Join the Project
The California State University Japanese American Digitization Project has been working at collecting Japanese American history materials and making them globally accessible since 2013.
As of 2020, the CSUJAD database has more than 45,000 digitized archival objects. Yet the central hub at CSU Dominguez Hills and the CSUJAD partners have focused attention on the lives of Japanese Americans and their communities for at least 40 years, building archival collections of great depth.
As of 2020, the CSUJAD database has more than 45,000 digitized archival objects. Yet the central hub at CSU Dominguez Hills and the CSUJAD partners have focused attention on the lives of Japanese Americans and their communities for at least 40 years, building archival collections of great depth.
Join the Project
The California State University Japanese American Digitization Project has been working at collecting Japanese American history materials and making them globally accessible since 2013.
As of 2020, the CSUJAD database has more than 45,000 digitized archival objects. Yet the central hub at CSU Dominguez Hills and the CSUJAD partners have focused attention on the lives of Japanese Americans and their communities for at least 40 years, building archival collections of great depth.
As of 2020, the CSUJAD database has more than 45,000 digitized archival objects. Yet the central hub at CSU Dominguez Hills and the CSUJAD partners have focused attention on the lives of Japanese Americans and their communities for at least 40 years, building archival collections of great depth.
About the project
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:
This collection documents three generations of a Japanese American family living in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California, from the early 20th century through the postwar era.
This collection chronicles Mr. Ishida’s time following the exclusion order and incarceration in several camps and documents his life in Japan and California before WWII and during the Korean War.
This collection contains negatives and prints from a studio in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district. Images include photographs from weddings and memorials, portraits and passports.
This collection consists of photo albums and scrapbooks compiled by George and Mitzi Naohara during WWII and other documents pertaining to the Naohara and Masukawa families.
we need your participation
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.
collection policy / project scope
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.
donations by individuals
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.
institutional partnerships
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.
Contact us
Greg Williams
Director, Gerth Archives and Special CollectionsCSU Dominguez Hills and CSUJAD Principal Investigator
Email: gwilliams@csudh.edu
Phone: 310-243-3013