The Bancroft Library Archived Websites

The California Art Research Archive (CARA) blog connected biographies of early Bay Area artists with their related archival and digital resources held at The Bancroft Library, building off the work of the California Art Research Project.

Published by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1937, the California Art Research Project published twenty volumes detailing the history of art in California including biographical sketches of artists, descriptions of private and public art collections, and histories of art schools and galleries. 

The CARA site, created by Bancroft intern Mèlanie Le Torre includes historical essays about the California Art Research Project along with profiles of the artists and data visualizations, including maps. 

California Cultures was created by the scholars and curators of the University of California in response to H.R. 1905, an appropriation from the US Congress through Library of Congress’s American Memory program, which made funds available to digitize archival materials relating to the ethnic groups of California.

The California Cultures project aimed to balance the Eurocentric historical record of California by digitizing 20,000 photographs, documents, and other archival material to reflect the histories of underrepresented ethnic groups. 

This project was hosted on Calisphere. Powered by the California Digital Library, Calisphere aggregates digital collections from more than 300 cultural heritage organizations including all ten campuses of the University of California. 

The Calisphere site contains six historical essays and four online exhibitions on California cultural contributions from communities of African, Asian, and Hispanic descent and the Indigenous peoples of California. 

Originally conceptualized as the California Heritage Digital Image Access Project, the CalHeritage Collection launched in the mid-1990s. This project was a groundbreaking collaboration between The Bancroft Library and the California Digital Library to create a large-scale digital archive of historical images. Drawing from nearly 200 individual collections held by The Bancroft Library, the project brought together over 30,000 digitized photographs and illustrations documenting California’s history and culture with the goal to make these primary sources accessible to K-12 educators. At a time when digital library infrastructure was still emerging, this initiative was an early effort and prototype to programmatically aggregate images from disparate sources using EAD-encoded finding aids. The project was made possible by a 1995 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a software grant from the Inso Corporation.

In subsequent years, the hosting sunsite.berkeley.edu site was retired and the resource was moved and hosted on the Online Archive of California. The archived site is now available on the Internet Archive and accessible through the Wayback Machine. The links provided here demonstrate the evolution of the site from its earliest version hosted on the sunsite.berkeley.edu site to when it was hosted on the Online Archive of California.

In partnership with The California Historical Society, San Francisco and The Ethnic Studies Library of the University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library received an award in the 1998/99 of The Library of Congress / Ameritech National Library Competition to support the digitization of materials related to The Chinese in California, 1850- 1925. 

The Chinese in California, 1850-1925 digitization project included various types of materials including photographs, original art, cartoons and other illustrations; letters, excerpts from diaries, business records, and legal documents; as well as pamphlets, broadsides, speeches, sheet music, and other printed matter resulting in 8,000 accessible digitized items. The assembled collection from the various institutions describe a broad spectrum of experiences of Chinese immigrants in California.

The materials selected for this project document nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese immigration to and settlement in California, drawing from both published sources and original archival materials. Due to the complex social and political context of the era, the digital archive is organized thematically and reflects both external perceptions, often marked by caricature and bias, and where available, Chinese perspectives. Despite the scarcity of firsthand accounts, these documents offer insight into the challenges Chinese immigrants faced, the inter-ethnic tensions of the time, and their significant contributions to the cultural, commercial, and architectural life of the American West.

Preserving content from City Arts & Lectures, a San Francisco-based non-profit founded in 1980 to contribute to the cultural landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area, this project included a substantial amount of archived audio recordings from the City Arts & Lectures radio program. 

The site linked to a database with 1,000 audio recordings of lectures and onstage conversations with figures in literature, criticism, science, and the performing arts.

While the database content was only available to UC Berkeley users, the digital material is now publicly available on Digital Collections.

The Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement (DRILM) Project, launched in 1996, was developed to chronicle the historical efforts of people with disabilities and the efforts to secure civil rights and autonomy. The project's collection, housed at the Bancroft Library and created by the then Regional Oral History Office, comprises over 100 oral histories from movement leaders, participants, and observers from the 1960s and 1970s, alongside a vast archive of personal papers and organizational records. 

Funding for the DRILM Project initially came from two grants (1996-2000 and 2000-2003) from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, a division of the U.S. Department of Education. These first two grants focused on the movement's origins in Berkeley, California, a pivotal city for independent living models, and later expanded nationwide. Additional funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004 for a project on artists with disabilities, and by DBTAC-Pacific ADA Center in 2006 for interviews related to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Private donors, including Raymond Lifchez, Judith Stronach, and June A. Cheit, also contributed, with the Prytanean Society at UC Berkeley funding the very first interviews in the mid-1980s.

The archived website includes project information, timeline, oral history transcripts, and related resources, although playback of video interviews are no longer functional. 

The Early Arrivals Records Search (EARS) was an online index created to help researchers access immigration investigation case files held by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at its San Bruno, California facility. These records document the arrival and incarceration of over 250,000 individuals—primarily through San Francisco and Honolulu—during the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act and related immigration laws (1882–1943) that discriminated against people of Asian descent. Developed in collaboration with the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the project was initiated by Robert Barde, then Deputy Director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Business and Economic Research. Since 2002, volunteers at NARA have expanded the index to include over 91,000 names. The EARS website provided a searchable database with downloadable results, helping users identify case file numbers and basic entry details essential for further research. While the full case files remain accessible only in person at NARA San Bruno, the EARS index is a valuable, free tool for genealogists and historians researching immigration to the United States.

While the website is no longer active, the database can still be accessed and utilized. See the links below for access to the website and the database.

