The Bancroft Library
The Bancroft Library is one of the treasures of the campus, and one of the world's great libraries for the history of the
American West.
Some Bancroft materials are available online via Calisphere, which includes primary sources from many California libraries and museums.
Before you go:
1. Be prepared! Read secondary sources and know something about your topic.
2. Search OskiCat so you can bring call numbers with you. Use the Entire Collection pull-down menu in OskiCat to limit your search to the Bancroft Library only. (Remember that there are primary sources in many other campus libraries as well.)
- If the item you want is in storage (the location is NRLF) and it's owned by The Bancroft Library, do not use the Request button in OskiCat. Instead, use the Bancroft's online request form at least 72 hours in advance (they prefer a week.)
- If you have 72 hours in advance, you can also use the online request form for Bancroft materials that are not in storage; that will speed things up when you arrive.
- If the OskiCat record mentions a finding aid (an index) to a manuscript collection, you should use it to help you find what you need in the collection. If the finding aid is online, there will be a link from the OskiCat record. The finding aids that are not online are near the Registration Desk at the Bancroft Library.
3. Learn about the Bancroft's policies: read about Access (bring a quarter for lockers) and Registration (bring two pieces of ID). You may want to read about the new camera policy ($10/day, no flash) or about getting photocopies.
Read morePrimary Sources: California & the West
See also: UCB's Government Info page for more details on finding local, county and state records. There are a number of librarians available to help you unearth government documents.
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Calisphere
Gateway to digitized images from the libraries and museums of 10 University of California campuses and more than 100 cultural heritage organizations in California. Includes more than 150,000 photographs, diaries, documents, oral histories and other resources. Serves as a single point of access for more than 300 UC-created websites and collections.
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Online Archive of California (OAC)
A searchable and browseable resource that brings together historical materials from a variety of California institutions, including museums, historical societies, and archives. Contains over 120,000 images; 50,000 pages of documents, letters, and oral histories; and 8,000 guides to collections. Images are organized into thematic and institutional collections, such as historical topics, nature, places, and technology.
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1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection
A compilation of selected holdings form collections housed in the archives and special collections of The Bancroft Library and five other California institutions. Includes approximately 14,000 images and 7,000 pages of text. A finding aid to the collection is also available through an Online Archive of California guide.
Primary Sources: Newspapers
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Access World News
Provides full-text information and perspectives from over 600 U.S. and over 700 international sources. Offers strong regional coverage, indexing more than California newspapers such as Contra Costa Times (1995-current), Sacramento Bee (1984-current), San Francisco Chronicle (1985-current), and San Jose Mercury News (1985-current). Search categories include: California newspapers (121 titles), Greater Los Angeles (54 titles), major metropolitan titles (13 titles), Spanish-language news sources (48 titles), the World (almost 2000 titles), US (855 titles).
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Accessible Archives
Provides access to the Pennsylvania Gazette (1728-1800), the paper called 'The New York Times of the 18th Century', Godey's Lady's Book (1830-1898), the Philadelphia magazine intended to entertain, inform and educate the women of America, and a collection of Philadephia papers. Offers social, political and cultural perspectives of colonial America, the American Revolution, and the New Republic.
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California Digital Newspaper Collection
Offers over 200,000 pages of California newspapers spanning the years 1849-1911: the Alta California, 1849-1891; the San Francisco Call, 1893-1910; the Amador Ledger, 1900-1911; the Imperial Valley Press, 1901-1911; the Sacramento Record-Union, 1859-1890; and the Los Angeles Herald, 1905-1907. Additional years are forthcoming, as are other early California newspapers: the Californian; the California Star; the California Star and Californian; the Sacramento Transcript; the Placer Times; and the Pacific Rural Press.
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Chronicling America
This site allows users to search and view newspaper pages from 1880-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. To date, over 200,000 pages of California newspapers have been digitized.
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Early American Newspapers
Access to hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as fully text-searchable facsimile images. Based largely on Clarence Brigham's "History and Bibliography of American Newspapers,1690-1820." (Archive of Americana allows cross-searching of several databases: Early American Imprints , Series I and II; Early American Newspapers; American State Papers; US Congressional Serial Set.)
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Ethnic News Watch
Indexes over 200 ethnic, minority, and native press publications. Contains news, culture, and history searchable in both English and Spanish. Also includes a retrospective backfile of titles (1960-1989).
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Historical Newspapers (ProQuest)
Includes Chicago Defender (1910-1975). Chicago Tribune (1849-1988). Los Angeles Times (1881-1988). San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922). New York Times (1851-1994) with Index (1851-1993). Wall Street Journal (1889-1994). Washington Post (1877-1995).
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LexisNexis Academic
Includes over 6,000 individual titles of international, national and local newspapers and wire services; radio and television transcripts; and business, medical, industry, and legislative magazines, journals, and newsletters. Wide geographic coverage and translations from foreign-language sources, as well as news services like the Associated Press, Agence France Press, El Pais and Xinhua (New China) News Agency.
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San Francisco Chronicle (historical archive)
Full page article images of the San Francisco Chronicle starting with the first issue (1865) through 1922.
Daily Cal
Daily Cal Indexes
The index to the Daily Cal has changed format many times. Here’s a summary of where each chunk can be found.
1874 - 1929 is indexed in a card file in Bancroft’s University Archive. Easier to get to is the microfilm copy of the card file, which is in Newspaper/Micro Room under call no.: MICROFILM 20031 (3 reels).
1930 - June 1991 is indexed in card file located in Newspaper/Micro Room.
July 1991 - June 1994 is indexed in a printed index, which can be found in both: Doe Reference Periodical Indexes [AJ21.D333] and in the Newspaper Microform Room [AJ21.D29 NEWS\] And in the Online Archive of California website http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf4f59n7s5
September 1997 - current is in Lexis/Nexis (use Easy Search, enter Daily Californian in the By Source Title box

June 1999 - current is indexed and searchable at http://www.dailycal.org/search_advanced.php.
Searching OskiCat for Primary Sources
Certain words and phrases (part of the Library of Congress Subject Headings classification system) will find primary sources in library catalogs. You can use these in OskiCat or Melvyl:
-correspondence
-sources
-diaries
-personal narratives
-interviews
-speeches
-documents
-archives
-early works to 1800
-newspapers
Examples:
history victorian britain sources
women 19th century personal narratives

