Welcome
Welcome to the archives from the Portola Valley Historic Resources Group (HRG). Use this site to browse, search, and view the historic archives managed by the town.
Many of the archives on this site are digital copies of the originals that are stored in our offices at the town's main library - and some items are only available at our office. Feel free to stop by during our office hours to view any item.
Click any of the topics below (green header) to learn more about using this site.
Need to write instructions, or provide a link to instructions, on where to begin using this site....
Mark Is the Man.
There are a few ways to search our archives:
- Keyword Browse - click on a keyword of interest and see all of the records that have that keyword.
- Browse - you can scroll through the files from the "Browse" menu item at the top, or browse the pre-defined Collections also from the top menu.
- Simple Search - using the search box at the top right of every page, search for a specific word in any part of the archives. Use wildcard characters (* and ?) to search for any characters (*) or any one character (?).
- Advanced Search - click the Advanced Search hyperlink next to the Search filed at the top of the window to perofrm more flexible or specific searches. You can perform partial matches, "boolean logic", search specific properties (also known as fields), and so on.
The Town of Portola Valley has been collecting a wide range of material related to the town's history - both physical and digital records
Many of the physical items have been either scanned or photographed and added to this site - if they haven't been digitized yet, you will see a note on the item to stop by the office if you'd like to view it.
The site includes viewers for most of the file types in the site, and feel free to download any of the files.
This website is a database of records that can be searched and have been grouped in various ways to help organize the data.
Each item in the archive is a record that includes various data fields - also called Properties - and usually (but not always) includes one ore more media files (for example, an image, video, PDF, document, spreadsheet, etc).
Items have been grouped into Collections based on various criteria. These sets help provide a starting point for browsing a given topic.
In addition, you will also see items have been tagged with keywords to help locating information