The Japanese American National Museum, through its Hirasaki National Resource Center (HNRC), has established the Civil Liberties Archives and Study Center (CLASC) in which a comprehensive collection of materials documenting the Japanese American experience of exclusion, incarceration, and resettlement is being assembled and made publicly accessible.
Specifically, the Museum has proposed to:
- undertake the full cataloging and photographic and digital reformatting of an initial 3,000 historically significant artifacts related to Japanese American internment from its permanent collections;
- provide guidelines and assistance in cataloging and descriptive standards for repositories with holdings on the internment experience in order to make the information available through the Museum and through a national bibliographic utility; and
- actively solicit the products of the research and educational projects sponsored by CLPEF to establish a publicly accessible central repository and clearinghouse for them.
The materials acquired, cataloged, and preserved through this multi-faceted effort will be made accessible in a number of ways:
- through the Museum's World Wide Web site;
- through the creation of a Guide to the Resources of the Civil Liberties Archives and Study Center, to be distributed in digital format;
- through the uploading of descriptive data to the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN), a national bibliographic utility which provides bibliographic access to major research libraries and special collections;
- through the ongoing reference and research services provided by the professional staff of the Hirasaki National Resource Center to on-site and remote users;
- through the on-site and national public programs of the Museum, the materials gathered and rendered accessible as a result of the CLASC will continue to be interpreted and presented in meaningful ways.
The Civil Liberties Archives and Study Center project is made possible by a grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund