Photography 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’s photographic collections are wide-ranging and include the works of many of the most celebrated practitioners, excellent examples of a variety of 19th century historical photographic processes, and extensive documentation of the greater Los Angeles area.

It should be noted that some of the photographic collections are not searchable online. This guide describes strategies for finding photographs in collections through the Online Archive of California (OAC) and UC Library Search, as well as using the card catalog and paper finding aids in the Ahmanson-Murphy reading room in the Charles E. Young Research Library.
Quick tips:

• Try searching the Online Archive of California (OAC) first. Generally speaking, the most detailed online descriptions of photographic collections are in the OAC.
• UC Library Search is an excellent resource for searching for photographic albums. See the section on albums below for search strategies.
• Some important photographic collections must be searched in the card catalog and paper indexes available in the Charles E. Young Research Library, such as the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Photographers' Collection, and Picture Collection.
• Many digitized photographs are available online through the UCLA Digital Library and Calisphere.