About the Regional History Project, UC Santa Cruz

The Regional History Project was started in July of 1963 at a time when the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California was still in the planning stages. Its major purpose was to interview longtime residents of the Central California Coast area whose comments would add significantly to the sketchy and inadequate written history of the region. A number of the interviews have concentrated on the economic history of the area (e.g. redwood lumbering, coastal dairying, apple packing and shipping) although such interviews also cover the social and cultural history of the region. In 1967 the Project expanded its scope to include a series of interviews on University history and the Lick Observatory. As oral history projects in the country have proliferated so has student and academic interest and the Library no longer runs a discrete oral history program but instead provides guidance to others in using the medium.