Cultural/Professional Association

The Margaret Herrick Library collects a wide range of materials documenting film as both an art form and an industry. Its holdings include photographs, posters, books, periodicals, screenplays, oral histories, and extensive clippings files on people, films, and companies. The clippings files are organized under five headings: production, biography, general subject, festivals and awards, and Academy history. The general subject files contain clippings and photographs regarding aspects of Los Angeles such as homes, studios, motion picture theaters, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, Los Angeles as a location, educational and cultural institutions, theme parks, and landmarks; labor disputes and the formation of industry-related unions and guilds are also extensively documented in the general subject files. The Academy history files provide coverage of that very Los Angeles-based activity—the Academy Awards. The library's Special Collections contain materials relating to the careers of numerous directors, producers, actors, and other craftspeople and their filmmaking work in Los Angeles. Dating from the early 1900s to the present, the materials in Special Collections include scripts in various drafts, personal and business correspondence, production memoranda, sketches, clippings, music scores, recordings, scrapbooks, artifacts, and photographs.

The Max and Lore Zeller Library provides a specialized collection (including rare books) of over 6,500 volumes on Jungian psychology and related subjects: sandplay therapy, general psychology, anthropology, mythology, religion, alchemy, art and symbolism. The extensive book collection, 800 audio CDs, videotapes and DVDs, and 16 journals are available to the analytic community and the general public through an affordable membership fee. Library membership provides onsite access to the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS). Drawing upon C.G. Jung’s work on the archetype and the collective unconscious, ARAS is a pictorial and written archive of mythological, ritualistic, and symbolic images from all over the world and from all epochs of human history. The archive contains over 17,000 photographic images, each cross-indexed, and accompanied by scholarly commentary. The commentary includes a description of the image that serves to place it in its unique historical, cultural, and geographical setting. The ARAS commentaries honor both the universal patterns and specific cultural context associated with each image. The librarian is available to help steer readers toward their particular interests.

As the only collecting institution focused solely on the art, craft, and history of Hollywood writers and their labor union, the Writers Guild Foundation Library & Archive are vividlly relevant to the creative and business communities of Los Angeles. The holdings document a rich facet of Los Angeles culture in relation to the role of writers in the entertainment industry. The collections include Writers Guild of America historical materials, current and vintage produced and unproduced scripts, letters, periodicals, photographs, production materials, memorabilia, oral histories, and personal items pertaining to film, television, radio and new media writers. The non-profit Writers Guild Foundation strives to promote and preserve the work of writers for the screen, and to inspire and educate writers everywhere. In addition to the Shavelson-Webb Library & Archive, other esteemed programs include High School Workshops, the Military Veterans Writing Project, and a Visiting Writers program.

The Society of California Archivists, formed in 1971, is a professional association devoted to the support and development of individuals and institutions that collect, care for, and provide access to the documentary heritage of California and adjoining areas.

Angels Gate is a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to promoting the visual and performing arts and to the celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity through exhibitions, concerts, classes, workshops, and poetry readings. Founded in 1981, Angels Gate rents studio space to forty artists and exhibits their work. The annual exhibition schedule includes both a series of group shows (seven to eight per year) and a featured-artist-of-the-month series. Although Angels Gate is not a collecting organization, the site itself and the ten buildings that Angels Gate occupies are historic, and Angels Gate owns several steel sculptures that are on permanent display on the site.

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 Image Archives comprise over 500,000 photographs and negatives depicting the local history of Santa Monica, Ocean Park, Santa Monica Canyon, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Venice and Marina del Rey. The Outlook Newspaper Collection, one of the Museum’s primary holdings, consists of newspapers in hardcopy and on microfilm, extensive files by people and subject headings, and an estimated 400,000 photographs and negatives. Operating from 1875 at the time of the city’s founding until 1998 when the publication ceased its operations, the daily newspaper covered local, regional, state and national events. With an award-winning staff of professional photographers, the newspaper produced a significant archive of images that comprehensively portray the cultural, political and social life of the Santa Monica Bay Area communities. In addition, the archive contains images of major events taking place in the greater Los Angeles area, including cultural affairs, politics, features, sports, celebrities, presidential visits and conventions, the Los Angeles riots and earthquakes, fires and floods. The Museum also houses the collections of Outlook Newspaper photographers Bill Beebe, consisting of approximately 75,000 images from the 1930s to the 1960s, and Bob Smith, consisting of approximately 6,000 images from the 1960s to the 1990s. The Museum’s Image Archives also include publisher Diane Margolin’s City Scene images, the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce Collection and the Museum’s extensive collection of early Santa Monica photographs.

The Asian Pacific Community Fund is a philanthropic fundraising organization whose mission is to support health and social service programs that serve the critical needs of Asian and Pacific Islander families, youth, elderly, and disabled. Its holdings consist of organizational materials, minutes, and other records.

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 present which pertain to Catalina Island’s maritime history and local industries and to sport fishing, recreation, and tourism. Items include boat models, boat motors, fish mounts, fishing rods and reels, early paddleboards, swimsuits, postcards, and Catalina pottery and tiles. A small number of paintings and prints of historical interest are in the collections as well. The museum’s archives contain more than one hundred audiotaped oral history interviews with local residents, including many with members of the island’s Mexican American population, as well as several maps, various city and school records, a substantial ephemera collection documenting social and political activities on Catalina Island, and a very large number of photographs. Most of these holdings date to between the 1880s and the present.

Images of Los Angeles and its communities are preserved in the collections of the California Museum of Photography. In the immense archive of vintage stereographic negatives and prints known as the Keystone-Mast Collection are views taken between 1885 and 1960 of places, people, landmarks, industries, agriculture, and historical events in the Los Angeles region. The University Print Collection contains work by over one thousand contemporary and historical photographers. Its Los Angeles-related holdings include negatives from Ansel Adams’s Fiat Lux project which show the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the surrounding area in the 1960s; the archive of original negatives shot by photographer Will Connell in Los Angeles between the late 1920s and the early 1960s; Robert Cleveland’s photographs from the 1940s and 1950s of buildings and architecture in Los Angeles; studio photographs of children, families, entertainers, and burlesque performers taken between 1940 and 1976 at Raoul Gradvolh’s studios in Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles; Kodak Cirkut camera images (10 x 39–60 in. panoramas) taken by William Amos Hanes during the early 1900s which record events and places in Los Angeles, including residential areas, sanitariums, industrial and recreational sites, and downtown; and Louis Jarvis’s photographs of leisure in Pasadena in the 1890s. The museum also has a modest collection of rare photographic books and albums dating to the early decades of the twentieth century.