New Collection in Calisphere and the OAC: AFL-CIO Papers and Proceedings

By Adrian Turner, CDL Data Consultant

Approximately, 350 proceedings and papers dating back to 1901 from the records of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) are now available in Calisphere and the Online Archive of California (OAC).

These primary resources documenting California labor history have been made available by the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) Library.  The documents are available in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), a file format that is newly supported within Calisphere and the OAC.  The CDL anticipates offering enhanced support for PDF resources in 2009, including full-text searching across PDF documents (when transcriptions are available).

The project was made possible by a grant from the UC Labor and Employment Research Fund (LERF), which is based in the UCOP Office of Research.  The principal investigator for the ongoing digitization project work is Terry Huwe, IRLE Librarian.  Former CDL eScholarship staff member Dayna Holz provided assistance as a digital library developer to IRLE.  The IRLE Library collaborated with UC Berkeley Library’s Digital Publishing Group to create these new resources, and presented CDL with a pilot opportunity to support the PDF file format in Calisphere and the OAC.