Our researcher spotlight highlights individuals making innovative uses of archival materials.

This edition profiles UCLA Library’s Los Angeles Aqueduct Digital Platform.

Words by Courtney Dean

The Los Angeles Aqueduct Digital Platform (LAADP) was created to commemorate the Los Angeles Aqueduct’s 100th anniversary on November 5, 2013. Developed by UCLA Library Special Collections, in partnership with Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio, the platform is hosted by the UCLA Digital Library and features over 2,000 digitized archival resources such as photographs, documents, maps, and pamphlets from UCLA Library Special Collections as well as content from partner institutions including the Braun Research Library at the Autry National Center; Special Collections in the Honnold/Mudd Library at the Claremont Colleges and the Claremont Colleges Digital Library; the Oviatt Library at California State University Northridge; the Eastern California Museum; the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University; and the UC Riverside Libraries Water Resources Collections and Archives.

This multi-institutional platform also serves as a forum for new scholarship and interactive digital humanities projects born out of the archival material. Produced by graduate students in the Center for Primary Research and Training, projects range from biographies of the Owens Valley Paiute to visualizations of the Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) records to a story map of the St. Francis Dam collapse and even a sonnet project. I spoke with the LAADP’s Project Manager, Jasmine Jones, now a Metadata and Technical Services Archivist at Smith College, via email about this innovative suite of digital projects.

How did the creation of new scholarship fit into the overall workflow for the creation of the digital platform? How were specific areas of focus selected?

The creation of the digital platform happened parallel to the creation of the digital scholarship. How digital scholarship would be integrated into the site was something we thought a lot about, but it did not shift this parallel work/workflow. In the beginning of LAADP development, we envisioned that all digital scholarship would be created within the site. This, however, didn’t allow for terribly dynamic projects and, given the scope of development, we decided that we could utilize web tools/applications to create the scholarship projects and embed them once completed. Again, this didn’t change much in the way of the overall workflow for the creation of the digital platform; the only changes were a decrease in development to support more dynamic digital projects within the site.

As to the areas of focus, students had to create scholarship about the Los Angeles Aqueduct. However, beyond that limitation, the scope of topics was open for students to then define for their projects.

Can you describe the timeline and staffing required for the scholarship portion of the platform? What type of training and skills were required?

Since the LAADP was embedded in the CFPRT, the individuals creating the project were undergraduate and graduate students. We had students develop digital scholarship throughout the entirety of the grant—from the summer quarter of 2013 to winter quarter of 2015—and they were generally hired for a quarter to develop their projects.

We worked with the Digital Library Program and a vendor to develop the LAADP, though the scholarship portion of the platform was a small percentage of the infrastructure development. Our minimum viable product was due November 2016, so we had a timeline of approximately six months for the MVP launch.

StoryMap of the St. Francis Dam collapse of 1928.

Visualization of types of materials in the FoLAR records.

Many of the students had some knowledge of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, though not all. They brought specific subject expertise—English, geography, film, urban planning, etc.—and curiosity about the Los Angeles Aqueduct, as well as creativity to tie those subjects to some aspect of the aqueduct. We did not require students to have experience with archival methodology or research nor did we ask that they have any specific skills with digital tools. Though many students came to us with those things, what was most important is that they were open to ambiguity and creativity. The training and skills needed by the students would vary, depending on the type of project they devised. Some skills that they learned were copyright research, oral history interviewing, utilizing specific digital tools, and project management. Again, none of these things were required, though, and most of the skills were learned on the job.

Pages from Aquazine, made by students in the “Documenting Urban Ecologies” English class taught by Sara Torres during fall Quarter 2013.

What were some of the biggest challenges and successes of integrating new scholarship into an archival project? Do you think this is something that can or should be taken on by more archival repositories?

Embedding scholarship into an archival project requires collaboration beyond the archives and your institution. For the LAADP, we worked closely with Miriam Posner, DH Program Coordinator for the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities, to learn how to do digital humanities and how to prepare and support students doing DH. We also worked with the UCLA Digital Library Program to ensure that the digital scholarship the students were doing, specifically the means through which their scholarship was created and made available, could be integrated/embedded into the site. Our students were also encouraged to look beyond primary sources at UCLA Library Special Collections and do research at other repositories.

Another major challenge was copyright. The digital scholarship that the students created integrated digitized archival materials from LSC (and sometimes partner institutions), many of which were still in copyright. One thing that came out of the LAADP project was a workflow and documentation for assessing the copyright status of archival materials and the risk for including them in digital projects. We implemented this workflow for the materials that the students wanted to incorporate into their digital projects. It required teaching the students about the basics of copyright and fair use, as well as how to engage in the copyright and risk assessment workflow and fill out documentation pertaining to the process. It took us some time to create and iterate the workflow to a point in which we were satisfied with its use by students. It also took time to assess copyright and risk for the materials in the digital projects, as well as on the platform in general. This was not a process that we had originally built-in and was a challenge in the beginning, but ultimately, it was important for us to engage in this work; to respect the rights of rights holders; to ensure that we made materials about the Los Angeles Aqueduct widely accessible, particularly in relation to the students’ digital projects; and to guarantee that our students understood how to engage in this process for later in their careers.

Finally, sustainability of the students’ projects was a major challenge. It was something that we thought a lot about but did not find a good resolution for. Many of the students used digital tools, where their projects were hosted on external sites and were then embedded using an iframe tag on the LAADP. This is not a great model, but we wanted leverage the functionalities of these tools, and it helped the students do the kind of work that they wanted to do. Given the time frame we were working with for this grant, we did the best that we could, but it is definitely a lesson well learned.

I do think more archival repositories should undertake scholarship projects, especially in collaboration with students. And when repositories do scholarship projects with students, I think that they should let the students have as much independence as is possible to engage with the content, so that they could be empowered to seek, evaluate, use, and create scholarship that is not constrained by traditional methods or understandings of scholarship. It is such a great way to get our materials out there and to increase students’ archival literacy.