Digital Collections Chronicle History of University and Surrounding Communities

After a year of sifting through nearly 100,000 photos taken since California State University, Dominguez Hills was founded, the Department of Archives and Special Collections has completed its CSUDH Photograph Digitization Project.

Approximately 2,000 photos of university’s history are now available online. Spanning from 1960s through the 1990s, the CSUDH Photograph Collection—the result of the project—contains images of the university as it grew, as well as of campus life over the years: students, faculty/staff/administrators, classroom activities, athletics, commencement exercises and events.

“For the larger community, it makes the history of the university, the presence of the university accessible in a relatively easy form,” said Gregory Williams, director of the CSUDH Archives and Special Collections Department, which oversees the collection. “People generally don’t know the way the university evolved.

“For the campus, it’s just one other source that people can use to locate not only the history of the university but any variety of issues.”

The completion of the CSUDH Photographic Digitization Project comes within a year of the department launching its Digital Collections division, of which the CSUDH Photograph Collection is a part. Other online collections focus on the history of the South Bay region, the Del Amo Estate Company, Rancho San Pedro and the Dominguez family, and the 1910 Los Angeles International Aviation Meet. The Digital Collections was made possible by grants from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission and the Associated Students, Inc., the student governing body.

Williams says that all of the digital collections are a work in progress, as staff updates photo details and continually adds more photos to them. More collections will be added, as well. Plans to digitize CSUDH yearbooks, along with photographs and documents from former Congressman and California Lt. Gov. Glenn Anderson and of the California State University system are already in the works, Williams says.

The Department of Archives and Special Collections, in the Leo F. Cain Library on campus, is the repository of more than 2,000 linear feet of historical records pertaining not only to the university but the South Bay region as a whole. It also houses the California State University system archives and has a rare books collection of popular books dating back, in some cases, to the 1500s. Appointments are required to view the collections, and permission is required to reproduce photos in the collections.

For more information, visit the department Website, http://archives.csudh.edu, or call (310) 243-3895.

- Amy Bentley-Smith

Photo above: President Leo F. Cain of then-California State College Dominguez Hills shaking hands with President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Photo courtesy of CSU Dominguez Hills Digital Collections