One of my favorite parts of working with the library's document collection is getting to take in all the imagery. In his poem "A Supermarket in California," Allen Ginsberg describes walking through the grocery store as "shopping for images." That's exactly how it feels to thumb through a cart full of documents—it's like shopping for images on the front covers of assorted plans and reports. It's a similar act to flipping through crates of vinyl at a record store, patiently waiting for a cover to catch your eye among a sea of unfamiliarity. One of my personal favorite cover designs I’ve come across is for "Small Area Population Projections for Health Planning."
After the items are digitized, we perform a quality control check of the scanned documents. I enjoy this step because it allows me to spend a little more time with the cover imagery, as well as the content inside the documents. A large portion of the collection's documents have graphs, diagrams, charts, and maps that are often just as thoughtfully arranged and presented as the cover images. Here's an example I liked from the 1994 City of San Buenaventura downtown specific plan:
There's always something interesting to see, as each cart holds dozens of documents from all over California. The 50+ year date range of the collection also adds another layer of interest, as you can see how design trends evolve over the decades.
Because of the project's specific scope, most of the documents are of the same "types," like city general plans or environmental impact reports, but every document is still completely unique. In a way, each document is unlike anything else you've seen while simultaneously being incredibly similar to all the documents surrounding it. They serve the same purpose and are structured in the same ways, but each document still maintains its own sense of aura, emerging from a specific moment in history, serving specific political and social goals, and representing itself through the aesthetics of its graphic design.
Every document in the collection says a lot more than what is written in its pages. This idea comes out most succinctly, in my opinion, by taking a couple of extra moments to look at the front cover designs, which has easily become my favorite part of working here.
