These collections have both personal and organizational information primarily focused on the events surrounding the World War II mass removal from the west coast and incarceration, but also on important pre-and post-war topics, from early immigration to the Redress Movement and beyond. The archival items include family letters and photographs, incarceration documentation, business records and a wide range of other archival materials.
Here are a few examples of CSUJAD collections:
The CSUJAD project has worked with more than 25 institutions to digitize their materials and invites individuals and organizations with archival items associated with Japanese American history to consider donating them to the project to enhance the historical record and make them readily accessible.
We also encourage universities, historical societies, libraries, museums and other cultural institutions to consider participating by adding digital objects and descriptive information to the CSUJAD project.
The CSUJAD project collects, digitizes, describes and preserves archival materials (photographs, textual documents, oral histories, video, ephemera, etc.) associated with the history of Japanese Americans in the United States, especially California, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
The primary focus is on the personal history of individual families who were incarcerated during World War II, but the content also encompasses the pre-war lives of the earliest Japanese immigrants though the post-war period and up to more current events. Virtually connecting these archival materials in the CSUJAD database provides readily accessible primary sources to a global audience in order to democratize the historical record, humanize past experiences and transform historical interpretation.
The CSUJAD project welcomes donations of physical and digital materials that document the lives of Japanese Americans, especially those from the WWII era, to ensure their remembrances are not lost. We encourage donors to contribute such materials to the CSU Dominguez Hills central hub archive or any other partner institution.
Physical materials donated will be archived, selectively digitized, catalogued and preserved. Materials loaned to the project will be digitized and returned to the owner. A deed of gift is required.
The CSUJAD project has been fortunate to have more than 25 California State University and associated institutional partners contributing to the growth of this Japanese American history project.
If your organization has materials that fit the scope of the CSUJAD collection policy, please contact us and we can discuss the possibility of project participation. Partners tend to keep their physical archival materials in-house and use grant funding to digitize collections, then provide the CSUJAD project with scans of archival objects and appropriate metadata.
Outsourcing digitization is possible, depending upon available grant funding. The CSUJAD technical specifications and cataloguing toolbox guide participants through the digitization, description and workflow processes to enhance uniformity, with additional assistance available from the CSU Dominguez Hills central hub, as needed. The CSUDH central hub and project partners create agreements that outline the goals and deliverables of the partnership.