Abstract
The California State Parks Photographic Archives currently describes its collection of images in the Guide to California State Parks Photographic Archives (Guide). The 2014 edition of the Guide provides a broad Scope and Content for the entire collection, a Park Index with volumes, formats, and physical locations of corresponding images, a Subject Index, and a Special Collections Index; it does not offer any descriptive content for the sub-collections sorted by park unit, nor does it include individual park unit histories to contextualize the photographic groupings. Moreover, the Guide’s descriptive content is currently only accessible through the California State Parks website. This project employs sources originating from numerous areas, including the physical and digital holdings at the California State Parks Photographic Archives and Department Archives, publications, unpublished materials, online resources, professional manuals, historical books, and journal articles. In addition to generating individual park unit histories along with scope and content notes for an assortment of thirty-three key park units, the author also identified related archival collections, provided subject search terms for California State Parks’ internal cataloging database (called The Museum System), and encoded and published the above content as individual park unit sub-collection finding aids on the Online Archive of California (OAC) website. This added descriptive content and OAC presence will assist park personnel, academic and professional researchers, publishers, and other interested members of the public to better access the California State Parks Photographic Archives.