Water Resources Center Archives
Encyclopedia
The Water Resources Center Archives (WRCA) on the UC Berkeley campus is a multi-campus research unit administered by Agriculture and Natural Resources (ANR), a division of the University of California
Office of the President. WRCA collects, preserves and provides access to academics and the public on historical and contemporary water-related materials that support the instructional and research programs of the University of California and the needs of the people. The University of California Center for Water Resources
(WRC) 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. WRCA was formed in 1958.
On October 2, 2009, ANR announced that WRCA would have a "new academic home" by June 30, 2010 and that WRC would close on December 31, 2009. A public and political outcry in support of WRCA staff, services, and collections to remain funded at the UC Berkeley campus emerged following the ANR announcement. WRCA continues to host WRC's website, publications, and data.
On July 16, 2010, ANR announced that WRCA will move to southern California, substantially dividing the valuable research collection between UC Riverside and CSU San Bernardino.
on water resources development in California and the West. The collection includes national and international material as well. Reports, pamphlets, and unpublished materials from federal, state and local government agencies, other federal Water Research Institutes, non-governmental organizations and consultants form the heart of the collection. WRCA’s archival materials are discoverable in the Online Archive of California. WRCA’s collection is cataloged in OCLC
and is searchable in UC Berkeley's Oskicat catalog and in the University of California's Melvyl
catalog.
The collection consists of more than 170,000 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 6,000 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 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.
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
Office of the President. WRCA collects, preserves and provides access to academics and the public on historical and contemporary water-related materials that support the instructional and research programs of the University of California and the needs of the people. The University of California Center for Water Resources
University of California Center for Water Resources
The University of California Center for Water Resources is 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 is located on the original 1907 site of...
(WRC) was established and funded in 1957 by a special act of the California State Legislature
California State Legislature
The California State Legislature is the state legislature of the U.S. state of California. It is a bicameral body consisting of the lower house, the California State Assembly, with 80 members, and the upper house, the California State Senate, with 40 members...
and was designated the California Water Research Institute by a federal act in 1964. WRCA was formed in 1958.
On October 2, 2009, ANR announced that WRCA would have a "new academic home" by June 30, 2010 and that WRC would close on December 31, 2009. A public and political outcry in support of WRCA staff, services, and collections to remain funded at the UC Berkeley campus emerged following the ANR announcement. WRCA continues to host WRC's website, publications, and data.
On July 16, 2010, ANR announced that WRCA will move to southern California, substantially dividing the valuable research collection between UC Riverside and CSU San Bernardino.
Collections
WRCA is the premier library of its kind in the United States, specifically collecting contemporary and historic material, technical reports, and gray literatureGray literature
Gray literature is a field in library and information science. The term is used variably by the intellectual community, librarians, and medical and research professionals to refer to a body of materials that cannot be found easily through conventional channels such as publishers, "but which is...
on water resources development in California and the West. The collection includes national and international material as well. Reports, pamphlets, and unpublished materials from federal, state and local government agencies, other federal Water Research Institutes, non-governmental organizations and consultants form the heart of the collection. WRCA’s archival materials are discoverable in the Online Archive of California. WRCA’s collection is cataloged in OCLC
OCLC
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"...
and is searchable in UC Berkeley's Oskicat catalog and in the University of California's Melvyl
Melvyl
Melvyl is the name of the online catalog of the University of California's library system, and is a registered trademark owned by the University of California...
catalog.
The collection consists of more than 170,000 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 6,000 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 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 S. Eastwood
John S. Eastwood was an American engineer who built the world's first reinforced concrete multiple-arch dam on bedrock foundation at Hume Lake, California, in 1908. Mr...
, John D. Galloway, Sidney T. Harding, Walter L. Huber, Edward Hyatt, Joe W. Johnson, Robert Kelley
Robert Kelley
Robert O. Kelley, PhD, is the current president of the University of North Dakota which is located in Grand Forks, North Dakota. He became UND's 11th president effective July 1, 2008. Kelley was previously dean of the College of Health Sciences and professor of medical education and public health...
, Bernard Etcheverry, Harvey Oren Banks
Harvey Oren Banks
Harvey Oren Banks was an American civil engineer who was appointed State Engineer of California in 1955 and the first Director of the California Department of Water Resources in 1956. Under his direction, DWR completed its first California Water Plan and initiated the first stage of planning of...
