Water Resources Collections and Archives

Last updated
Water Resources Collections and Archives
Established1958
Location Riverside, San Bernardino, California
Access and use
Population servedUniversity of California, State of California, and the public
Website http://library.ucr.edu/wrca/

The Water Resources Collections and Archives (WRCA), formerly known as the Water Resources Center Archives, is an archive with unpublished manuscript collections and a library with published materials. It was established to collect unique, hard-to-find, technical report materials pertaining to all aspects of water resources and supply in California and the American West. Located on the campus of the University of California Riverside (UCR), it is jointly administered by the UCR College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences (CNAS) and the UCR Libraries. WRCA was part of the University of California Center for Water Resources (WRC) that was established and funded in 1957 by a special act of the California State Legislature and was designated the California Water Research Institute by a federal act in 1964.

Contents

History

WRCA was formed in 1958 as the research component of WRC. At that time, the WRC was a system-wide unit administered by the University of California Office of the President, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources (ANR).

Although WRCA staff began collecting materials in 1958, the library portion of the collection includes select materials dating from the late 19th century, with exceptional strength in its coverage of California water history from the early 1900s to the present. This extensive coverage is due to the generous donations of archival and print materials from UC professors, hydrologists, the staff of various government agencies and private donors.

On October 2, 2009, ANR announced [1] that WRCA would have a "new academic home" by June 30, 2010, and that WRC would close on December 31, 2009. There was a public and political outcry in support of WRCA staff, services, and collections to remain funded at the UC Berkeley campus, [2] [3] but on July 16, 2010, ANR announced that WRCA would relocate to UC Riverside, and entering into a collaborative partnership with the Water Resources Institute at CSU San Bernardino. [4]

Collections

WRCA is the premier library of its kind in the United States, specifically collecting contemporary and historic material, technical reports, and gray literature on water resources development in California and the West. The collection includes national and international material as well. WRCA's archival materials are discoverable in the Online Archive of California. WRCA's collection is cataloged in OCLC and is searchable in UC Riverside's Scotty catalog and in the University of California's Melvyl catalog.

The collection consists of more than 200,000 cataloged reports and approximately 2,200 serial items. WRCA currently receives more than 2,600 specialized newsletters and annual reports published by water or irrigation districts, non-profit organizations, water associations and federal agencies. The collection includes more than 6,200 archival maps and more than 600 films. WRCA also actively maintains more than 200 unique manuscript collections, included in these materials are more than 25,000 unique photographs (chiefly black & white) and approximately 45,000 coastal aerial photographs.

WRCA's manuscript collections [5] include materials from engineers and agencies influential in California's water infrastructure (engineering, groundwater, environmental, etc.). Some highlights include the papers of engineers and attorneys such as Joseph B. Lippincott, Hans Albert Einstein, Frank Adams, Charles Derleth, John S. Eastwood, John D. Galloway, Sidney T. Harding, Walter L. Huber, Edward Hyatt, Joe W. Johnson, Robert Kelley, Bernard Etcheverry, Harvey Oren Banks, Milton N. Nathanson, Luna Leopold and Murrough P. O'Brien, amongst others. WRCA also holds institutional and legal records from numerous organizations, including Mono Lake Committee, California Department of Water Resources, East Bay Municipal Utilities District, and the Berkeley Creeks Task Force.

The collection overall is particularly strong in river and creek restoration (chiefly specific to the San Francisco Bay Area), Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, San Francisco Bay, California Aqueduct, Los Angeles Aqueduct, Owens Valley, California legislation and policy, and dam construction and removal.

Initiatives

The WRCA's initiatives include:

Publications using WRCA collections

WRCA's services and materials have been influential and utilized in numerous publications and films. The following is a small representation of these materials:

Related Research Articles

California State of the United States of America

California is a state in the Pacific Coast region of the United States. With over 39.3 million residents across a total area of approximately 163,696 square miles (423,970 km2), it is the most populous U.S. state and the third-largest by area, as well as the world's thirty-fourth-most-populous subnational entity. California is also the most populated subnational entity in North America, and has its state capital in Sacramento. The Greater Los Angeles area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second- and fifth-most-populous urban regions, with more than 18.7 million and 9.6 million residents respectively. Los Angeles is California's most populous city, and the country's second-most-populous, after New York City. California also has the nation's most populous county, Los Angeles County, and its largest county by area, San Bernardino County. The City and County of San Francisco is both the country's second most densely populated major city after New York City and the fifth-most-densely populated county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs.

University of California Public university system in California

The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Hastings, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, along with numerous research centers and academic abroad centers. The system is the state's land-grant university.

California State University Public university system in California, United States

The California State University is a public university system in California. With 23 campuses and eight off-campus centers enrolling 484,300 students with 26,858 faculty and 25,305 staff, CSU is the largest four-year public university system in the United States. It is one of three public higher education systems in the state, with the other two being the University of California system and the California Community Colleges. The CSU System is incorporated as The Trustees of the California State University. The California State University system headquarters are in Long Beach, California.

California water wars

The California water wars were a series of political conflicts between the city of Los Angeles and farmers and ranchers in the Owens Valley of Eastern California over water rights.

William Mulholland engineer and builder of the Los Angeles Aqueduct

William Mulholland was a self-taught Irish American civil engineer who was responsible for building the infrastructure to provide a water supply that allowed Los Angeles to grow into the largest city in California. As the head of a predecessor to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Mulholland designed and supervised the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 233-mile-long (375 km) system to move water from Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley. The creation and operation of the aqueduct led to the disputes known as the California Water Wars. In March 1928, Mulholland's career came to an end when the St. Francis Dam failed just over 12 hours after he and his assistant gave it a safety inspection.

