The archaeological site material in the museum’s collections dates from approximately 8,000 thousand years ago to the early 1800s. This material includes artifacts from the  indigenous people known as the Tongva who were living on Catalina Island - which they called Pimu - when the Spanish arrived in 1542. Also in the collections are approximately two thousand items dating from the 1880s to the…

Yearbooks, newsletters and bulletins, scrapbooks describing club activities and philanthropic activities spanning the years from 1894 through the present. Furnishings, artworks including paintings and sculpture, clocks, textiles and costumes.

El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument is the oldest section of Los Angeles. Its twenty-seven historic buildings clustered around an old plaza range in architectural style from an adobe dwelling of 1818 to a Spanish-style church of 1926. Four of the buildings have been restored as museums. A brochure describing the buildings is available at the Information Desk in the Plaza or at the El…

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…

A digitized, JPEG, DOC, PDF, MP3 collection of photo albums, oral history tapes and text from the personal albums and interviews of engine builders and auto-racing notables active in the Los Angeles Basin 1880s-1984. Family immigration from England, France, Germany and Canada is noted along with some 'old-country' testimony. The file is approx. 20GB in size. Papers posted on academia.edu

The collection is currently being evaluated to determine content and needs for curation and as such is not yet available to the public.

UCSB professor David Gebhard (1927-1996) founded the Architecture and Design Collection in 1963. Today it is one of the largest architectural archives in North America with more than 1,000,000 drawings, as well as papers, photographs, scrapbooks, models, decorative objects, and furniture. The focus of the collection is the design and architecture of southern California from the late 19th through…