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The California State Parks Photographic Archives currently describes its collection of images in the Guide to California State Parks Photographic Archives (Guide). The 2014 edition of the Guide provides a broad Scope and Content for the entire collection, a Park Index with volumes, formats, and physical locations of corresponding images, a Subject Index, and a Special Collections Index; it does not offer any descriptive content for the sub-collections sorted by park unit, nor does it include individual park unit histories to contextualize the photographic groupings. Moreover, the Guide's descriptive content is currently only accessible through the California State Parks website. This project employs sources originating from numerous areas, including the physical and digital holdings at the California State Parks Photographic Archives and Department Archives, publications, unpublished materials, online resources, professional manuals, historical books, and journal articles. In addition to generating individual park unit histories along with scope and content notes for an assortment of thirty-three key park units, the author also identified related archival collections, provided subject search terms for California State Parks' internal cataloging database (called The Museum System), and encoded and published the above content as individual park unit sub-collection finding aids on the Online Archive of California (OAC) website. This added descriptive content and OAC presence will assist park personnel, academic and professional researchers, publishers, and other interested members of the public to better access the California State Parks Photographic Archives.
The California State Parks, Photographic Archives uses a database called The Museum System to catalog its collection of photographic materials. The contents of the database are a product of newly input data and previous records migrated from legacy software. For the most part, each data migration was successful; however gaps and inaccuracies did occur. In order to reconcile the missing fields, a massive curation project of the entire collection was undertaken by the author in accordance with archival principles and methodologies. The sources of data for this undertaking originate from a variety of areas, including the physical and digital holdings at the California State Parks, Photographic Archives and Department Archives, publications, unpublished materials, web resources, professional manuals, historical books, journal articles, and meetings conducted by the author with California State Parks staff members. Through a multifaceted process of collections assessment, database analysis, and data curation, the author recovered almost all missing data. Long-term planning for database system migration, proper staff training, and consistent, periodic data curation assessments will help archives better provide access for their constituents.
California was one of the first states in the nation to have a state park system. While a general history of the system up to 1980 has been written, the history of interpretation in the California Department of Parks and Recreation (more commonly know as California State Parks) had never been documented and analyzed in a single focused study. Of particular interest is how the evolution of interpretation in the California state park system compares to that in the rest of the United States, especially the National Park Service. Data for this thesis was gathered from many sources. For the history of California State Parks interpretation these included the department document archives and photographic archives, the California State Archives, the Center for Sacramento History, California State Parks publications, and private collections of department documents made available to the author. The author also conducted three oral history interviews with past department employees. These oral histories will be deposited in the California State Parks Archives, in both digital recording and transcript form. The national context was also researched using a wide variety of sources. The website of the National Association for Interpretation and a publication from that organization provided a broad overview of the development of interpretation in the United States, as did seminal works on interpretation theory written throughout the twentieth century, and historical books and journal articles on interpretive techniques, trends, and issues. Additional information, especially on specific interpretive methods, came from the National Park Service. The study reveals that interpretation became increasingly professionalized in California State Parks throughout the twentieth century, as it did nationwide during the same period. In virtually all cases, interpretive techniques, training and planning lagged behind the National Park Service--usually about a decade behind. The main reason for this seems to be chronically insufficient funding and staffing to carry out programs, not a lack of knowledge of what was occurring in the National Park Service and other agencies. In the case of distance learning, California State Parks was a pioneer, and still is ahead of the National Park Service and other park agencies in the nation in having a system-wide organized program of distance learning.
The first park ranger in the world was appointed in California in 1866. Galen Clark was chosen as "Guardian of Yosemite," at what was then Yosemite State Park, and the concept of rangers to protect and administer America's great nature parks was born. The tradition continued in 1872 with the establishment of the first national park at Yellowstone. From the earliest days, park rangers have been romanticized; they are explorers, outdoorsmen, tree lovers, animal protectors, police officers, nature guides, and park administrators. The park ranger has become an American icon, whose revered image has maintained itself to this very day.