Featured Articles

Historical Bibliography of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake & Fire

The following is a historical bibliography of works related to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fires. The bibliography was originally prepared by the San Francisco Public Library and published in the city's San Francisco Municipal ...

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Here's an image of the old Fletcher Drive train trestle. Home restaurant is near the steel pylons on the left-hand side of the street (Image courtesy of http://atwater-village.blogspot.com/).

Lost L.A.: The Abandoned Corralitas Streetcar Line

In the triangle-shaped neighborhood between the Silver Lake Reservoir, the Glendale Freeway, and the I-5 Freeway is a little piece of Los Angeles history that is lost, but not forgotten. The Corralitas Trail is a ...

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Using Google Tools to Improve Findability and Access to UCLA’s Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

Using Google Tools to Improve Findability and Access to UCLA's Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

UCLA's Young Research Library maintains a great collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of the metropolitan Los Angeles area, including Venice, San Pedro, Culver City, and North Hollywood. From about the 1870s until the 1970s, the ...

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Are Archivists also Librarians?

Are Archivists also Librarians?

Are archivists also librarians? For me it's an easy answer: yes. I consider myself an archivist as well as a librarian. Mapping it out logically, I believe archivists are librarians, but not all librarians are ...

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Here's an image of the old Fletcher Drive train trestle. Home restaurant is near the steel pylons on the left-hand side of the street (Image courtesy of http://atwater-village.blogspot.com/).

Lost L.A.: The Abandoned Corralitas Streetcar Line

In the triangle-shaped neighborhood between the Silver Lake Reservoir, the Glendale Freeway, and the I-5 Freeway is a little piece of Los Angeles history that is lost, but not forgotten. The Corralitas Trail is a little-know urban hike that follows an abandoned Pacific Electric streetcar line that used to run between downtown Los Angeles and [...]

sanborn

Using Google Tools to Improve Findability and Access to UCLA’s Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

UCLA’s Young Research Library maintains a great collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of the metropolitan Los Angeles area, including Venice, San Pedro, Culver City, and North Hollywood. From about the 1870s until the 1970s, the Sanborn Company was one of a few companies that specialized in producing fire insurance maps for the purpose of [...]

Example of a neatline

Map neatlines

The neatline on a map is: “A border drawn around a map to enclose the legend, scale, title, geographic features, and any other information pertinent to the map, often showing tick marks that indicate intervals of distance. On a standard quadrangle map, the neatlines are the meridians and parallels delimiting the quadrangle.” Citation The ERSI [...]

Hansard

Challenging Reference Question: Searching Hansards and British Parliamentary Papers

Here was a challenging reference question I received at the Young Research Library reference desk that was ultimately solved by a couple of my colleagues. A patron was looking for a transcript of a debate that took place in the British Parliament in 1937 about, as the patron asked, whether any black representatives would be [...]