LACHS Webinar - A talk with Christina Rice: Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection

LACHS Webinar from October 22, 2020

A presentation with Christina Rice, Senior Librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection. Christina introduces us to LAPL Photo Collection, which contains images from the 1850s to the present, documenting all aspects of life in Southern California, with an emphasis on Los Angeles. She also shares some tips and tricks for effectively searching the online collection. 

About the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection

The Los Angeles Public Library began collecting photographs sometime before World War II and amassed a collection of about 13,000 images by the late 1950s. In 1981, when Los Angeles celebrated its 200th birthday, Security Pacific National Bank gave its noted collection of historical photographs to the people of Los Angeles to be archived at the Central Library. Since then, LAPL has been fortunate to receive other major collections and special archives, making the Library a resource worldwide for visual images.

The library has been digitizing photos since 1998 and was one of the first public libraries to do so. To date, over 133,000 images have been digitized and made accessible online at tessa.lapl.org/photocol with hundreds more added each month.

About Christina Rice

Christina Rice is the Senior Librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection, a position she has held for eleven of her fifteen years with the library. She is the author of Ann Dvorak: Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel (University Press of Kentucky, 2013) and the forthcoming Mean…Moody…Magnificent! Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend (University Press of Kentucky, 2021). She lives in North Hollywood with her husband, writer Joshua Hale Fialkov and their daughter.