New Digital Resources: Calisphere Images
Calisphere Web Site Launched
The California Digital Library presents Calisphere, "a world of primary sources and more", freely accessible to everybody.
Here's an extract from CDL's press release:
Calisphere is a free public gateway to thousands of digitized primary sources — including photographs, documents, newspaper clippings, works of art — from UC museums and libraries and other cultural heritage institutions across California. The site has a special emphasis on serving California teachers and librarians.
Overview of Calisphere’s features:
* Themed Collections are primary source sets created specifically to help educators easily find images aligned with the California State Board of Education Content Standards. Currently, the Themed Collections include 30 topics organized into six historical eras, from the Gold Rush to the 1970s.
* California Cultures organizes Calisphere’s images into subsets related to four historically undocumented ethnic groups (African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans). This organization gives educators another route to access compelling images that illustrate California’s diversity. Also included are teacher-created lesson plans, offering complete units or inspiration for educators. California Cultures was created by 13 University of California repositories in response to H.R. 1905, which made funds available to digitize archival materials relating to the ethnic groups of California.
* Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives, a separate web site accessible through Calisphere, includes more than 10,000 governmental and personal resources that illustrate the story of Japanese-American internment during World War II.
* In addition to these features, more than 300 UC web sites created or maintained by UC libraries, museums, academic departments, and research units are easily accessible through Calisphere. These sites cover a wide range of topics and provide thousands of additional primary sources and other resources for educators and students.
Lizbeth Langston, Head, Science Information Services
