Claremont Colleges Library to digitize water history

‘Southern California swings between drought and deluge, a climate history that has been captured in thousands of documents, photographs and other archival material dispersed in local libraries.’ Prof. Char Miller, Pomona College

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has awarded the Claremont Colleges Library a $333,574 grant to digitize and help preserve primary source documentation of water history in California.

“Digitizing Southern California Water Resources” seeks to digitize documentation on the development, management and exploitation of California and western U.S. water dispersed at the Claremont Colleges Library and six other Southern California institutions.

“Southern California swings between drought and deluge, a climate history that has been captured in thousands of documents, photographs and other archival material dispersed in local libraries,” said Char Miller, Pomona College professor of environmental analysis and principal investigator of the initiative.

The Pomona College-led initiative is one of 17 projects awarded a CLIR 2016 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant, a program funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Miller suggests that gaining access to these rich repositories has been difficult, which is why the CLIR Hidden Collections grant is of immense significance. This grant will enable the collaborating institutions to digitize these historical documents and make them available to researchers, policymakers and the larger public at precisely the time when we need this baseline data to make sense of how climate change is altering the conditions of life in this region, he says.

The project is expected to become a model for other water collections to employ digital tools that support and enhance questions scholars and researchers can ask and answer.

“These soon-to-be digitized and widely available primary resources will facilitate the research of a new generation of scholars,” says Kevin Mulroy, the A.J. McFadden Dean of the Claremont Colleges Library.

Collaborating institutions include: the A.K. Smiley Public Library, California State University Northridge Oviatt Library, California State University San Bernardino Water Resources Institute, the National Archives and Records Administration at Riverside, the Ontario City Library and the Upland Public Library.

– Submitted by Pomona College