UCLA Libary Digital Collections
UCLA Library Digital Collections website
The UCLA Library Digital Collections website provides access to research-grade digitized primary source collections held by the UCLA Library and partnering organizations from around the world. Digital collections generally represent a fraction of what libraries, museums and archives own in boxes and folders. What they offer instead of bulk quantity is robust quality and technological sophistication: selectively curated high-value materials that have been prioritized for item-level description and cutting-edge digital processing, with advanced features for rigorous inquiry. Approximately half of the items in UCLA Digital Collections are direct facsimiles of physical materials in UCLA Library Special Collections, where they can be viewed and verified in person. Other collections have been added to the Digital Collections site through grant-funded "post-custodial" digitization arrangements, such as IDEP (The International Digital Ephemera Project) and MEAP (the Modern Endangered Archives Program. These collections can only be engaged remotely, as the originals are typically located thousands of miles away, and may not be available for on-site viewing.
Content
Digital collections contain primary source content, that is, rare and unique materials with a wide range of formats (e.g. photograph, sketch, poster, manuscript, audio, video, etc.), and are different from other digital content available through the library, such as ebooks and scholarly journals.
Leading collections (by number of items):
- Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection (21,963 items)
- Albanian Photographic and Graphic Art Collection (18,031 items)
- UCLA University Archives. Photographs (Reference Collection). 1882- (10,594 items)
- Motion Picture Stills, 1903- (10,280 items)
- Green Movement (Iran) (9,786 items)
- Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro (7,443 items)
- OpenUCLA Collections (7,335 items)
- Cashin (Bonnie) Collection of Fashion, Theater and Film Costume Design, 1913-2000 (7,003 items)
- AIIS Center for Art & Archaeology Negatives & Slides (6,579 items)
- Adelbert Bartlett Papers, 1922-1950 (6,491 items)
- McMillan Memorial Library Newspaper Collection (5,738 items)
- Los Angeles Daily News Negatives (5,116 items)
- Louis Dupree and Nancy Dupree Collection (5,000 items)
- West (H. H.) Collection (4,686 items)
- Columbia Pictures stills and key books (3,992 items)
- The Ricardo Montejano Collection (3,303 items)
- Archive of Sound and Vision, Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan (3,092 items)
- Henry J. Bruman Map Collection (3,062 items)
- Ramakatane Archive (2,980 items)
- Willis E. Bell Photographic Print Archive (1950s-1970s) (2,675 items)
Other UCLA Digital Collections
Additional online collections host specialized content that is accessed differently. These include:
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- University Archives "Picturing UCLA: The Visual History of UCLA as Told Through 10,000+ Images." This collection has its own interactive viewing site, and items are also viewable on the main Digital Collections Site)
- Center for Oral History Research: The UCLA Center for Oral History Research (COHR) conducts in-depth, multi-session oral history interviews with individuals who have been a part of the history of Los Angeles and its many communities. COHR has particularly strong collections in the history of social movements, communities of color, the arts, Los Angeles politics and government, and the history of UCLA.
- The Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings: over 125,000 songs celebrating North America’s Spanish-language musical heritage
- The Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library: a collaboration of St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai, in partnership with the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL) and the UCLA Library. Widely recognized as the world’s oldest continually operating library, the manuscript holdings of St. Catherine’s Monastery are a resource to study the history and literature of the Eastern Mediterranean from late antiquity until early modernity. NOTE: this digital library is intended for scholarly use and requires a password-authenticated account, which can be requested from the home page.
- The Sinai Palimpsests Project: state-of-the-art spectral imaging recovered erased texts from palimpsest manuscripts in the library of St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai, the world’s oldest continually operating monastery. The monastery holds an exceptional collection of more than 160 palimpsests, the erased layers of which preserve unstudied texts from the 4th to the 12th century.
The Digital Library Program
The UCLA Library Digital Library Program is a unit within the library that oversees the various digital collections and sites, and collaborates at all stages of collections creation with partnering entities within the UCLA Library and around the globe.