Los Angeles History and Culture in Library Special Collections

LSC is committed to remediating harmful description by creating and implementing an anti-oppressive approach to discovery and access. We aim to:

• Be clear about what we know, how we know it, and what we don't know
• Embrace baseline description as a tool to improve the discoverability of all our materials
• Demonstrate an understanding that description is a continuous and necessarily iterative endeavor

Read more about our past and current approaches to description in Toward Ethical and Inclusive Descriptive Practices in UCLA Library Special Collections.

UCLA Library Special Collections’ holdings include a wide range of materials related to the Los Angeles area’s history and communities. This guide offers a sample of some of the most extensive collections. Researchers should use the library finding aids to locate further collections in their areas of interest.

Quick tips:

• The Online Archive of California (OAC) includes finding aids for most collections related to Southern California.
• Oral histories can be found online: UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research.
• The UCLA Library’s Digital Collections features Special Collections materials that have been digitized and mounted online. Collections that have an online component are indicated in the listings for each heading.