The Santa Monica Historical Society was founded in 1975 as part of the city’s centennial celebration with the mission of collecting and preserving the history, art and culture of the Santa Monica Bay Area. In 1988, a Museum was established to house the Society’s growing collections of artifacts, documents, rare books, newspapers, textiles, artwork, and photographic images. Currently, the Museum’s…

Side Street Projects is a community-based, nonprofit arts organization dedicated to helping artists produce and exhibit their work. Located in the Eighteenth Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica, Side Street Projects pro--vides and maintains a fully equipped workshop where local artists can have their pieces fabricated at reasonable rates or do the work themselves. Also available are a gallery for…

The Sierra Madre Historical Archives collects, preserves, and provides access to a variety of materials that tell the Sierra Madre story: photographs, slides, postcards, scrapbooks, city directories, maps, letters, periodicals, posters, works of art, sound recordings, moving images, and ephemera. The archives collection includes the Sierra Madre Oral History Project in which residents describe…

SPARC’s MREC is one of the country’s largest repositories of information about murals and other forms of public art. SPARC produces, exhibits, and preserves public art works and is particularly committed to enhancing the visibility of work which reflects the lives and concerns of American’s diverse ethnic populations, women, working people, youth and elderly. We have an extensive collection of…

The SCGS Library holds nearly 40,000 volumes, with a relatively small portion of the material related to LA. We have published indices to cemetery records, vital (birth, death and marriage) records, and immigration and naturalization. We provide free access to some data on our website. The Society is in the midst of a project to recreate the 1890 Census for Los Angeles County. The census records…

The Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research primarily documents and preserves the history of twentieth-century radicalism and social change through progressive movements in the greater Los Angeles area. The materials held by the library relate to the labor, peace, social justice, civil rights, women’s, gay and lesbian, and various other grassroots movements.