Collections

A collection of baskets by American Indian women is housed in the Yosemite Museum. Lucy Telles, pictured, demonstrated basket-making to visitors from 1930 until her death in 1955.

Yosemite's resources are captured within a flourishing museum collection that protects more than 4 million items, including John Muir's tin cup, Thomas Hill's oil paintings, and 100,000 historic park photographs. The 1922 donation of an Indian basket collection helped inspire the park to build a museum in Yosemite Valley that opened in 1926.

Yosemite Museum
The Yosemite Museum has the honor of being the first museum built as a museum in the National Park Service. The collection is home to more than a million historic records and another million archeological artifacts. View the current Views & Visitors: The Yosemite Experience in the Early 20th Century. (View highlights of past exhibits, such as the 2011 Yosemite Renaissance XXVI and the 2010 Views & Visitors exhibit about the 19th century.)

The Yosemite Museum herbarium collection has significant regional holdings, with 8,000 specimens dating from the early part of the 20th century to the present. While most of the collections date from the 1920s - 1960s, it is an actively growing herbarium with over 3,000 vascular plant specimens added in the last ten years. The herbarium is a valuable component of the park's museum collections and is an essential tool for resource management: fire management, exotics programs, and vegetation management. It is also a valuable source of information to the scientific community about Yosemite's complex flora. Online access is available to the museum's herbarium courtesy of the Consortium of California Herbaria (choose "YM (Yosemite N.P. herbarium)" as the source). Access is granted to researchers by advance appointment; contact the park's registrar for details.

Yosemite Research Library
The Yosemite Research Library, maintained by the museum, is a research resource with some 10,000 books relevant to Yosemite, as well as photographs and articles. The library is open to the public; contact the park's librarian for details.

Yosemite Archives
The Yosemite Archives, located in El Portal, contains National Park Service records, personal papers, manuscript collections, and oral histories. Searchable finding aids are now available online. Several collections, including the Joseph Dixon collection [760 kb PDF], have been partially digitized and can be perused onsite using a computer database.

Research is by appointment; research hours are Mondays & Tuesdays 8 am-4:30 pm. To set an appointment, please call 209/379-1283.

• View the NPS Historic Photo Collection through the Harpers Ferry Center. Search for close to 90 images of Yosemite.
• The Mariposa County Library Photo Heritage webpage offers more than 50 images available to the public from Yosemite's photo collection.
• View the NPS Digital Image Archive for public domain images of hundreds of park sites, including Yosemite.
• The NPS Voyager Library Catalog offers an increasing number of digitized texts in the public domain accessed via links inserted to records. For other NPS library resources, use the "Quick Links to More Info" bar to search NPS Focus (a digital library & research station of many collections that offers one-stop seaching) and to search Online History Books organized by park name in a PDF format.
• View the NPS' history home page, with a constant stream of newly added documents spotlighted on the page. Also, find a history of the National Park Service and an alphabetical list of individual park histories.