Month: July 2017

This week it was back to basics as I digitized a 1923 F. C. Finkle document, “Report on the hydrology and hydrography of Temecula Creek and Santa Margarita River, San Diego and Riverside Counties, California.”

All the old favorites are here:

Reference photos!

A big map of the Temecula Creek and Santa Margarita River drainage basin!

Discharge tables!

And so on. That’s about all the time I have. Next week may involve a field trip… or a post about image cropping? I dunno. Either way, see you then!

Hello readers!

This week I’ve worked on collecting more metadata, and I have unfortunately run out of meta jokes. Dry your tears however, because next week the CCEPS fellows may be going on a field trip! We might be visiting the Metropolitan Water District in LA and getting a tour of the exhibits at the district, including “Turning on the Tap: 75 Years of Water Delivery to Southern California,” and “From the Archives Reaching for Water – Rex Brandt and Metropolitan.” We may also learn more about a recent Twitter campaign carried out by MWD about the stories of individuals who were involved in the Colorado River Aqueduct. I’m looking forward to hearing about things that I’ve spent the last two months reading pieces of, and getting a better idea of how Southern California’ water history is shaping its current and future access to water. Stay dry out there – there are light showers this week, and the water is coming for you.

Hello all!

For this week, I’ll be talking about metadata again and some personal reflections now that I’ve completed over fifty inputs. Last week, I discussed how putting together metadata requires a balance between being efficient and concise but specific enough. Defining the subject terms for items sometimes is easy. I find that if the item I’m creating metadata for is particularly interesting, it’s easier to scan through the document and extract terms that can be searched within the Library of Congress authorities (subject headings, names, titles). Thinking about controlled vocabulary has taken over my life.

Sometimes, however, it’s not easy sifting through these documents, simply because I am not familiar with the contents within them. I have a familiarity with the topics in the California Water Documents, but I do come across topics I am nowhere near an expert on. Today, I needed to create metadata for an item called “An Irritant in the Arizona-California Controversy” by Rex Hardy, a Los Angeles city attorney (1947). In this document, he discusses water problems between Arizona and California in regards to the two states legal relationship.

eyond this, I am not familiar with legal terminology and laws in addition to being unfamiliar with water infrastructure. Even though I struggle understanding this document, I still have to create proper metadata. I may not be able to parse through the content of this document, but others in the future will need to be able to find and know if this document is relevant to their research interests. It sounds like an easy task on paper, but doing it yourself, finding the correct controlled vocabulary within the authorities is much more time consuming than I expected. Don’t get me started on making sure I pick the correct name when it comes to LOC authorities (especially when the document only gives you first/middle initials and then a last name). It’s a good thing we can create our own terms, sometimes!

So, this has been a humbling experience, learning how to put together metadata. There is still much more to learn about it, such as actually uploading the documents. We will be learning more about GIS and geospatial metadata next week, so stay tuned. I’ll also have to go through and make sure there are no errors within my metadata.

I thought I could pretty much tackle anything this work could throw my way, but metadata is a challenge, one I didn’t expect. I admire my fellow workers here at CCEPs and previous workers who have had to adjust to this learning curve.

It takes time, but the knowledge gained is valuable!

The scanning of Willis Jones field notes, Box 7, reached its thrilling conclusion with a return to the camera room. There, I photographed a graph from 1910 with a label I couldn’t decipher:

And a map of Chino:

The white lots denote property of Chino Land & Water Co., and the orange lots are sold.

And that about does it for scanning Box 7. Now to crop the images, which should be a relatively swift process. At least I hope it’s swift, otherwise that’s going to be the subject of a terrible blog entry, and I’m running out of gimmick titles. Like “A Bountiful Crop,” or “Crop Circles.” No, wait! “Crop Rectangles,” because the scans are rectangular, see. Maybe “Killer Crop,” the dreaded Batman villain who’s really into re-sizing images?  

In the meantime, one more newspaper clip from the 1938 flood, because why not:

Hello!

This week I’ve been busy collecting more metadata, and I’ve come across some very interesting lines in the documents I’ve been looking at. Both letters are from C.N. Perry to H.T. Cory, and Perry has quite the flair for poetic language and a dry wit (pun very much intended). In the first letter Perry tells Cory how he was unaware of the business dealings in the Los Angeles office, and how Cory’s letter made him aware of the “whole scheme.”

Perry clarifies that he doesn’t mean the “actual dirt moving and structure building,” which he has a “vivid recollection” of, but another kind of dirt about the “inside workings” in Los Angeles which altered what was happening on the ground. In a moment of admirable symbolism production, Perry says that “the real strings, which, when pulled, made us puppets dance.” Poetic, deep, and just a little angry at the business institutions which have so much control over projects on the ground.

