Considered to be the mother of the California Coastal Zone Conservation Act of 1972, Ellen Stern Harris was an environmental activist long before the avocation became fashionable. The school plans to digitize her vast and chaotic archive to make it available online to scholars and others.
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“The UCLA Library is honored to receive [Harris’] papers, which will enable scholars, students and community members to study the environmental movement in Southern California and beyond,” said Gary E. Strong, university librarian. The material joins other holdings at UCLA, including special collections about natural resources and an oral history series.
Archivist Loretta Ayeroff has worked on the project since October 2006. She said Harris’ broad interests made it difficult at first to determine what was valuable and what could be tossed. Initially faced with more than 200 bankers boxes of barely sorted material, “I was completely overwhelmed,” Ayeroff said. “There were days when I practically froze.”
Digitization Projects: "UCLA Will Catalog a Noted Conservationist's Collection"
Filed by on May 2, 2011
About Gary PriceGary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.
