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!

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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’s 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. Beyond
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!

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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:

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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!

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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.

 

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