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Funded by a National Leadership grant from The Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Rapidly developing digital technology is allowing researchers to solve some of their most fundamental problems: how to find out which repositories hold what material, and then to consult and inter-relate these diverse collections. Among the many primary sources preserved in California collections are letters, diaries, manuscripts, legal and financial records, architectural and engineering records, scientific logbooks, electronic records, sound recordings, oral histories, films, photographs and other pictorial items, maps, artwork, artifacts, and ephemera. Archives, libraries, and museums manage these collections with a range of catalogues and finding aids. Such listings provide detailed descriptions of the items so that researchers will be able to determine which of them is likely to contain answers to the questions they are investigating.
A consortium of cultural institutions, "Museums and the Online Archive of California" (MOAC) was created in order to help solve these problems of access. The MOAC project hopes to create a prototype "virtual museum archive," accessible to the public via the World Wide Web, that integrates standardized "finding aids" for various cultural institutions into a single source, thus providing access to collections held throughout the state of California. The MOAC Web site includes a single, searchable database of finding aids to primary sources and their digital facsimiles.
The MOAC project had its roots in a 1995 initiative at the University of California to create a digital library for its archives and special collections. Called "UC-EAD," it was an experimental program to devise a set of digital standards ("Encoded Archival Description") that would allow archives across the nine campuses of the UC system to share information about their holdings. In 1998, the project was expanded beyond the university to include archives, libraries, and museums throughout the state. With funding from the State Library, it was renamed the Online Archive of California (OAC) and administered by the California Digital Library, a division of the UC Office of the President in Oakland. After the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive proposed including museum collections, the program became "Museums and the Online Archive of California," with two years of funding, granted in October 1999, from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Along with the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the current MOAC partners are: the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, The Bancroft Library, Museum of Paleontology, all at UC Berkeley; as well as the Oakland Museum of California, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Japanese American National Museum, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and Fowler Museum of Cultural History at UCLA, and California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside.
The Hearst Museum has chosen its world-renowned photograph collection to begin its cooperation with the MOAC consortium. Currently two collections have digital finding aids: the California Indian photographs by Alfred L. Kroeber and the western landscape photographs by Carleton Watkins (http://www.oac.cdlib.org/).
Available soon will be our entire collection of ethnographic field photographs of California Indians, which will include the Kroeber pictures. Between 1901 and 1970 approximately 3,500 photos with negatives were made by figures central to the history of California anthropology, including Samuel A. Barrett, Anna H. Gayton, Edward W. Gifford, Pliny E. Goddard, Alfred L. Kroeber, and Thomas T. Waterman. For each photograph there is an entry containing basic catalogue information (photographer, culture group, subject, place, date, catalogue number, comments, etc.), along with a digital version of the image.
The project is already proving its value as it unites related collections housed in different UC repositories. The Bancroft Library and the Hearst Museum share Kroeber collections: his papers and his artifact, photo, and sound recording collections, respectively. For Watkins, MOAC allows researchers to combine access of the Hearst's little-studied collection with the Bancroft's, one of the largest holdings of his images. This is just the beginning of future possibilities for supporting research in a digital domain.
For more information on the MOAC project, go to: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/moac/
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