IGS Library

Mandi Acevedo

PPIC Research Affiliate

Mandi Acevedo is a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California, where she works on criminal justice issues. Her prior research focuses on the intersection of race, police brutality, and public opinion. She is pursuing a master’s degree in public policy at Georgetown University and holds a BA in political science from the University of Florida.

Luci Susanto

PPIC Research Affiliate

Library

The IGS Library is one of the nation’s major collections in public administration, public affairs, and public policy. The library holds more than 400,000 volumes and is a depository for California local government documents.

Historical Bay Area Newspapers

The IGS Library has a unique collection Bay Area community newspapers in print, spanning the early 20th century through the mid-1970s. The following is a selected list of these newpapers, noting that runs are incomplete.

Many issues are available on-site and can be paged on-demand. Materials housed off-site at the Systemwide Shared Library Facility - North (SLF-N) need to be requested; allow 1 to 3 days for SLF-N requested materials to be available.

Please visit the IGS Library circulation...

A look back in time to understand our present: California local government publications from the 1976 Bicentennial

July 6, 2026
Paul D King

As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, it is the perfect moment to look back fifty years to the nation’s previous milestone: the 1976 Bicentennial.

Through the lens of the California Local Government Documents Digitization Collection, we can explore a range of the pressing issues that shaped local governance at the time. Across the...

Rails Across the Bay: Exploring a Forgotten Transportation Future

June 2, 2026
Kyra Eyerman

My role as a Digitization Technician here at IGSL involves manually digitizing local government documents page by page. At face value, government documents might appear trivial to the untrained eye, but in working with our collection I have been struck by the idea that all the little things that affect everyday life that we often take for granted in our cities, from the sounds we hear to the air we breathe, are the result of deliberate engineering and policy decisions, often made long before their full impacts were understood.

I was particularly captivated by the...

LoCALDig Project: One Million Pages and Counting!

May 5, 2026
Paul D King

As we approach summer, the IGS LoCAL Digitization Project is reaching a series of significant milestones. In just two years, the project has grown into a substantial digital collection, representing hundreds of cities and counties and capturing decades of local policy decisions. Few comparable archives of local government materials exist at this scale in a fully accessible digital format.

We officially reached our one millionth page digitized in March 2026! This page, from the...

California Local Government Pamphlets: Early Municipal Governance in Practice

January 9, 2026
Paul King

Rules (Including Classification) of the Civil Service Commission, City of San Diego, California
As...

Undocumented Immigrants in California: Evidence from Local Government Publications

February 26, 2026
Paul King
Undocumented Immigrants in California: Evidence from Local Government Publications

Undocumented immigration is among the most debated public policy issues in the United States. Estimates[1] from the Pew Research Center place the undocumented population at approximately 14 million nationwide as of 2023. California has long been central to discussions around undocumented...

Reading the Covers: Community and Change in Local Government Documents

April 10, 2026
Paul D King
Reading the Covers: Community and Change in Local Government Documents

As we digitize local government documents, certain cover designs begin to stand out. Many public documents follow a familiar pattern of cover imagery: text-heavy, highly formal, and primarily functional. However, in many documents produced after the late 1960’s, a different visual approach emerges: Children’s drawings, bright colors, scenes of families and neighborhoods, and other imagery that feel less formal and more approachable.

By the late 1960s, public attitudes...