San Francisco Examiner Photograph Archive Preservation Project

FAIN: PC-50093-07

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)
Thomas C. Leonard (Project Director: July 2006 to September 2009)

Arrangement, description, and preservation of some 180,000 photographs, including 30,000 glass plate negatives, from the archives of the "San Francisco Examiner," 1919 to 1998. The project would also create Encoded Archival Description finding aids and digitize 2,000 photographs for mounting on the Internet.

The recent acquisition of the San Francisco Examiner Photograph Archive, ca. 1919-1998, stands as the largest single donation ever received by The Bancroft Library. The 3.6 million negatives and 1 million photoprints more than doubles the Library?s holdings of photographs. The Examiner photograph archive preserves the original film negatives of the paper?s regional photojournalism from the late 1920s through the late 1990s. The negative collection is a virtually untapped reservoir of the visual documentation of many historic events which took place in the Bay Area over the 20th century. Unfortunately, due to their inherent fragility and deterioration, many of the negatives -- especially the glass, nitrate and cellulose acetate negatives which constitute the earliest part of the collection -- will self-destruct if remedial work is not immediately begun. With funding from the NEH, the collection will be surveyed, and negatives will be stored properly and re-housed.