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Funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has enabled the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to award the Claremont Colleges Library a $333,574 grant for the project “Digitizing Southern California Water Resources.” The funding will allow the Pomona College-led project to digitize and help preserve primary source documentation of water history, both drought and deluge, in California.
The project will create a digital archive of California and U.S. western water that will support and inspire scholarship through various disciplinary lenses, including public health, engineering, urban planning, legal history and the disciplines that fall under environmental studies. The funding allows the Claremont Colleges to digitize documentation of the development, management and exploitation of California and western U.S. water. The documentation will be dispersed to not only the Claremont Colleges Library but also six other Southern California institutions.
The collaborating institutions include: the A.K. Smiley Public Library, California State University Northridge Oviatt Library, California State University San Bernardino Water Resources Institute, the National Archives and Records Administration at Riverside, the Ontario City Library and the Upland Public Library. The project one of 17 projects awarded a CLIR 2016 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant.
“Southern California swings between drought and deluge, a climate history that has been captured in thousands of documents, photographs and other archival material dispersed in local libraries,” says Char Miller, Pomona College professor of environmental analysis and principal investigator of the initiative.
The CLIR grant will enable the collaborating institutions to digitize these drought and deluge historical documents and make them available to researchers, policymakers and the larger public at precisely the time when we need this baseline data to make sense of how climate change is altering the conditions of life in the Pomona-Inland valleys and beyond according to Miller.
“This complicated past has shaped our present, and the CLIR grant will help us build a more resilient future,” adds Miller. Miller contends that gaining access to these rich repositories has been difficult—which is why the CLIR Hidden Collections grant is of immense significance.
The impact of “Digitizing Southern California Water Resources,” is potentially far-reaching in that the project is expected to become a model for other water collections to employ digital tools that support and enhance questions scholars and researchers can ask and receive timely and accurate answers. After the water documents are digitized and georeferenced, scholars can create geospatial visualizations of historic watershed data. They can subsequently be shared online and researchers working on global drought conditions can use them in their own inquiries.
“These soon-to-be digitized and widely available primary resources will facilitate the research of a new generation of scholars,” says Kevin Mulroy, the A.J. McFadden Dean of the Claremont Colleges Library. “We’re grateful to CLIR for supporting our proposal and look forward to working with our regional partners on this exciting new initiative,” states Mulroy.
The benefactor for the “Digitizing Southern California Water Resources,” project – The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – is a multi-faceted entity and in its contributions to the humanities and the arts. It supports exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work.
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), who reviewed the Claremont Colleges’ initiative and selected the project for funding, is an independent, non-profit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions and communities of higher learning.
