The 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.
Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990 expands on the content digitized for California Cultures by building a digital archive of ca. 5000 additional images documenting important events and figures in California's rich history.
The project is a joint effort of the Department of Special Collections, UCLA Digital Library, and the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF). Project funding has been provided by the Online Archive of California.
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 is available to a broad spectrum of users—students, teachers, and researchers of all levels. Through the OAC, access to information previously available only to scholars who traveled to collection sites is available to everyone.
The OAC includes a single, searchable database of "finding aids" to primary sources and their digital facsimiles. Primary sources include letters, diaries, manuscripts, legal and financial records, photographs and other pictorial items, maps, architectural and engineering records, artwork, scientific logbooks, electronic records, sound recordings, oral histories artifacts and ephemera.
Describing primary sources in detail, finding aids are the inventories to collections held in archives, museums, libraries and historical societies. Finding aids provide detailed descriptions of collections, their intellectual organization and, at varying levels of analysis, of individual items in the collections. Access to the finding aid is essential for understanding the true content of a collection and for determining whether it is likely to satisfy your research needs.
The Department of Special Collections has more than 1700 collections, over 1400 of which are available on the OAC.
OAC digital content projects include:
UCLA Digital Library Program projects involving Special Collections and University Archives collections include:
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.
Departmental collections being digitized include:
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.
The Department of 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. Plans are underway for the electronic publication on the repository of selected titles from our previously published Occasional Papers series.