This site, 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, was created to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the disaster which destroyed large portions of the city of San Francisco. The Bancroft Library received the Library Services and Technology Act grant from the California State Library to make archival materials concerning the 1906 earthquake and fire accessible to the public. In a collaboration between The Bancroft Library, the California Historical Society, California State Library, The Huntington Library, The Society of California Pioneers, and The Stanford University Library, this project digitized approximately 14,000 images and 7,000 pages of text for public access.

The site included a digital collection of photographs and documents, a virtual exhibition, an interactive map of San Francisco, and a 360 degree panorama of the city in ruins. 

The creation of the Italian Americans in California site, including the digitization of photographs and the development of an online exhibit, was funded by the National Italian American Foundation. The exhibit explores some aspects of the relationship between Italian immigrants and the processes of settler colonialism in California. 

The Japanese American Evacuation & Resettlement Study Digital Archive was created to showcase 100,000 items digitized under the National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program between 2011 and 2014. 

The materials digitized were drawn from the The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study initiated in 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley. This research project sought to document the forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese Americans by embedding Nisei social science students recruited from the Berkeley campus into selected internment sites (now recognized as concentration camps). The collection comprises daily journals, field reports, life histories, extensive correspondence between staff, evacuees, and others, and secondary research materials collected and compiled by the research staff.

The website was created to offer a portal to the digital materials alongside narrative historical context, maps, a timeline, and additional resources.

This site built upon The Japanese American Evacuation & Resettlement: A Digital Archive (2014) project and other digitization grants from the National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program to make available additional material related to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Over 148,000 items from the War Relocation Authority (WRA) were digitized under this grant. 

The 2020 site provided a portal to access all the digitized material held by The Bancroft Library in previous grant projects alongside a timeline, audiovisual materials, and guided searches organized by geographic location.

Both the 1942 University of California study as well as the 2014 and 2020 grants awarded by the National Parks Service use euphemistic language (such as evacuation and resettlement) to obscure the harsh realities of life in the concentration camps. To find out more about the euphemistic language used at the time and the Library’s use of the current preferred terminology please visit the Densho website.

This project website linked out to a collection in Calisphere which collected digitized archival material from eight repositories including The Bancroft Library documenting the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II as a result of Executive Order #9066.

Primary source materials included in this collection includes photographs, documents, manuscripts, paintings, drawings, letters, and oral histories. The Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive in Calisphere also provided historical context, a timeline of events, and lesson plans for K-12 curriculum. 

This 2007 project uses euphemistic language (such as evacuation and resettlement) to obscure the harsh realities of life in the concentration camps. To find out more about the euphemistic language used at the time and the Library’s use of the current preferred terminology please visit the Densho website.

This site hosted information about the Land Case Maps collection, including a link to the finding aid. 

This collection contains maps found in private land claim cases in the U.S. Northern and Southern District Courts (ca. 1850-ca. 1890). The maps were used by California-Mexican land owners to establish legal claims to property and as such represent an important historical record of land ownership in California. The maps generally include some descriptive information and show boundaries, reference points, buildings, and natural features of the landscape.

The Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute Archives, composed of material from the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Library, are a collection of legal briefs, transcripts, and motions in the Civil Liberties Docket. Compiled by Ann Fagan Ginger, the goal of this collection was to serve as a legal resource to share innovative research and courtroom strategies for lawyers and clients in the constitutional law fields of civil liberties, due process, and civil rights. 

The archived site contains information on the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Library, related publications and finding aids, and digital copies of the Civil Liberties Dockets 1955-1972.

This site served as the digital archive of the treasures of the Oroville Chinese Temple, built in 1863 as a place of worship and community for the 10,000 Chinese residents of Oroville, California. 

The project to photograph, describe, and host photographs of the architecture and artifacts of the Temple was spearheaded by Gloria Gee, funded by the Library of Congress Ameritech Project, and realized in collaboration with the City of Oroville and The Bancroft Library.

The archived site contains information about the history of the Oroville Chinese Temple as well as notes on this digital archive project. While the search functionality on this site has not been preserved, the images can be viewed in Berkeley Library Digital Collections.

Rock Art Studies: A Bibliographic Database launched as a collaboration between the Bay Area Rock Art Research Association and The Bancroft Library in 2003. This open access, online resource compiled by Leigh Marymore contains over 40,000 searchable citations related to the research, education, and conservation of rock art in Northern California. 

Since 2016, the database has been hosted by the Museum of Northern Arizona. 

Shig Murao: The Enigmatic Soul of City Lights and the San Francisco Beat Scene was created by Richard Reynolds in 2011 and transferred to UC Berkeley in 2013. This site chronicles the life of Shigeyoshi “Shig” Murao (1926-1999) and his impact on the bohemian culture of San Francisco. Shig Murao is known for being the clerk of City Lights Bookstore arrested for obscenity after selling a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl to an undercover police officer in 1957. 

The site contains materials compiled by Richard Reynolds (a friend of Shig) including a biography, digital versions of Shig’s Review (a zine with about 80 issues that Shig published in the 1960s-1990s), a photograph gallery, and audio recordings of interviews about Shig. 

This site primarily hosted a link to Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975, a project by Adam Matthews (now AM Digital) which consists of a proprietary database of digitized archival material and historical essays.

The Popular Culture in Britain and America project brings together material from multiple repositories but notably includes the Social Protest collection held at The Bancroft Library. The Social Protest Collection (BANC MSS 86/157 c) contains leaflets, flyers, posters, publications and ephemera related to social movements collected on Sproul Plaza between 1969-1982.

The Popular Culture project is a subscription-based database available to UC Berkeley users with CalNet authentication.