California Aqueduct

The Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct is a system of canals, tunnels, and pipelines that conveys water collected from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and valleys of Northern and Central California to Southern California. Named after California Governor Edmund Gerald "Pat" Brown Sr., the over 400-mile (640 km) aqueduct is the principal feature of the California State Water Project.

Santa Ana River

The Santa Ana River is the largest river entirely within Southern California in the United States. It rises in the San Bernardino Mountains and flows for most of its length through San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, before cutting through the northern Santa Ana Mountains via Santa Ana Canyon and flowing southwest through urban Orange County to drain into the Pacific Ocean. The Santa Ana River is 96 miles (154 km) long, and its drainage basin is 2,650 square miles (6,900 km2) in size.

<i>Los Angeles Daily News</i> Daily newspaper in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Daily News is the second-largest-circulating paid daily newspaper of Los Angeles, California. It is the flagship of the Southern California News Group, a branch of Colorado-based Digital First Media.

Castaic Dam Dam in northwest Los Angeles County, California, United States

Castaic Dam is an embankment dam in northwestern Los Angeles County, California, in the unincorporated area of Castaic. Although located on Castaic Creek, a major tributary of the Santa Clara River, Castaic Creek provides little of its water. The lake is the terminus of the West Branch of the California Aqueduct, part of the State Water Project. The dam was built by the California Department of Water Resources and construction was completed in 1973. The lake has a capacity of 325,000 acre feet (401,000,000 m3) and stores drinking water for the western portion of the Greater Los Angeles Area.

California State Water Project

The California State Water Project, commonly known as the SWP, is a state water management project in the U.S. state of California under the supervision of the California Department of Water Resources. The SWP is one of the largest public water and power utilities in the world, providing drinking water for more than 23 million people and generating an average of 6,500 GWh of hydroelectricity annually. However, as it is the largest single consumer of power in the state itself, it has a net usage of 5,100 GWh.

William Wurster

William Wilson Wurster was an American architect and architectural teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, and at MIT, best known for his residential designs in California.

The Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library —also known as the Institute of Transportation Studies Library (ITSL), the Berkeley Transportation Library, or simply as the Transportation Library— is a transportation library at the University of California, Berkeley, devoted to transportation studies.

Kevin Starr American historian and librarian

Kevin Owen Starr was an American historian and California's State Librarian, best known for his multi-volume series on the history of California, collectively called "Americans and the California Dream."

The history of the University of California, Riverside, or UCR, started in 1907 when UCR was the University's Citrus Experiment Station. By the 1950s, the University had established a teaching-focused liberal arts curriculum at the site, in the spirit of a small liberal arts college, but California's rapidly growing population made it necessary for the Riverside campus to become a full-fledged general campus of the UC system, and it was so designated in 1959.

Juan Felipe Herrera American writer

Juan Felipe Herrera is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017.

The California Institute for Water Resources was an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to developing and coordinating a system-wide approach to water conservation. The center was funded by the California State Legislature in 1957, and was located on the original 1907 site of the UC Citrus Experiment Station on Mount Rubidoux in Riverside County, California. WRC was administered by the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources (ANR). It collected historic and other documents related to water topics through the Water Resources Center Archives (WRCA) and made the collection available to the public.

Environment of California

The environment of California describes results of human habitation of the State of California.

Water in California Water supply and distribution in the U.S. state of California

California's interconnected water system serves over 30 million people and irrigates over 5,680,000 acres (2,300,000 ha) of farmland. As the world's largest, most productive, and most controversial water system, it manages over 40 million acre feet (49 km3) of water per year.

Stan Morrison

Stanley Mack Morrison is an American retired college basketball coach and athletic director. He was head men's basketball coach at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California from 1972 to 1979, University of Southern California (USC) from 1979 to 1986, and San Jose State University from 1989 to 1998.

John W. Olmsted (1903–1986) was an American Rhodes scholar and historian of early modern Europe. He taught history at University of California, Los Angeles for 24 years and served as faculty representative to the Pacific Coast Conference for seven years. He also served as the first chairman of University of California, Riverside's Humanities Division.

References

  1. ↑ "ANR Vice President Dooley's restructuring announcement", October 2, 2009.
  2. ↑ "Viva la Archives! Budget cuts threaten California water's institutional memory" by Matt Jenkins, High Country News, 4/26/10
  3. ↑ Daniel O. Holmes, "Why is UC abandoning its water library?", San Francisco Chronicle, 25 May 2010]
  4. ↑ Iqbal Pittalwala, "Western Water-resource Collection Moves to Southern California: UC Riverside and Cal State San Bernardino will manage the collection collaboratively", UC Riverside Press Release 16 July 2010
  5. ↑ Alphabetical list of WRCA's manuscript collections
  6. ↑ "Clearinghouse for Dam Removal Information"
  7. ↑ "WRCA's collection guides on the Online Archive of California"
  8. ↑ Western Waters Digital Library
  9. ↑ "California Water Districts Web Archive"
  10. ↑ "California Colloquium on Water"
  11. ↑ "Cache Creek Catalog"
  12. ↑ "The California Water Atlas on David Rumsey Historical Maps"
  13. ↑ "The California Water Atlas on the Internet Archive"
  14. ↑ David Rumsey, "Landmark 1979 California Water Atlas Debuts Online", David Rumsey Map Collection blog, 21 January 2010.
  15. ↑ Hazardous Metropolis : Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles
  16. ↑ William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles
  17. ↑ Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin
  18. ↑ The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.