USC Libraries

Since 2002, the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture and the USC Libraries have partnered with archives around the world to digitize more than 82,000 historical photographs by Christian missionaries and make them publicly available through the USC Digital Library. Now, two new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) totaling $305,000 will allow USC and partner archives to add an additional 20,000 images to the International Mission Photography Archive (IMPA) database. NEH funding will also support development of video essays that bring IMPA collections together with scholarly analysis and digital storytelling methods. Keep reading to learn more about IMPA.

The Scout Report, a weekly publication of the Internet Scout Project at the University of Wisconsin, recently highlighted the USC Digital Library's Chinese Historical Society Collection. Keep reading to learn what The Scout Report editor Max Grinnell wrote about the collection, which documents more than 1,000 artifacts from Los Angeles' original Chinatown.

A drawing from the USC Digital Library of the Tongva Indian village of Yang-na was recently featured by the Los Angeles Times. The image appeared on the Times' website alongside an article by Leon Furgatch, who suggested that the Los Angeles Dodgers be renamed the Los Angeles Yang-nas to honor the Native Americans who originally occupied Chavez Ravine. Keep reading to learn more about the village and Furgatch's proposal.

More than one hundred finding aids for the USC Libraries' archival collections are now available online. These finding aids, which provide basic information about the collections as well as detailed inventories of the collections' contents, help researchers discover the riches of the libraries' archival collections. Keep reading for a list of available finding aids, organized by subject area.

As part of its From the USC Libraries series, the USC Chronicle recently featured a nineteenth century French board game from the USC Libraries' Special Collections. The game, Le Monde a Vol d’Oiseau: Jeu de Societé Instructif, was published in 1895. Dan Knapp's article from the Chronicle appears after the jump.

The USC Libraries announced yesterday that the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives had donated its extensive research collection to the libraries. 89.3 KPCC, NBC4 LA, Passport Magazine, WeHoNews.com, and the Los Angeles Times all covered the acquisition of the world's largest collection on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history and culture.

The USC Libraries are now home to the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives research collection, it was announced today. The ONE Archives collection is the largest in the world on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history. Keep reading to learn more about the collection.

This seventh installment in a series exploring the many USC Libraries looks inside the Von KleinSmid Center Library for International and Public Affairs (VKC Library), an invaluable resource for students, faculty, and other scholars of the applied social sciences. Located in the basement of the Von KleinSmid Center, the VKC Library houses specialized collections in disciplines ranging from political science to urban planning, and also serves as an official depository for government documents of the United States, State of California, and European Union.

John Nava's "The Trojan Family Tapestry" was recently unveiled in the new Ronald Tutor Campus Center. The tapestry features several texts from the USC Libraries' Special Collections holdings. This second installment in a series exploring those texts highlights the Codex Bodley, a 16th century Mixtex manuscript. Keep reading to learn more about the codex, as well as other resources on pre-Columbian Mexico available from USC's Boeckmann Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies.

The USC Libraries recently acquired 59 new electronic resources, many of which are already accessible via the E-Resources tab on the libraries' homepage. This post, the second in a series, looks at the new resources falling under the broad heading of the social sciences. Keep reading for an introduction to the new resources, including a new full-text archive of all Congressional hearings from 1980 to 2003.