Hi, folks! Welcome to a new and exciting CCEPS project, Digitizing Southern California Water Resources! Thanks to a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) awarded to six collaborating institutions,* student workers at the Claremont Colleges Library will digitize documents relating to California water (from what I saw of the holdings, reports from the California Department of Water Resources will feature prominently) and upload them to the Claremont Colleges Digital Library (CCDL). Along the way we’ll provide weekly updates to this blog with tales and images from our many adventures in archiving. Let us begin!
Last week I started with a 1926 report by the Pasadena Water Department’s Chief Engineer, Samuel B. Morris, titled, “Report submitted by Pasadena Water Department to Federal Investigating Committee at hearing com. 2-24-26 re: San Gabriel Canyon Rs of W.”
According to Morris, the purpose of the report is to “present Pasadena’s water supply needs, proposed San Gabriel River domestic water supply project, and suggestions of methods to permit the fullest realization of the objects and aims of both the City of Pasadena and the Los Angeles County Flood Control District with the greatest economy and speed.”
He rounds out the report with an assortment of graphs visualizing trends and probabilities, as well as this nifty map of Pasadena ground water basins:
We’re not uploading to the CCDL’s Water Documents page just yet, but we’ll let you know when we do.
In the meantime I’m scanning a report on the Victor Valley Irrigation District. Stay tuned!
-Myles
*The collaborating institutions are: The Claremont Colleges Library, the A.K. Smiley Public Library, California State University Northridge Oviatt Library, California State University San Bernardino Water Resources Institute, the National Archives and Records Administration at Riverside, the Ontario City Library, and the Upland Public Library. Whew.