In conjunction with the launch of The Claremont Colleges Library’s new website, I would like to share with you the Digitizing Southern California Water Resources project web page! The Digitizing Southern California Water Resources project, also known as the CLIRWater project, is a 3-year collaborative preservation and dissemination project supported by a Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. You can visit the new CLIRWater project web page here: https://library.claremont.edu/scl/clirwater-project/.
This project is a partnership between The Claremont Colleges Library; the A.K. Smiley Public Library in Redlands; the Oviatt Library at California State University, Northridge (CSUN); the Water Resources Institute at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB); the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at Riverside; the Ontario City Library; and the Upland Public Library.
Having begun in 2017, students from The Claremont Colleges, CSUN, and CSUSB, have been digitizing and describing reports, maps, blueprints, photographs, and other materials found in water-related archival collections. Subjects covered by the collections include floods and flood plains, irrigation, legal cases, the Colorado River Aqueduct, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, reservoirs and dams, the Salton Sea, water companies and municipal water suppliers, water engineering, water rights, and land ownership. The materials come from a variety of sources such as federal, state, and local governments, water companies, local agencies, engineers, and other individuals involved in water development in the Southern California region from the 19th through the 20th centuries.
If you are interested in Southern California water and our collaborative project, you can find us online using the hashtag #CLIRWater as well as checking out these links:
Press Release
Digital Collection
Facebook Page
Student Blog
Society of California Archivists (SCA) Newsletter - Spring 2018 (article on pages 10-11)
For more information, please contact tanya.kato@claremont.edu or (909) 607-8039.
Thuumbnail image: Mouth of Canyon, San Antonio Creek. Willis S. Jones Papers, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California.