Getty Provides Higher Profile for Smaller Archives

When Angelenos think of local archives, they think of the vast, distinguished collections of the Huntington Library or UCLA. But Los Angeles is home to hundreds of lesser-known archives, containing everything from the world’s largest collection of Armenian coins to thousands of aerial photographs of Southern California.

Now, for the first time, information on these little-known treasure troves has been collected in a book titled “Cultural Inheritance LA: A Directory of Less-Visible Archives and Collections in the Los Angeles Region.”

A project of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, the book gives vital statistics on 178 public and private caches of documents, artifacts and other items. Among the collections are the Automobile Club of Southern California’s History Archive, the International Gay and Lesbian Archive, the Antelope Valley Indian Museum, the Italian Oral History Project, the Ralph Miller Golf Library, the collection of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee and the archives of an Asian American comedy group, Cold Tofu.

Robert G. Marshall, who was head of the advisory forum for the project, said that the sometimes obscure collections are crammed with information on the city’s hundreds of communities and ethnic enclaves, data that rarely found its way into older archives that emphasized white mainstream culture.

“There’s always been the traditional history of Los Angeles being told through the main repositories, but there’s an additional history of L.A. that is contained in many of the smaller collections,” said Marshall, head of the Urban Archives at Cal State Northridge.

Marshall cited such invaluable but not widely known collections as that of the Chicano Resource Center at the East Los Angeles Public Library, which includes materials on the Mexican American experience from 1848 to the present.

“UCLA doesn’t have that kind of collection,” he said.

The directory will be released at a scholarly symposium, “Mapping L.A.: A Global Prototype,” today and Tuesday at the Getty Center.

The 350-page reference book will be available without charge to anyone who requests it until the run of 3,000 copies is depleted. It can be obtained by writing L.A. as Subject, the Getty Research Institute, Suite 1100, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90049-1688, or by calling (310) 440-6222.

The data also will be available on the Internet at www.getty.edu/gri/public/lasubject.htm

The first day of the symposium is by invitation only, but the second day is open to the public. Parking reservations are required and can be made by calling (310) 440-7300.

The project is important for many reasons, said Deborah Marrow, interim director of the Getty Institute and director of the Getty grant program.

“It’s crucial to let people know of all these wonderful cultural resources in the L.A. region,” Marrow said. “I think the variety of materials in the area is really remarkable, and it well represents the extraordinary diversity of Los Angeles as a city.”

The professional archivists in the group also hope to share what they know about preserving collections and displaying them with the enthusiastic amateurs who devote so much time and energy to their often idiosyncratic collections.

In an unusual move, the directory’s creators asked the administrators of the archives and collections to describe them as they saw fit.

One result of the project, according to Marshall, was that the so-called elite institutions and the less famous ones found they had much in common. New alliances and relationships among the institutions are being formed.

Stokes said the center plans to update the volume every other year under the auspices of a different local university.

The “L.A. as Subject” project, as it is formally known, involved churches, government agencies, neighborhood organizations and artists, as well as archivists.

In connection with the launch of the directory, the project is sponsoring two exhibits that draw on photos and other materials from the widely dispersed institutions included in the directory.