San Francisco Voter Information Pamphlets

San Francisco Public Library received a Library Services and Technology grant to finance the digital scanning and microfilming of the Library's print collection of voter information pamphlets for San Francisco elections. Dating back to 1907 through the most previous election, this growing collection is a chronicle of all municipal, special and general elections held in San Francisco for the 20th and 21st centuries. The original historical pamphlets were printed on newsprint-quality paper and are extremely fragile. To extend the availability of the materials, a major goal of the project was to preserve the pamphlets in alternative formats and create an Internet-accessible version. A microfilm copy was deposited with the California State Library. Approximately 60,000 voter pamphlet pages, including over 2,000 propositions, were digitized into PDF files. For some elections, separate pamphlets were created for each voting district or a combination of each voting district and political party, resulting in no singular representative pamphlet which includes all of the candidates for that election. As a result, the hard copies of the various pamphlets were bound together to represent that particular election, and this resulted in extra-large digitized versions.