Building a Statewide Archival Collaborative: The California State University Japanese American Digitization Project

This article summarizes the goals, processes, and experiences to date of a California State University Japanese American Digitization project. The Archives and Special Collections on 15 CSU campuses are identifying important Japanese American historical materials; digitizing and describing them at the item level; and, making them searchable, discoverable, and accessible on a central website that is readily available to scholars, students, and interested citizens throughout the United States and world-wide. Digital technology is bringing the geographically disparate CSU collections together in one online location, where additional contextual information and extended resources provide researchers with rich opportunities for finding and interpreting new information. CSU archivists not only want to improve access to humanities collections about Japanese Americans, but also to develop a sustainable model for collaboration amongst the CSU archival and library community that is extensible in the future. Acknowledgements: The CSU Japanese American project gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities with a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations grant (2014-2015) and the National Park Service with Japanese American Confinement Sites Program grant (2015-2017). The technical support and advice of the California Digital Library and Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project are also much appreciated. Thank you to all of the collaborating CSU archivists and a debt of gratitude goes to Tom Philo, Cataloger and Archivist at CSU Dominguez Hills, who has taken on more of the centralized work than originally planned