Perry’s anger is once again expressed, when he ends his next letter to Cory with the statement “I will refrain from indulging my propensity for growling,” though the growling is not directed at Cory but at the lack of attention he feels is being expressed about conditions at the Alamo Channel. Be free, Perry, and growl away.

Congratulations on reaching Thursday readers!

This week I learned how to collect metadata. “That’s so meta,” you may be murmuring, and you would be correct. Metadata is data on data – how’s that for being meta? Metadata is important because it gives us information about the data that makes the documents we’ve digitized more accessible and easier for researchers to sort through. To collect metadata, we look at each document and record certain pieces of information about it, including its title, a brief description of its content, its contributors, recipients, the language it is in, and the dates referenced in the document.

We also include the subject for each document, words that capture what the document describes and includes, like “dams” or “floods.” This way researchers who are interested in floods, for example, will have a much easier time finding the document than if it didn’t include that subject. Since I started the process this week I still have a long way to go before getting through all the documents, but it will happen, drop by drop, trickle by trickle. 

Hi folks! This week I took a detour from field note scanning to digitize a bound collection of 1938 newspaper clippings. Or, as it is concisely titled: 

“Flood, March 1938 : newspaper clippings from Anaheim, Azusa, Brea, Chino, Claremont, Corona, El Monte, Glendora, Hollywood, North Hollywood, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Monrovia, Ontario, Orange, Pasadena, Pomona, Redlands, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Ana, Santa Monica, Torrance, Tujunga, Upland ; with photos. of San Antonio Creek and the Claremont area“

The volume contains articles detailing a flood that devastated the Inland Empire in March 1938. For the most part the stories are what you’d expect from newspapers reporting major natural disasters: government response, relief efforts, property damage, lives lost, rabbits…

The clippings touch on a striking variety of ways in which daily life was impacted by the flood. Pieces abound stressing the importance of boiling water so it’s safe to drink. There’s a lost and found notice about a heifer. Advice about caring for wet rugs… 

…And grand pianos: 

A report about a public library whose children’s department suffered “only” a fifth of its books being soaked:

The Denison library of Scripps College was less fortunate:

Scattered among the bigger stories are vignettes painting a vivid picture of the flood: 

I’ll close by sharing a piece by Dorothy Doyle, because there’s really no other way to close this. See you next time!

Hello all!

During my time here at CCEPS, I have come across several documents that have been of interest to me. Today, I would like to share more about one of my favorite documents that has taught me about an event in southern Californian history that I didn’t know about until yesterday. While working on metadata for the Imperial Valley Records items I have scanned, I revisited the following document: “Letter to N. W. Stowell of California Development Company from Thos. L. Woolwine.”

Stowell inquired with Woolwine about representation in the case of California Development Company vs. the Imperial Land Company. To better understand what this court case was talking about, I did a little research.

In previous posts, I have talked about the Salton Sea in relation to the development of the All-American Canal in the Imperial Valley. This canal was not, however, the first in the region. At the turn of the century, the California Development Company (previously known as the Colorado River Irrigation Company) built the Alamo/Imperial Canal, which was to irrigate and provide water for the farming communities in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys by diverting water from the Colorado River.

The Salton Sink area (what we know now as the Salton Sea) was fertile for a short time. After heavy rains caused the Colorado River to overflow, this higher influx of water brought more silt through the Imperial Canal and caused blockage. This blockage led to dikes breaking, canals overflowing, and an infrastructure disaster that completely altered the course of history for the Imperial and Coachella Valleys. Massive flooding destroyed farms, submerged a town, and changed the environmental face of the Salton area.

The silt from the Colorado River poured into the Salton Sink area and eventually formed what we now call the Salton Sea. The California Development Company faced several lawsuits from farmers and other land companies in the area and eventually went bankrupt. In 1911, the Imperial Irrigation District formed through a collective of farmers and local citizens, and from this year forward, this organization managed the development of water infrastructure in the area. With the context of this incident in mind, this helps explain some of the fears facilitating the creation of the All-American Canal. The aggressive advertising, including xenophobia against Mexico, and calls to rally around the support of the financing bills in Congress have a historical context with this in mind. Citizens of the Imperial and Coachella Valleys needed water, but they needed the canal to be built to combat flooding.

The documents tell a story, especially when placed in conversation with each other. By digitizing these documents, hopefully other archives patrons will be able to read through the documents I have had the pleasure of looking over while digitizing.