"California as I Saw It": First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years: Collection Overview

Table of Contents

Go to

How the Collection was Assembled

"California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900 is the Library of Congress's first digital collection building on the exceptional holdings in the Library's General Collections and Rare Book and Special Collections Division in the area of state and local history. It has been several years in the making, sustained by a generous grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which has a focal interest in the state of California.

Initially, project researchers Kathi Brown and Rich Greenfield searched the Library's catalog for works on California and especially for works that could be construed to be historical. The approximately 2,000 works they identified were then narrowed down according to four major guidelines: the collection should be limited to works in English, so that searchable texts could be produced without the special technical challenges of text conversion in non-English languages; the primary emphasis of any work included should be on the writer's experience in California; the limitations imposed by copyright had to be taken into account; and the collection should have an identity as a unified whole. On the basis of these criteria, it soon became clear that a set of first-person narratives from the period 1850-1900 would make a rich and appealing collection. (Readers should note that not all of the works were published when they were written; a few carry imprints from the decades after World War II.)

A bibliography of about 250 of the Library's works of this kind was sent to six reviewers with expertise in history, librarianship, and California book collecting: Iris Engstrand, Professor of History, University of San Diego; Gary F. Kurutz, Principal Librarian, Special Collections, California State Library; Jennifer Larson, Yerba Buena Books; George Miles, Curator, Western Americana, the Beinecke Library, Yale University; and two historians, Doyce Nunis and James Rawls. The reviewers suggested additional books, bringing the total under consideration to 320, and evaluated all candidates according to whether or not (for example) a work was especially well written or represented a less frequently encountered perspective on California history. An additional factor was the percentage of California content, with preference going to books in which more pages were devoted to being in the state than, say, traveling there.

Finally, three factors conspired to limit the number of books digitized: first, the high cost of full text conversion, second, consideration of the stress that scanning would bring to bear on books in poor physical condition and, third, the determination that several books were still protected by copyright. Thus the collection was rounded at slightly more than 190 works, representing approximately 40,000 pages and including more than 3,000 illustrations. This collection's note on Additional Resources in the Library of Congress lists the works originally considered which could not be included in the final collection.