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California Social Welfare Archives--Call for references



The California Social Welfare archives is planning the develoment of a series
of web-pages to coordinate reference to the many archival collections that
house records pertaining to the development of social welfare institutions in
California.

The specific mission of the CSWA restrains its concerns to those collections
that have direct bearing on the practice of social work in California.  This
unique mission automatically entails the coordination of records that are
housed in a variety of institutions.  In many cases, only one series or
subseries of a complete collection would be of interest to researchers in
social welfare.  Without an over-all guide, many of these valuable
resources could be overlooked.  What appears to be required, then, is a
unified reference instrument that will guide the researcher to all appropriate
collections, no matter where they are dispersed.

The main reference tool would be a page that contains brief descriptions of the
pertinent holdings of the various archives, pointers to online descriptions or
finding aids, and brief information about access.  Included would be the
records of agencies and individuals whose primary activity was the delivery of
social welfare programs.  At present, these records are housed in a number of
local historical, governmental, university, and church archives.  It is not the
intention of the CSWA relocate the documents themselves or to interfere in any
way with the mangement of the documents.  Our intent, rather, is to provide a
document that will aid researchers in locating the various sources of
information required for their research in social welfare projects.

We are making a preliminary survey of the available records at this time.  Your
help would be appreciated.  We are asking archivists to send us a listing of
pertinent collections in their archives. We are particularly concerned to
collect information on smaller collections.  If you wish to participate, I
would appreciate it if you could send me an email giving:

Institution
Contact Information
Access Information
Collection information [Name of collection (including pertinent series,
subseries, etc.), Identifying Information, Rough size, Web pointers (if
available)].

I recognize that this is asking for a bit of work for a project still in the
planning stage.   But the potential benefits in access and public exposure of
our archival treasures are very high.

Please Use "CSWA-Reference" somewhere in the subject line, and address the
email to az248@lafn.org.

Thanks,

John Howard Fowler

Consulting Archivist
California Social Welfare Archives

http://www.usc.edu/isd/locations/ssh/socialwork/csw_archives.html

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