offered instruction on proper behavior) were virtually the only early books directed at children. In these books illustration played a relatively minor role, usually consisting of small woodcut vignettes or engraved frontispieces created by anonymous illustrators.  This collection includes over 1,800 digitized children’s books, including Goody Two-Shoes (1888), which has been downloaded over two million times through the site.

  • Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive

    image of Photo of a woman in white robes belowing a heraldic horn with the Hollywood Bowl in the backgroundThe Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, ca. 1918-1990, is one of the most heavily used of UCLA's Special Collections. The collection consists of approximately 3.5 million photographic negatives and 1.5 million photographic prints documenting events and people in California, the United States, and the world. The material originates from the Los Angeles Times and includes glass negatives (ca. 1918-1932), nitrate negatives (ca. 1925-45), and safety negatives (ca. 1935-1990). It also includes prints and negatives from the Los Angeles Times Orange County and San Diego bureaus. Digitized images from the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive are accessible through the UCLA Digital Library. The project is a joint effort between Library Special Collections, UCLA Digital Library, and the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF). Project funding has been provided by the Online Archive of California.

  • An inexplicable image from medieval medicineThe Index of Medieval Medical Images (IMMI)

    The Index of Medieval Medical Images project began in 1988 and aimed to describe and index the content of all medieval manuscript images (up to the year 1500) with medical components held in North American collections. The goal of this 2001 pilot project was to make the descriptions and the images available via a searchable database on the Web.

  • International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) Online Archives

    pain clinic logoFeaturing excerpts from Pain: A Universal Problem and an International Field, an exhibition for the 9th World Congress on Pain (Vienna, 1999) to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP).

 

  • Los Angeles Aqueduct Platform

    fragment of los angeles aqueduct mapIn partnership with Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio, UCLA Library Special Collections developed the Los Angeles Aqueduct Digital Platform in commemoration of the Aqueduct’s centennial, November 5, 2013.  The platform provides access to digitized archival resources from UCLA Library Special Collections, including photographs, documents, maps, and pamphlets. Featuring original scholarship from graduate students in the Center for Primary Research and Training, a program in UCLA Library Special Collections, the platform serves as a space where scholars, writers, and students share research that contextualizes the Aqueduct’s historical, social, political, and environmental impact on California and the nation.
    lippincott, eaton, and mulhollandThe platform will also provide access to more than 2000 archival resource descriptions from six California institutions: Braun Research Library at the Autry National Center; Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library, The Claremont Colleges, and the Claremont Colleges Digital Library; Oviatt Library at Cal State Northridge; Eastern California Museum; William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University; and UC Riverside Libraries, Water Resources Collections and Archives. Incorporating these resources into the Los Angeles Aqueduct Digital Platform enables users to search across the holdings of multiple repositories to discover archival materials.