1 Navigating the #CLIRWater Project
Lisa Crane
The 2021 Western Water Symposium is sponsored by The Claremont Colleges Library as part of the programming associated with our Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant. Our project’s official title is Digitizing Southern California Water Resources, but it is more commonly known as the hashtag #CLIRWater Project.
Conceiving the Project
When Special Collections at The Claremont Colleges Library first heard of CLIR’s digitizing hidden collections grant program, we immediately thought of our vast Water Resources collection. The collection, made up of many smaller collections, contains materials on the subject of water; its distribution, augmentation, and use in Southern California. Due to its size, it has pretty much defied complete cataloging.
The Claremont area and its surrounds have long had a “special” relationship with water issues. The city is located on a rather large aquifer that has been a source of water since the Tongva people first lived in the area. The city of Ontario, California is one of the few cities that gave water rights to landowners when they purchased a parcel in the booming city.
Our region’s experiences with water in the past, and the recent impacts of climate change, have direct implications for many other regions on a global scale. For example, with rising urban expansion and shrinking agricultural lands, Egypt seeks to farm the Sahara Desert. China, with the Yangtze River, and India, with its principal Eastern rivers, are attempting feats of engineering that were present in California more than a century ago, as engineers rebuilt water catchments and mapped and pumped groundwater for agriculture, housing developments, and industrialized civilization.
To create this multi-party collaborative project and bring together physically dispersed collections into a common digital space, we reached out to local organizations which held similar or complimentary water collections to our own. We ended up partnering with California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB), which are academic institutions; municipal public libraries Upland, Ontario (California), and the A.K. Smiley in Redlands; and the National Archives at Riverside (NARA), a federal government organization. Pomona College and its Foundation Relations and Strategic Initiatives team agreed to be the applicant institution.
Scope and Content
Over the past three years, the seven partner institutions collectively have digitized a critical mass of primary source documentation on the development, management, and exploitation of Southern California water and western US water held in our institutions. We have created a digital archive, accessed through the Western Water Archives (https://westernwaterarchives.org/) online portal, that supports, and hopefully inspires, scholarship through multiple disciplinary lenses,