DUST BOWL MIGRATION DIGITAL ARCHIVES

The Dust Bowl Migration Digital Archives is a small digitization project undertaken by California State University Bakersfield. The heart of the collection is a group of 57 oral histories created in the early 1980s as part of the California Odyssey Project's Oral History Program, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The site also includes about 150 photographs from the Farm Security Administration, most apparently taken by Dorothea Lange. These images are part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory collections, and the site provides a link to the pertinent LOC statement, which says, in part, that “Photographs in this collection were taken by photographers working for the U.S. Government. Generally speaking, works created by U.S. Government employees are not eligible for copyright protection in the United States.”

SELECTION POLICY

With the oral histories, the creators of this digital archives began with a well-defined, preexisting set of documents. It seems that a conviction regarding the importance of these oral histories motivated the project, though there is no statement regarding selection policies or the origin of the digitization project. The selection of photographs is intended to illustrate the oral histories, though there seems to have been a preference for Lange’s work, based on her notoriety. Several of the famous “Migrant Mother” photographs are included.

OBJECT CHARACTERISTICS

The oral histories themselves and the guide and index to those histories are all in the PDF format. PDF should, I believe, provide some search functionality, but the text searches I attempted failed. The PDF format is useful and convenient in many ways. It has also been describes a de facto standard. Yet it remains a proprietary format, which makes me wonder how good a choice it is for a project like this, even though it is so widely used. The photographs are JPEG images, mostly in the range of 600x700 pixels and around 75-150 KB. I discovered no additional data about the photographs.

METADATA

The site provides a PDF of the cumulative index for the oral histories, which was produced in 1981. Each of the oral histories was assigned a number, which is listed under any index term represented in that history, along with a page number. There is no electronic search function, though a determined researcher would benefit from the PDF index. There is also a guide (again in PDF) to the oral histories that provides an overview of the way the histories were collected and brief biographical information about the subjects. There is no metadata provided for the photographs except for the captions that describe the subject and identify the location where the photo was taken. There is no search function for the photos, though they are divided into eight categories and browsing is fairly efficient for a collection of 150 photos. I was a bit frustrated by the failure to provide the photographer’s name, though the site says that the majority were taken by Lange.

AUDIENCE

The fact that the materials are owned and the exhibit hosted by CSU Bakersfield suggests two target audiences: CSU faculty and students, of course, but also a regional audience, as Bakersfield is in the heart of the area to which the dustbowl refugees migrated. The oral histories would be of value to social historians, and quite possibly genealogists and avocational historians.