Art & Art History

Free public access to searchable collection guides (also known as finding aids) for primary resource collections in repositories maintained by more than 200 institutions throughout California, including many digitized collections.

Calisphere provides free access to unique and historically important artifacts for research, teaching, and curious exploration. Discover over 750,000 photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more.

The Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection emphasizes the history of Los Angeles, Southern California, and California. This Internet-accessible collection is one of the treasures of the Central Library.

The digital collections of the Santa Monica Public Library. The collections include the Santa Monica Image Archives, Pacific Palisades Historical Collection, Santa Monica Evening Outlook (1875-1937), Santa Monica Facts, Historical Maps of Santa Monica, and Santa Monica Newspaper Index.

With funding from the Library Services and Technology Act administered by the California State Library, the County of Los Angeles Public Library has created local history Web sites for fifteen of its libraries. These local history Web sites provide answers to frequently asked community history questions twenty-four hours a day via the Internet. The Web sites provide information on Native Americans who lived in the area in prehistoric times, local missions and the early history of the community as well as other historical topics. They also contain images of historic community photographs and other documents, and links and citations to additional community history resources.