LA Library

That was fun. Yesterday, I found a link to old photos of Los Angeles and collected half a dozen interesting ones from the Los Angeles library site. They use a database retrieval system that’s very similar to the one in the Denver Public library and it’s quite easy to use. Wouldn’t it be great if all libraries, everywhere, could be the repositories for our historic images?

I like to use the images in my journals; illustrating the story of my life. So the libraries (and the internet) are a great resource for the early images. But you do have to be careful and not let the added images create Word files that are too large to open without taking up all of your available memory. It’s easy to do.

And this morning I decided to look for images of the old Queen of Angels hospital, where I was born in 1940. I typed ‘hospital into the keyword section and was rewarded with 40 pages of pictorial history. Great stuff! Veteran’s hunger strike in 1981, Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, earthquakes, Mickey Cohen and Barbara Graham. All sorts of history could be found with that one simple word. But no Queen of Angels. I had to use Google to come up with this very recent color photo of the building. The building hadn’t changed; just the cars in the parking lot had.