A photo of young Samuel R. Delany in the frame with the contemporary Jay Kay, taken during on a visit to UC Riverside in 2011.

To the science fiction community, 

I’m Dr. Phoenix Alexander, the Klein Librarian for Science Fiction and Fantasy here at University of California, Riverside, where I steward the Eaton Collection: one of the world’s largest cataloged collections of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and related genre materials. I’m also a published author of over 20 short stories in venues such as F&SF, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, and The Dark, and serve on SFWA’s History Committee. 

I joined UCR Library in 2022, but as you might know, we began digitization of the Jay Kay Klein photographs back in 2017, publishing just under 6,000 images onto a publicly accessible digital repository, Calisphere, as part of a mass digitization pilot initiative. During this pilot initiative, we solicited community feedback on the descriptions of the photos, utilizing a Google form and later a comment function on Calisphere itself. From Fall 2019 to Summer 2021, the UCR Library undertook a comprehensive review project, led by Andrew Lippert, Special Collections Processing Archivist, to update all of the titles and descriptions for the Klein photos on Calisphere, incorporating the voluminous and extraordinarily helpful community feedback received since the initial publication of the photos.

Over the last few years, we’ve continued to digitize the remaining 57,000 images from the Klein collection (an ongoing project that will take many more years to complete, as you can imagine!), but we’re delighted to announce the publication of the first of eleven boxes of photos, comprising almost 2,000 images of 47 conventions and events.

To share hundreds of photos more quickly with the community, we decided to implement a two-phase approach to our descriptions. Some photos from the new box will appear with basic information about the convention or event they belong to, with Klein’s original identifiers for his images as temporary titles. These will be updated later with more details about the people and topics depicted. Other photos will have descriptions already enhanced by myself and Andrew Lippert, both subject specialists (albeit not infallible ones!). We will continue describing and publishing the remainder of the photos, one box at a time, in chronological order.

Once again, we welcome feedback from the community to assist with identifications in the photos. We have compiled a web page with guidance on commenting practices to ensure that your time and labor is respected, and that your feedback will be most helpful to us as we continue to review, add, and amend the descriptions of these images. As science fiction fans and experts, we are of course familiar with the well-known figures of the genre that you’ll see in these collections—so if possible please avoid identifying figures such as Asimov, Heinlein, Pohl, and others of similar notoriety. Your feedback will be most valuable in identifying the lesser-known individuals in the photographs, in particular, fan attendees. 

In the Jay Kay Klein photograph collection each individual photo is on its own webpage. Click the photo to open the page. The ‘Item Information’ section has a description containing identifications made on earlier passes. Are you able to add one?  We use Disqus to collect comments giving us identifications. There is a button to ‘JOIN THE DISCUSSION’. Click that button, and existing comments will be displayed with the newest identifications. You will be able to add your own.

We’re honored to be able to make these wonderful snapshots of the SF community publicly accessible in the years to come, and thank you in advance for your patience and generosity! If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at [email protected]. 

Many thanks, 

Phoenix & the UCR team 

Jay Kay Klein (left), Frederik Pohl (right) at the 1966 Worldcon in Cleveland.