The Sonoma County Library's Digital Collections make available a variety of digitized historical materials and other resources from our Special Collections locations (History & Genealogy Library, Petaluma History Room and Sonoma County Wine Library and the Sonoma County Library Archives) and from a number of partner organizations. Digital Collections includes -- with the exception of the full finding aids for our archival collections -- all of our local digital collections and projects on a single platform. Current resources include:

The Digital Collections is a Sonoma County Library program, funded by Measure Y funds and other sources. Until 2017, the Sonoma County Advertising Program (now known as the Community Investment Fund Program) provided much of our funding, with additional project funding for the Sonoma County Visionaries, Immigrants and Wine Makers Collection supplied by our partner organizations and Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grants provided by the California State Library through the Califa Library Group.

Funding for the Sonoma County Bar Association Collection and the Luther Burbank Home & Gardens Collection supplied by the Bar Association and by the City of Santa Rosa, respectively. The Library has also directly supported by the time and talent of the participants in digitization projects since their inception in 1996.

You Can Contribute to Digital Collections!

Do you have new information about a photograph in our collections -- particularly for one with unidentified locations and people? We have, unfortunately, many such images (also check out our Flickr collection of unidentified images). Please contact us directly. We also welcome offers of donations of photographs or other materials related to Sonoma County history and life. See our FAQs for information about how you can donate.

You are welcome to reuse images and other materials on this site under the terms noted below, including Web-quality versions of images available for download on the individual item pages.

The Sonoma County Library, the Western Sonoma County Historical Society and other partner institutions whose digitized images and other materials are included in the Library's Digital Collections, make no assertions as to ownership of any original copyrights to these materials and can claim only physical ownership of the materials described in these records.

However, these materials are intended for Personal or Research use only. Any other kind of use, including, but not limited to commercial or scholarly publication in any medium or format, public exhibition, or use online or in a web site, may be subject to additional restrictions, including but, not limited to the copyrights held by parties other than the Library and partner organizations.

User are solely responsible for determining the existence of such rights and for obtaining any permissions and/or paying associated fees necessary for the proposed use. Preferred credit line is: Courtesy, the Sonoma County Library (or partner organization as stated in the individual item information). For Sonoma County Library materials, please see additional reproduction and reuse information. For partner organizations' materials, please contact the respective organization (Western Sonoma County Historical Society or Luther Burbank Home & Gardens)

We acknowledge there may be language in our Digital Collections, as there may be in our Library catalog, that is outdated, harmful, biased, or inaccurate including, but not limited to, issues such as racism, colonialism, sexism, ableism, transphobia and homophobia. Such descriptions do not reflect the library’s viewpoint, but rather the social attitudes and circumstances of the period or place in which they were created.

We are committed to creating inclusive descriptions that document the history of our diverse communities in a respectful manner and recognize this work must be ongoing. We continually review our descriptions to identify harmful language and encourage you to contact library administration if you find language that causes concern in any of our subject headings, catalog records, finding aids or item descriptions.