Организация: The University of California

Calisphere is the University of California's free public gateway to a world of primary sources. More than 200,000 digitized items — including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts — reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history. Calisphere's content has been selected from the libraries and museums of the UC campuses, and from a variety of cultural heritage organizations across California. See the list of contributing institutions.

Calisphere is a public service project of the California Digital Library (CDL). Through the use of technology and innovation, the CDL supports the assembly and creative use of scholarship for the UC libraries and the communities they serve. Learn more about the CDL.

Designed for Classroom Use

A variety of primary sources have been collected into sets that support the California Content Standards in History-Social Sciences, English-Language Arts, and Visual Arts for use in K-12 classrooms. These collections of primary sources make it easy for teachers to find the materials they need quickly:

• Themed Collections: Primary sources organized into historical eras with brief overviews that provide historical context.
• California Cultures: Images of four ethnic groups — African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics Americans, and Native Americans.
• Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive: Personal and official documents, transcribed oral histories, and works of art bring viewers inside the Japanese-American internment experience during World War II.
• Local History Mapped: Five maps overlayed with hundreds of historical photographs show the diverse history and geography of California.
• Browse A-Z: This alphabetical list of terms selected from the California Content Standards makes it easy to locate primary sources for classroom use.

Especially for Teachers: Information and links about teaching and learning with primary sources, including sample lesson plans, primary source analysis sheets, and more.

Access to Hundreds of UC Web Sites

Calisphere is a single point of access to more than 500 UC web sites that explore the diverse interests of the University of California campuses. This collection of web sites covers subjects ranging from history, math, literature, and anthropology to film, contemporary art, marine sciences, medical and health issues, and much more.

Addressing a Longstanding Research Challenge

SNAC is addressing a longstanding research challenge: discovering, locating, and using distributed historical records. Scholars use these records as primary evidence for understanding the lives and work of historical persons and the events in which they participated. These records are held in archives and manuscript libraries, large and small, around the world. Scholars may need to search scores of different archives one by one, following clues, hunches, and leads to find the records relevant to their topic. Furthermore, descriptive practices may differ from one archive or library to another. The research is time consuming and inefficient: clues and leads may be easily overlooked and important resources undiscovered.

The data needed to address this research challenge already exists in the guides, catalogs, and finding aids that archivists and librarians create to document and provide access to the archival resourcess. It is buried in isolated guides and finding aids that are stored in different, isolated systems.

Establishing a Framework: Phase 1

In 2010, with funding from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, SNAC began to explore the feasibility of extracting the data in the record descriptions that describes the people who created or are documented in the records. This data was then assembled into a collection of descriptions of individuals, families, and organizations that are interrelated with one another and with the resources that document their lives. The collection of records was then used to build a prototype research tool that 1) integrates and simplifies access to the dispersed resources and 2) provides unprecedented access to the biographical-historical contexts of the people documented in the resources, including the social-professional-intellectual networks within which they lived.

It quickly became apparent to the SNAC team that, while it was quite feasible to extract the data and use it to build a research tool, computational techniques alone would not fully realize the potential power of the assembled data to both transform research and improve the economy and effectiveness of archival descriptive practices. To fully realize these complementary objectives, it would be necessary to develop an ongoing, sustainable international cooperative that would enable archivists, librarians, scholars, and, eventually, “citizen archivists” to maintain and add biographical-historical data and to extend the scope of the people and historical resources covered.

Establishing a Framework: Phase 2

With additional funding from the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SNAC continues its research and development work, increasing the quantity and diversity of the sources data and improving the technical methods. The team is in the planning phase of transforming this research into an international cooperative hosted by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.