The papers and eclectic artifacts of Pulitzer Prize winning environmentalist poet and former UC Davis faculty member Gary Snyder will be available to the public via an online index beginning in November.

He wrote poetry. He learned Japanese and Chinese. He practiced Buddhism. He helped spark the West Coast Beat Movement in San Francisco in the 1950s. He won a Pulitzer Prize. He taught at UC Davis. He co-founded the Nature and Culture program on campus. Now he’s going online.

Beginning in November, the California Digital Library’s Online Archive of California (OAC), located at http://www.oac.cdlib.org/, will host an online index of the papers of environmentalist poet and former UC Davis faculty member Gary Snyder. Due to copyright concerns, copies of items from the Gary Snyder Papers will not be placed on the Internet at this time. Instead, researchers may log on to view a detailed description of every item contained within the Gary Snyder Collection at UC Davis. After perusing the index online, scholars can then request to view items in UC Davis Special Collections in Shields Library.

Previous Issue Online Database Growing in Size and Content Electronic Library Resources Now Available Everywhere Beyond the Card Catalog: Library Research Tools Continue to Expand California Digital Library’s Online Archive of California (OAC) UC Davis Shields Library US Institute of Museum and Library Service Shields Library Electronic Collection: British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832 Shields Library Electronic Collection: Eastman’s Original Collection

An Eclectic Collection
Currently, one-third of the Snyder Papers consists of correspondence, some of it from literary greats such as Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen, but it also includes many unique artifacts such as audio and video recordings of poetry readings, t-shirts, buttons, flyers, art, and even a package of “Gary Snyder Pine Nuts.” Perhaps the most unusual item in the collection is a flattened cardboard toilet paper roll stamped and mailed to Snyder around 1970 with a written message from a friend.

Snyder began depositing manuscripts, letters, and other materials in Special Collections in 1975. He continued adding to the massive collection during his 1986-2002 tenure as English department faculty, and persists to the present day.

Two full-time archivists, Melissa Tyler and Sara Gunasekara, spent a year sorting through the 260 linear feet of material, dividing the Papers into 11 categories such as “works,” “correspondence,” “photographs,” and “memorabilia.” During the sorting process, Snyder made himself available to answer questions regarding his work, such as the meaning of a drawing and the identity of first-name-only correspondents, as well as clearing up questions regarding his works written in Asian languages.

How Libraries Go Online
Catapulting the contents of the neat, gray, acid-free archival boxes from Shields Library Special Collections to the World Wide Web is no small feat. Once libraries have the time, money and staff to go online, there is a rigorous and labor-intensive process ahead of them. The project would not have been possible without the $86,800 grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Electronic Resource Librarian Jared Campbell and Programmer Jim Sylva developed templates at UC Davis that allowed archivists and student employees to enter data concerning the Snyder collection into the computer. The system went through the templates each night and transformed the information into Expanded Archival Description (EAD) format. Sylva and Campbell also dealt with small technical issues that cropped up, such as ensuring that the program normalized dates according to standard.
Developed at UC Berkeley in the early 1990’s and publicly released in 1997, EAD standards provided the structure that allows multiple institutions to contribute data into one Web site. Researchers can tap into a finding aid on the site that enables them to search across collections, a major step up from yesterday’s typewritten paper indexes.

“ Previously, each University had its own home-grown version of digital description,” says University Archivist John Skarstad. “EAD standardized the methods.”

The Gary Snyder Papers will be one of the most detailed finding aids on the Online Archive of California (OAC), which is the online library archive for the nine UC campuses and other universities and museums throughout California.

“ Now by searching the OAC, a researcher could track correspondence from Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder and vice-versa and find all of it,” says Programmer Jim Sylva. “It’s pretty powerful. The researcher could be working from Timbuktu.”

Daryl Morrison, Project Director and Head of Special Collections, says the Snyder Papers will be important to biographers, faculty, students, and Snyder enthusiasts who want to understand Snyder’s impact as a writer and environmental activist.

Library Offers Other Online Archives
Other electronic collections at Shields Library include texts from British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832, available at http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/English/BWRP/ and photographs from the Eastman’s Originals Collection, available at http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/specol/html/newstuff.html. Special Collections is also working on a UC-wide California Cultures project hosted by the OAC that will include both images and text.