Calisphere and the Online Archive of California (OAC) are gateways to unique collections held by libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions throughout California.

New Staff

Introducing Christine Kim

We are delighted to announce that Christine Kim is joining the CDL as the OAC/Calisphere Service & Outreach Manager, effective January 15, 2019. Christine brings a broad array of advanced product management, marketing, outreach, and community support experience to the CDL. As a member of the CDL’s Publishing & Special Collections group, she will be supporting a product portfolio comprised of OAC, Calisphere, and associated services such as the UC Shared DAMS. Christine will be transitioning from LYRASIS, where she currently serves as the Community Engagement Coordinator for ArchivesSpace. Her responsibilities there include coordinating and providing user support, training, outreach, and communications across the ArchivesSpace community. Prior to her work at LYRASIS, Christine served as Outreach Coordinator & University Archives Processor for 5 years at the UC Irvine Libraries, Special Collections & Archives. She holds an MLIS from San Jose State University and a BA in both History and Film & Media Studies from UC Irvine. We look forward to having Christine onboard in the new year. Welcome, Christine!

New Featured Collection

Hoover Institute Digital Collections

Comprising over 50,000 objects from almost 100 discrete collections, the Hoover Institute Digital Collections are absolutely massive. These collections primarily focus on war, revolution, and peace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and include everything from propaganda posters to radio broadcast records to military medals. We are delighted that these materials are now available on Calisphere! 

New Initiative

Toward a National Archival Finding Aid Network

We are embarking on an initial collaborative planning initiative (October 2018-September 2019), in partnership with regional/statewide archival description aggregators, to explore potential models for a “next generation” finding aid network — one that which would continue to serve the statewide functions of the Online Archive of California (OAC), while potentially offering more extensible and broader discovery for archival materials.

Many archival description aggregators across the country struggle to find sufficient resources to update their platforms and to engage with some of the most promising advances in archival description. By pooling resources and establishing co-development partnerships, we believe we can address this challenge collectively and, consequently, extend the capabilities, breadth, and depth of existing aggregations.

Over the coming weeks, we will be posting additional information about planning initiative to an project workspace.

This collaborative planning initiative is supported by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), administered in California by the State Librarian.

Project Update

Harvesting California's Bounty, Phase IV

We are also pleased to announce that we have received an additional year of grant support from the California State Library (October 2018-September 2019), enabling us to aggregate and provide even more comprehensive access to unique digital resources from cultural heritage organizations throughout the state.

We anticipate harvesting a number of new resources, ranging from a broad array of historical materials digitized through the California Revealed initiative, the Los Angeles Public Library’s Travel Posters Collection and Menu Collection, important material from the CSU Fresno Armenian Studies program, and a host of potential new local history collections from across the state that are being managed using PastPerfect and other systems. In addition, we are planning to conduct a series of regional workshops for library practitioners on crafting shareable metadata, in order to maximize the reach of their collections via aggregations such as Calisphere and DPLA. 

“Harvesting California’s Bounty” is also supported by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), administered in California by the State Librarian.

New Roadmaps for Our Services

In order to be more transparent about plans for our services, we've created roadmaps on Trello for OAC, Calisphere, and the collection management systems that we host for the UC Libraries. Trello is a widely used web-based project management software that can simplify complex work into an elegant array of 'lists' and 'cards'. Click through to find out more about our goals, plans and current development tasks for each respective service below!

 Calisphere roadmap       OAC roadmap       Collection management systems roadmap