Since the arrival of the California Historical Society (CHS) Collection at Stanford and the archivist appointments announced in the prior quarterly update, the first milestone of reopening the CHS Collection has been reached. The twentieth-century records of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, starting in 1900 with the bulk dating from the 1934 waterfront and general strike, can now be discovered in both the SearchWorks catalog and the Archival Collections at Stanford webpage created for the CHS Collection. Boxes containing the original records can be retrieved for study in Special Collections. The influential newsletters of the Northern and Southern California chapters are included in the records; digital images of the newsletters made at CHS are being transferred to the Stanford Digital Repository.
The ACLU records were among the most heavily requested collections at CHS. The compiled case files confronted the many injustices inflicted by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Japanese American incarceration during WWII, for example. Two other civil rights-related collections are being released concurrently: the papers of Mike Miller, a community activist with grassroots organizations in San Francisco, and the California Social, Protest and Counterculture Movement Ephemera Collection, which preserves the written and printed memorabilia of the gay and lesbian rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests, and other popular causes in the 1960s-70s.
“These crucial civil rights records were mainly ephemeral publications that would have vanished long ago without the California Historical Society serving the public as collector and preserver for over a century. We must ensure that these materials are never again at risk of disappearing and remain constantly and readily accessible,” said Michael A. Keller, the Ida M. Green University Librarian.
The Vault Books and Vault Broadside Collection, as the two collections were labelled and stored in San Francisco, have been fully processed in preparation for adding to the SearchWorks catalog. They contain the oldest and rarest CHS materials, such as exceedingly scarce examples from the Zamorano Printing Press and other early California printers. Many of the titles were not previously held at Stanford University Libraries. “No two early printed books are identical,” said Rare Books Curator Benjamin Albritton. “Even the duplicates have independent research value deriving from their handwritten annotations, associations with prior owners, and unique bibliographic features. We are really excited to be able to share these exceptional books with students, faculty and researchers in the upcoming academic year.”
Integrating the vast CHS Collection into the systems and shelving of Stanford University Libraries is expected to take at least three years. The archivists are working closely with the Libraries’ curators and subject matter specialists, since the CHS Collection covers such a broad swath of formats and topics, as well as with members of the Digital Production Group transferring CHS images into the Stanford Digital Repository. Every cataloged item will retain its original CHS identifiers to keep intact the links from its prior citations in academic publications and in the media.
Moreover, the California Historical Society Collection itself will endure as a distinct entity, essential to historians and treasured by the people of California, through the creation of its own website at Stanford and the eventual reappearance of its remarkable rarities in academic programs and public exhibitions at Stanford and elsewhere.
This article is the second in a series of quarterly updates about the California Historical Society Collection at the Stanford University Libraries. More information can be found on the CHS Collection at Stanford website. Please direct all inquiries to: chscollection@stanford.edu.
For information about supporting the project, please call or write to Assistant University Librarian for External Relations Anh Ly or (650) 512-6308.