, Milton N. Nathanson, Luna Leopold
Luna Leopold
Luna Bergere Leopold was a leading U.S. geomorphologist and hydrologist, and son of Aldo Leopold. He received a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1936; an M.S. in Physics-Meteorology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1944; and a Ph.D...
and Murrough P. O'Brien, amongst others. WRCA also holds institutional and legal records from numerous organizations, including Mono Lake Committee
Mono Lake Committee
The Mono Lake Committee is an environmental organization based in Lee Vining, California in the United States. Its mission is to preserve Mono Lake, by reducing diversions of water from the Eastern Sierra watersheds by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power .The Committee was founded in...
, California Department of Water Resources
California Department of Water Resources
The California Department of Water Resources , is a department within the California Natural Resources Agency. The Department of Water Resources is responsible for the State of California's management and regulation of water usage...
, 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
San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Bay is a shallow, productive estuary through which water draining from approximately forty percent of California, flowing in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers from the Sierra Nevada mountains, enters the Pacific Ocean...
, California Aqueduct
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. The Department of Water Resources operates and maintains the...
, Los Angeles Aqueduct
Los Angeles Aqueduct
The Los Angeles Aqueduct system comprising the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Second Los Angeles Aqueduct, is a water conveyance system operated by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power...
, Owens Valley
Owens Valley
Owens Valley is the arid valley of the Owens River in eastern California in the United States, to the east of the Sierra Nevada and west of the White Mountains and Inyo Mountains on the west edge of the Great Basin section...
, California legislation and policy, and dam construction and removal.
Initiatives
WRCA has developed numerous initiatives that use cutting edge tools to preserve and deliver content to UC and the California water community.- Clearinghouse for Dam Removal Information (CDRI): CDRI is an online repository for documents about proposed and completed dam removal projects across the country. The goal of CDRI is to collect documents from government agencies, consulting firms, universities, and non-profit organizations so that those making decisions about dam removal, including cases where a decision is made to retain the dam, can access all the information in one place.
- eScholarship: WRCA administers an open access eScholarship repository that includes full-text PDFs of WRC's Technical Completion Reports series, UCB Hydraulic Engineering Laboratory Reports, faculty Working Papers, and graduate student papers from two Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning courses.
- Online Archive of California (OAC): WRCA has 117 XML collection guides hosted at OAC. Within these collections, 1,200 images are available digitally; digitization and metadata creation funded by multiple grant projects, including the Joseph B. Lippincott Los Angeles Aqueduct images (funded by a California Library Services and Technology grant) and the Origins of Western Water, a multi-university grant funded by the National Endowment for the HumanitiesNational Endowment for the HumanitiesThe National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
and hosted by the Western Waters Digital LibraryWestern Waters Digital LibraryThe Western Waters Digital Library provides free public access to digital collections of significant primary and secondary resources on water in the western United States. These collections have been made available by research libraries other academic and institutional partners.WWDL allows...
. - Web Archiving Service: WRCA administers the California Water Districts Web Archive, harvesting, preserving, and making available transient content from hundreds of California water and irrigation district websites. A Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta Web Archive will be made live in summer 2010.
- OCLC Digital Archive (via ContentDM): WRCA catalogs and preserves born-digital items and makes them available via OCLC’s Digital Archive on the ContentDM platform. These are discoverable from the OskiCat, Melvyl, and OCLC catalogs.
- California Colloquium on Water: WRCA manages and hosts this lecture series, wherein scholars of distinction in the fields of natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, law and environmental design will offer monthly lectures. These lectures are designed to increase the understanding and appreciation among students, faculty and the general public of water resources and to contribute to informed decisions about water in California. Streaming video and PowerPoint presentations of these lectures since 2000 are available online.
- On Water blog and Facebook: WRCA blogs and posts to Facebook daily on relevant news, studies, and University of California research. The blog includes CDRI content.
- Cache Creek Catalog : The Cache Creek Catalog is an ongoing project to provide access to all types of documents pertaining to Cache Creek and vicinity in Yolo and Lake Counties, California. The purpose of this public catalog is to facilitate administrative, research, and information needs for all parties.
- Digitization of the California Water Atlas: In 2009, WRCA coordinated with David RumseyDavid RumseyDavid Rumsey is a map collector and the founder of the David Rumsey Map Collection. He is also the president of Cartography Associates.Rumsey has a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University and was a founding member of Yale Research Associates in the Arts...
and the State of California Governor's Office to digitize and make publicly available this influential 1979 publication.
