Carlene Tanigoshi Tinker, a retired teacher and school counselor with Fresno Unified School District, recently completed a scanning and editing project for the Special Collections Research Center at the Henry Madden Library, donating approximately 1,266 hours of her time over 8 years.

Carlene's project involved digitizing an almost complete set of newsletters produced in the Granada Relocation Center, the internment camp in Amache, Colorado where Japanese Americans from the Los Angeles area were sent during World War II (including Carlene and her family). These newsletters were written and mimeographed by hand by the internees themselves from September 1942 to May 1944.

For decades the newsletters were preserved by Carlene's uncle, George Shitara, until he decided to give them to her in 2009. In turn, she and her husband, John Tinker, professor emeritus in sociology at Fresno State, donated the newsletters to the Library and then offered to first do the work of scanning all of the newsletters, and then to correct the scanned text so it could be searchable.

Carlene talks about how rewarding an experience working on the newsletters has been and how much she's learned about the history of the Japanese American internment experience, connecting her to her own family's past. As just a child during the war, Carlene has very few memories of the time but has made it her mission to learn and actively serve to preserve this history. She volunteers every other summer at the Amache archaeological site led by Dr. Bonnie Clark at the University of Denver and has conducted several oral histories with internment camp survivors along with Dr. Howard Ono, Professor Emeritus in Chemistry.

Carlene's latest project is to capture the memories of Japanese Americans during the post-war period. Starting this fall, she will be doing oral history interviews with Japanese Americans in the Central Valley for the Special Collections Research Center.

The Library congratulates Carlene on a job well done, one that never would have been accomplished without her. Her hard work and dedication were invaluable. Volunteers like her are priceless. Hats off to Carlene!