Welcome
The Portola Valley Heritage Center is located at the library, 765 Portola Road. It has been created and is staffed by members of the Historic Resources Group. Use this site to browse, search and view the town's historical archives. Click any of the topics below with the green header to learn more about using the site. Most of the files here are digital copies of the originals housed at the center. So, pay us a visit.
The front room consists of a small museum, a collection of local authors’ works, and a bound collection of Country Almanacs from 1967-2001. It is open whenever the library is, generally 10 AM – 5 PM.
The back room contains archival materials: the Regnery Collection and such items as an index to the Almanacs, negatives of photos from the paper, various maps, drawings, documents, art works, and newspaper clippings. It is open on Tuesdays from 3-5 PM or by appointment.
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:
- 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.