WRCA welcomes donations of appropriate historic and contemporary materials related to water issues in California and the West. We actively seek books, reports, manuscripts, directories, journals, photographs, maps, atlases, and videos on all aspects of water resources development and use.

Potential donors include water and irrigation districts, engineers, consulting firms, lawyers specializing in water issues, authors, and environmental organizations. WRCA also seeks unpublished materials such as correspondence, minutes, and legal records that document an organization's history. For example, the Mono Lake Committee donated papers it compiled during its fight to Save Mono Lake.

Recent donations include:

• The American Rivers collection of technical and legal materials relating to river restoration and the removal of dams. The nine cartons of published and organizational documents include information about dams across the United States and endangered rivers. These materials have been added to the Clearinghouse for Dam Removal Information and also are searchable in the Melvyl® catalog.


• The Tulare Litigation Exhibits Collection, consisting of trial exhibits from the 2001 case Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District v. United States. Irrigators in the district sued the government after the Bureau of Reclamation shut down water deliveries in order to protect endangered fish. The court ruled that the government could protect the fish but that irrigation contracts required it to pay the district for the water it took. The collection (9 ms boxes) is currently being processed.


• The Dividing the Waters Collection (1993 - ongoing), consisting of legal and otherwise relevant materials related to western water adjudications and other complex water litigation. An electronic finding aid is available online.

Materials donated to the Archives are acknowledged in our annual report. Please contact Linda Vida for more information.

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Profile of a Donor: ANN RILEY

Two threads are woven through all of Ann Riley’s water-related work. She’s focused on restoring rivers and creeks, and she’s made sure the records of those projects are housed at the Water Resources Center Archives.

When Riley was a student of Luna Leopold at UC-Berkeley, working on river and flood plain restoration, she learned that "the Archives has one of the best historical records on that topic." And, like her mentor, she came to believe in the value of keeping good records on the condition of rivers. "They’re dynamic," she says. "They change over time."

So when she took a job at the California Department of Water Resources, she sent its reports to WRCA. The department was producing "bulletins of ecological importance on riparian rivers; I wanted them available to the public and other water agencies, so I made sure the Archives got copies."

She next served as executive director of the nonprofit Waterways Restoration Institute, a position she still holds. The institute was developing demonstration river restoration projects and, Riley says, "it was important that there be a place where everybody could send materials and share information in this new field." Again, WRCA was her choice.

In her current position as Watershed and River Restoration Advisor at the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, Riley continues to send materials to WRCA. Her contributions have an added benefit: "I get a lot of requests for information from consulting firms, and I can say, ‘It’s in the Archives.’"