Publications utilizing WRCA collections
In addition to supporting faculty and graduate work for the University of California, WRCA's services and materials have been influential and utilized in numerous publications and films. The following is a small representation of these materials:- Hazardous Metropolis : Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles / by Jared Orsi. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-520-23850-3
- Tales of the San Joaquin: A River Journey (Film) / Written and directed by Christopher Beaver. Sausalito, CA : Christopher Beaver Films, 2003.
- Water and the California Dream: Choices for the New Millennium / David Carle. Berkeley: University of California PressUniversity of California PressUniversity of California Press, also known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish books and papers for the faculty of the University of California, established 25 years earlier in 1868...
& Sierra Club BooksSierra Club BooksSierra Club Books is the publishing division of the Sierra Club, founded in 1960 by then Sierra Club President David Brower. Volumes intended for club members had been published prior to 1960. In addition, books under their name had been published before 1960, but done through already established...
, 2003. ISBN 1-57805-095-2 (papbk.) - William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles / by Catherine Mulholland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN 0-520-21724-1.
- Water & the Shaping of California : A Literary, Political and Technological Perspective on the Power of Water, and How the Effort to Control It Has Transformed the State / by Sue McClurg ; foreword by Kevin Star ; [editor, Rita Schmidt Sudman]. Sacramento: Water Education Foundation in conjunction with Heyday Books, 2000. ISBN 1-89071-37-6 (cloth); 1-890771-33-3 (pbk.)
- Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin / by Gray Brechin. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1999. ISBN 0-520-21568-0.
- The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth / by Blake Gumprecht. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. (Creating the North American Landscape). ISBN 0-8018-6047-4.
- Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West / by Donald C. Jackson. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995. (Development of Western Resources). ISBN 0-7006-0716-1.
- Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles / by Margaret Leslie Davis. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. ISBN 0-06-016698-3 (cloth); 0-06-092194-3 (pbk.).
- The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s / by Norris Hundley, Jr. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992. ISBN 0-520-07786-5.
- The Water Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. Frits Van der Leeden, Fred L. Troise, David Keith Todd. Chelsea, Mich.: Lewis Publishers, 1990. (Geraghty and Miller Ground-Water Series). ISBN 0-87371-12-03.
- Battling the Inland Sea: Floods, Public Policy, and the Sacramento Valley / by Robert Kelley. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1989. (Reprinted: Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. ISBN 0-520-21428-5).
- Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity & the Growth of the American West / by Donald Worster. New York: Pantheon Books, c1985. ISBN 0-394-51680-X.
- From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931 / by Donald J. Pisani. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1984. ISBN 0-520-05127-0.
- Water and Power: The Conflict Over Los Angeles’ Water Supply in the Owens Valley / by William L. Kahrl. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. ISBN 0-520-04431-2 (cloth); 0-520-05068-1 (pbk.).
- A River No More: The Colorado River and the West / by Philip L. Fradkin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. 0-394-41579-5. (Reprinted: Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1984, ISBN 0-8165-0823-2; Expanded and updated: Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, ISBN 0-520-20564-2)
- The California Water Atlas / by William L. Kahrl, project director and editor. Sacramento: The Governor's Office of Planning and Research; Los Altos, Calif.: distributed by William Kaufmann, 1979. ISBN 0-913232-68-8.
- The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta : The Evolution and implementation of Water Policy : An Historical Perspective / by W. Turrentine Jackson and Alan M. Paterson: California Water Resources Center; Davis, California, 1977. Technical Completion Report no. 163.
- Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West / by Norris Hundley, Jr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. ISBN 0-520-02700-0.
Further reading
- "Politics and Pipelines: If it’s relevant to California’s water history, past or present, it’s on the shelves of Berkeley’s Water Resources Center Archive" by Carol Ness, The Berkeleyan 9/24/08.
- "Bay Area water history, one month at a time: Library calendar documents H2O's journey from 'Mountains to Mouths'" by Cathy Cockrell, The Berkeleyan 7/12/06.
- "Remembering Bay Area's Bridge-Building Bonanza: 2000 Calendar Features Water, Transportation and Tons of Steel" by Travis Hodgkins, The Berkeleyan 3/11/99.