Voices in Confinement: A Digital Archive of Japanese American Internees

The Bancroft Library is pleased to announce the publication of the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Digital Archive.

Notice of Japanese American Evacuation
Image credit: Lange, Dorothea –San Francisco, California. 4/11/42

The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Digital Archive is the result of a two-year grant generously funded by the National Park Service as part of the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. The grant titled, “Voices in Confinement: A Digital Archive of Japanese American Internees”, includes approximately 150,000 original items including the personal papers of internees, correspondence, extensive photograph collections, maps, artworks and audiovisual materials.

Selected from Bancroft’s vast holdings, these rich and often requested collections were digitally captured as high-quality archival TIFFs for preservation. Access images were created as JPEG image files and text searchable PDF formats for optimal accessibility. The project website provides context to our comprehensive digital archive with pointers to collection guides on the Online Archive of California and curated searches of digitized objects on the Calisphere website.

The project builds upon a previous grant conducted between 2011-2014 to digitize 100,000 pages from the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study. Together, these collections form one of the premier sources of digital documentation on Japanese American Confinement found anywhere.

View the Japanese American Evacuation & Resettlement Digital Archive Website: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/jacs

This project was funded, in part, by a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of the Interior.