Women's Studies Section

Association of College & Research Libraries / American Library Association

JARDA: Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives

March 1942-1946

Description

The JARDA: Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives website provides a gateway to California archival repositories' source materials on the Japanese-American Relocation experience. These primary sources are from the holdings of the California Historical Society (CHS); California State Archive (CSA); California State University, Fullerton; the Japanese American National Museum (JANM); UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library; UCLA's Young Research Library Department of Special Collections; University of the Pacific (UOP); and University of Southern California. The rich array of resources available through JARDA includes over 10,000 digital images including photographs, prints, paintings, and drawings and over 20,000 pages of transcriptions of texts including personal narratives, oral histories, government documents, and other types of documents.

JARDA is organized into three categories: Images, Texts, and Finding Aids. Some of the images and texts from the finding aids have been digitized.

Women's Studies Content

Searching within the Text Collection is problematic, given nothing was retrieved with very basic search terms ("women" and "girl"). Through browsing, one can find oral history interviews of Japanese American women.

There are hundreds of images of women in the Images Collection.

Also, digitized resources that are useful for women's studies may be found in three of the collections from the Finding Aids:

• Hisako Hibi Collection - images of paintings created by Hibi during her confinement at two relocation centers.
• Claire B. Sprague Collection - Sprague's writing, both fiction and nonfiction, as well as her correspondence with interned Japanese American students
• Yoshiko Uchida Papers - Uchida's correspondence and watercolors provide insight into the life of a successful and distinguished author, as well as her experiences as a Japanese-American growing up in Berkeley and internment camps during the war years.

Within the record for these finding aids, there are links to the digitized items.

Searching

Each of the three categories -- Images, Texts, Finding Aids -- offers a keyword search option. The Images Collection can be browsed by topic, photographer/artist, or internment camp. The Texts Collection and Finding Aids Collection are browseable by title.

The Finding Aids Collection also has an Advanced Search function which enables searching for keyword in the following fields: Collection Description, Title, Collection Inventory, or Title or Entire Finding Aid. It is also possible to limit searches by Archival Collection (UCB Bancroft, UCLA, Japanese American Historical Museum, etc.).

Archive Review:
Toby Matoush
San Jose State University