ANNOUNCEMENT:

Bancroft's Honeyman Digital Archive now On-line

BERKELEY, CA - December 1, 1998 -- The Bancroft Library of the University
of California is pleased to announce the completion of The Robert B.
Honeyman, Jr. Collection Digital Archiving Project. This project, the
first digitization project funded by the Library Services and Technology
Act through the California State Library, has made the Robert B. Honeyman,
Jr. Collection of Early Californian and Western American Pictorial
Material available on the internet. This important research collection,
which has never before been published in its entirety, has now been made
accessible through high resolution digital representations of each item in
the collection accompanied by detailed descriptions and subject and format
indexing.

The Honeyman collection is comprised of over 2300 items dated from ca.
1790 to ca. 1900, including original oil paintings, watercolors, drawings,
prints, ephemera and other materials related to the old West, with
emphasis on the early California and Gold Rush periods. Included are
sketches from important early expeditions, the changing landscape of the
West under the impact of westward migration, the development of towns and
cities, early settlements, California missions, railroads, Gold Rush
scenes, pioneer and frontier life, native populations, social history and
other topics.

The Honeyman project is the first major contributor to the Museums and the
Online Archive of California (MOAC) project which seeks to establish best
practices for including museum collections within the California Digital
Library's Online Archive of California (OAC). The Honeyman project uses
the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard, an SGML descriptive
standard maintained by the Library of Congress, and will serve, in
collaboration with other MOAC participants, as a model implementation of
the EAD standard for museum and special collections.

As the newest entry into the Online Archive of California - a union
database of primary resources available in repositories throughout the
state - the Honeyman Digital Archive will become part of the California
Heritage Collection. Residing within the OAC, the California Heritage
Collection is a digital repository comprised of over 30,000 images related
to the history of California and the West from selected collections held
by The Bancroft Library and will now be the home of the Robert B.
Honeyman, Jr. Collection digital archive. The Robert B. Honeyman, Jr.
Collection can be browsed within the California Heritage Collection at:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CalHeritage

Mary W. Elings, Project Archivist  ([log in to unmask])
Eva Garcelon, Project Archivist  ([log in to unmask])