Online Archive of California — New Support via Grants from LSTA, IMLS

A $360,000 grant from the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), administered by the California State Library, will enable the creation of the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive (JARDA).  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, University of Southern California, the California Historical Society, and the California State Archive — plans include the digitization of textual and visual material, plus audio content drawn from oral histories, and for OAC finding aids to serve as the means of navigating this material.

Two Berkeley projects that will produce OAC material were also funded in separate LSTA awards: the Cased Photographs Digital Archive project and the Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library Chinese American Archives project.  With a $490,000 “National Leadership” grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the CDL and the Bancroft Library 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 (EAD), to integrate their collection descriptions into the OAC collections.