Southern California Library

Location:
Los Angeles, CA

The Southern California Library is a people’s library dedicated to documenting and preserving the histories of communities in struggle for justice and using our collections to address the challenges of the present so that all people have the ability, resources, and freedom to make their own histories.

The Library serves teachers, students, community-based organizations, community members, and traditional scholars/researchers, with an emphasis on historically underrepresented, poor communities of color, including South L.A. where we are located. We address the complex issues facing these communities—poverty, unemployment, homelessness, community conflict—by offering services and programs in three key areas:

(1) documenting and providing access to L.A. community history
– through our unique archive holdings that support critical understandings of L.A.;

(2) providing programming to foster cultural, media, and political literacies in ways that illuminate their relationships to power
– including book readings, dialogues, film screenings, art/archival exhibits, and print/digital publishing and other related products;

(3) designing and hosting leadership programs, internships, workshops, and digital media training to strengthen the capacity of our constituents to make change.

Supported Projects



Digital Archive Program Development

Tiffany Otoya
9/20109/2011

The Corps member will develop a comprehensive, sustainable, and consistent program for digitizing materials from our collections that we simply would not be able to do otherwise, given our limited staffing. The member would also strengthen our ability to integrate out community partners, staff, board members, and volunteers into the digitizing program.




Transmission Project