The American Indian Resource Center was established in 1979 by the County of Los Angeles Public Library to address information needs for and about American Indians. With over 10,000 items, AIRC is the largest collection of its kind in an American public library. Our clientele is local, national, and international. The scope of the collection is the continental U.S. and Alaska from pre-Columbian…

The California State Library, comprising sections including California History, Information Services, Government Publications, and the Witkin Law Library in Sacramento and the Sutro Library in San Francisco, holds a wide variety of materials relating to the history of Los Angeles, including manuscripts, rare books, maps, photographs and other visual resources, ephemera, vertical files, and…

The Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections & Archives Library is the principle repository for the preservation and access of the Leatherby Libraries’ rare and unique collections. Special Collections holds rare books, manuscripts, maps and collections of enduring value while the Archives preserves the history of the university and the Chapman family. The department includes the Dan…

The Library has a large collection of manuscripts, printed books and periodicals, photographs, maps and ephemera relating to Los Angeles.

The Research Library and Archives has been collecting material relating to the history of Pasadena since 1924. The archives contains approximately 1 million historic images (including photos, negatives, postcards, stereographs) of Pasadena and surrounding areas. There are 45 cubic feet of maps and plans of the area, as well as a set of Sanborm fire insurance maps for Pasadena. There is a large…

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…

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…