UC Santa Cruz Aerial Photography Collection

Stanford University Libraries will grow to be the brand new dwelling for the University of California Santa Cruz Library (UCSC) Aerial Photography Collection, extending its longstanding partnership with the college and participation within the UC-Stanford Maps & Geospatial Common Knowledge Group.

The switch of the Aerial Photography Collection comes after the University Library Collections Team at UCSC accomplished its multi-year preservation evaluation and concluded the gathering would wish extra funding for additional digitization work, analysis help, and, most critically, entry and preservation necessities.

“It was important to us to both keep the collection together and make sure it was with a team of experts who were able to compound its research value. Stanford’s enduring maps expertise and our long-standing connection with them made this a terrific fit,” said Kerry Scott, Interim University Librarian at UCSC.

 

The University of California and Stanford map librarians have actively collaborated on assortment constructing for over 50 years incorporating cartographic supplies, aerial images, and geospatial information. Governed by longstanding agreements, the group ensured deep protection county by county making a wealthy historic legacy for your complete state.

“We understand the importance of this collection as it documents an invaluable part of the history of the state in the counties of Monterey, San Benito, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz. We look forward to taking over the management of the materials to make them widely available for research, scholarship, and public history,” states Julie Sweetkind-Singer, the previous Senior Associate University Librarian for Collections and Public Services at Stanford University Libraries who was instrumental in establishing this collaboration between the 2 establishments.

Zoe Dilles, Map Librarian at Stanford University Libraries, acknowledges the great position UCSC has performed and the steps forward. “We are grateful to the UCSC’s dedicated stewardship of this collection and plan to continue that legacy by opening these up to more digital scholarship in California, and beyond,” she shares. 

The UC Santa Cruz Aerial Photography Collection covers a five-county space together with all of Santa Cruz, San Benito, Santa Clara, Monterey, and components of San Mateo County. This is a uniquely complete archive of the Central Coast that features flights from 1928 to 2003. An spectacular 60% of the gathering is scanned and accessible for obtain by means of the UCSC digital collections dashboard; these scans will stay on-line by means of January of 2028 when they are going to be transferred totally to Stanford University Libraries.

The bodily assortment consisting of over 40,000 sheets might be managed by Branner Earth Sciences Library & Map Collections, one of many twenty libraries inside Stanford University Libraries’ community. The administration of the gathering by Branner Library employees highlights Stanford University Libraries’ superior digital infrastructure to make the aerial images extra discoverable and usable for researchers.

In the approaching years, Branner Library employees working carefully with a number of groups at Stanford University Libraries—together with the Geospatial Center, Research Data Services, and Digital Library Systems and Services—will proceed digitization efforts and create interactive indexes and instruments for navigating and analyzing this wealthy historic information archive. The scans might be accessible by way of Stanford University Libraries’ two discovery platforms: SearchWorks, its on-line catalog, and EarthWorks, its discovery software for geospatial information the place customers can search spatially by manipulating a map. Users will have the ability to not merely view however actively analyze and manipulate these scanned aerial images – together with different digitized maps and geospatial supplies – on the interactive discovery platforms.

Collectively, the mixing of the 40,000 bodily sheets together with the scans accomplished by UCSC will make this a useful addition to the prevailing trendy aerial images and cartographic collections at Stanford used for educating, studying, and analysis, particularly within the examine of twentieth century city and rural land use change, Earth science, and marine science.

Evan Thornberry, Head Librarian and Curator of Stanford University Libraries’ David Rumsey Map Center and an avid map fanatic welcomes the addition. “Aerial photos bridge the published map with the living landscape and give us a deeper understanding of change over time,” he notes.

The Aerial Photography Collection might be an incredible useful resource to help new and ongoing scholarship inside Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, The Silicon Valley Archives, The Bill Lane Center for the American West, and so many different campus facilities and institutes. For California residents, a key useful resource in regards to the Central Coast stays actively stewarded and accessible for analysis within the years to return.

For analysis inquiries utilizing the Aerial Photography Collection, please attain out to: Map Librarian Zoe Dilles.