2003-2004 Progress Report: Collection Review

See the complete progress report submitted to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation: [PDF]

The American West project will build a virtual collection by selecting relevant materials from the digital collections contributed by eight project partners: the California Digital Library, the Library of Congress, the Colorado Digitization Program and the university libraries at Harvard University, Indiana University, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and the University of Washington.

Nearly 70 collections have been made available to the project by these partners.

See sections below:

• Strengths of the Collections on Offer
• Thematic Collection Gaps
• Genre Gaps

Strengths of the Collections on Offer

• Chronological views of the frontier period (1800-1890): Materials bearing on the frontier period cover major historical events such as Lewis and Clark's explorations, the gold rush, pioneer life, the railroads, mining and logging, and Native American life.
• Chronological views of the post-frontier period (1890-1940): Many images of cities and the urban landscape are represented in the collections for this period. The non-urban landscape is also represented, reflecting the birth of the modern environmental movement. Other subjects include the labor movement and the Great Depression.
• Chronological views of 1940-present: The collections are strongest in the immediate post-war years, with three different views of Japanese-American relocation administration camps. Automobile and automobile tourism are especially well documented.
• Regional and state-by-state views: The majority of the resources in the collections pertain to states in which contributing institutions are located, especially California, Colorado, and Washington.
• Thematic views: The topics with the most representation in this virtual collection include daily life, agriculture, exploration and travel, landscape, leisure, natural resources, pioneer, race and ethnicity, tourism, and transportation. The collections are also strong in architecture, business, politics and activism, science and technology, urban life, and work and labor.

Thematic Collection Gaps

• Gender: More representation of women's frontier experience, women's work, and creative writing and art by women will help to round out this area.
• Race: Major omissions include indications of African-American and Mexican-American experiences in the West, in addition to contemporary representations of Native American life. Asian-American experience is limited to tourist images of San Francisco's Chinatown at the turn of the century and in the images and texts of the Japanese-American WWII confinement camps. Work with institutions that are specific to particular race and ethnic minority groups (but not university affiliated) may help to fulfill these gaps.
• Selected geographic regions: Frontier movement is not well indicated in these collections. Few materials have been acquired pertaining to the Southwest, including Texas, and the Northwest, aside from Washington state. Hawaii and the transnational West (including Canada and Mexico) are not well represented.
• Sports: Leisure is well represented in these collections, but few organized sports materials are currently available. By acquiring additional materials in these areas, contemporary and non-white representation might be increased.
• Movies and cinema: Though this is a major industry in Southern California, very few materials pertaining to movies and cinema are included in these collections. Some progress may be made with largely ephemeral materials in collaboration with the Internet Archive.
• Cyber technology: This important industry is associated with the Pacific West, but has no representation in these collections. Options for addressing this gap include the development of a collection plan in consultation with faculty and other specialists who are conducting research in this area and collaboration with projects that are collecting materials from the dot-com boom.

Genre Gaps

• Literature: These collections are weak in their representation of major Western literature. Very little of the material contributed is actually part of a Western literature canon, nor do these collections draw upon many popular literary works, such as occasional poetry and dime novels. Further, no 20th century literature is included in this collection due to copyright restrictions. This gap could be filled through a concerted digitization program guided by a credible canonical list of American Western literature.
• Music: Three kinds of materials would strengthen the collection: scores, sheet music, and audio files. Models for developing such a collection can be found at UCLA, which is working with a consortium of universities to develop a collection of sheet music, and at Seattle's Experience Music Project.
• Natural history: The library collections on offer do not have many materials bearing on the ecology and environment of the American West. The American West project will need to extend its collecting reach beyond its library partners to the natural history museum community.
• Art and architecture: Perhaps due to our sourcing collections primarily in research libraries, art and architecture are not well represented. More substantial collections may be available from the museum community.