A concert flier, a family photograph, a neighborhood organization’s meeting minutes, a City department’s records—each offers firsthand evidence of lives lived and decisions made. October is American Archives Month, an opportunity to celebrate these connections to our past and the work that keeps them accessible to future generations.

At the San Francisco Public Library's Archives & Special Collections, we preserve materials that help us understand our city, its people, and its history. Archivists assess, organize, describe and care for records in many forms, from handwritten letters to digital files, and help people discover them. This work supports discovery, government accountability and our ability to examine the stories we inherit.

As City Archivist, I also think about whose experiences are missing from the historical record. Building archives that better reflect San Francisco means working with communities whose histories have been overlooked and recognizing the knowledge and care people bring to preserving their own stories.

This month’s programs and exhibitions offer many ways to explore what archives make possible—from San Francisco’s punk scene to its history of protest and the campaigns that shaped its image as a travel destination. You don’t need to be a historian to use our collections. Bring your curiosity, your questions and your interest in the city we share.

- Adrienne Storey, City Archivist

Panel: Archiving Punk

Inside the San Francisco Punk Archive

Explore the San Francisco Punk Archive and learn how archivists preserve local subcultures and community stories. Join us for a conversation on preserving community culture as Christina Moretta (Photo Curator and Manager of the San Francisco History Center), Freya Channing (archivist for the San Francisco Punk Archive), and Penelope Houston (singer/songwriter for the legendary punk band The Avengers) discuss how punk materials enter the archive, how their stories are understood through provenance, and how archivists transform fliers, photographs, and personal collections into accessible historical resources.

Held in connection with Alle gegen Alles Punk@50 at the Goethe-Institut this program features a slideshow of rare materials from the collection, a panel discussion, and an audience Q&A session.

Wednesday, October 7th, 2026: 6:00pm

Goethe-Institut San Francisco
657 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94105

Goethe-Institut San Francisco Website

sfhistory@sfpl.org

Presentation: Moving Image and Memory: Keeping Film Alive

See and hear a selection of clips from the Prelinger Archives film collection presented by archivists Jen Miko and Kristin Lipska. What is film and why should we care for it? What delight can we find in the never-meant-to-be-seen - strictly utilitarian - clapperboard footage from outtakes? What does it look like when film suffers environmental assaults? What happens when a man with a microphone interviews people on San Francisco's Market street in 1949 as a way to promote the sale of television sets? Discover these collection highlights and more, and learn a bit about film preservation. What easy steps can you take to preserve your media collection while storing it at home?

Jen Miko (she/her) is a film archivist and Kristin Lipska (she/her) is digital asset manager at Prelinger Archives where they work together to scan film, describe the content, and share and preserve the digital files for a large collection of home movies, industrial outtakes, and educational and sponsored films.

Thursday, October 8th, 2026: 6:30pm

Koret Auditorium - Lower Level

Main Library

100 Larkin Street

sfphoto@sfpl.org

Film: Pensoyungkum — People with the Pencil

Hopi filmmaker Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva) honors the Hopi 19 while fostering understanding of Indigenous sovereignty, cultural resilience and the legacy of federal assimilation policy through his documentary film Pensoyungkum: People with the Pencil.

In 1894 nineteen Hopi men from the village of Hotevilla were arrested by the U.S. Military and charged with sedition for refusing to send their children to government boarding schools. After a 65-mile forced march, they were transported by train to San Francisco and imprisoned at Alcatraz for ten months, never formally charged, before being returned to Hopi land and reunited with their families.

Film screening to be followed by discussion by Hopi elders and youth. 

NR, 58 mins., 2023. No closed captions provided. 

Tuesday, October 13th, 2026: 5:00pm

Koret Auditorium - Lower Level

Main Library

100 Larkin Street

governmentinfo@sfpl.org

Presentation: Changing Commons Walking Tour

Explore Downtown and SOMA through the places, histories, and cityscapes that evoke the world of Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City. Led by Shaping San Francisco, this walking tour moves from high rises and Chinatown streets to rooftop outlooks, memorials, and other elevated sites, inviting participants to imagine San Francisco across time.

The tour is just under two miles and includes a couple of steep slopes and a staircase. Rain or shine.

Starting Point: Transamerica Redwood Park at the Transamerica Pyramid. Enter from Sansome, Washington, or Clay Street.

Space limited. Reservations required. (starting October 2).

Friday, October 16th, 2026: 12:00pm

Transamerica Redwood Park
600 Montgomery St
San Francisco, CA 94111

sfphoto@sfpl.org

Activity: Halloween Broadside Printing Event

Experience letterpress printing on the Library's 1909 Albion handpress and take home a unique keepsake to celebrate Halloween. The American Printing History Association's NorCal Chapter will provide printing assistance. 

Everyone is invited, but broadsides will be limited to the first 100 people.

Presented by Book Arts & Special Collections.

Saturday, October 17th, 2026: 2:00pm

Book Arts & Special Collections - 6th Floor

Main Library

100 Larkin Street

bookarts@sfpl.org

Social: San Francisco Correspondence Co-op

Explore the world of mail art with the San Francisco Correspondence Co-op, a monthly social club for snail mail artists, letter writers and people who love the USPS. If this sounds like you, then you've come to the right place. The Co-op is a lively group of beginner mail artists as well as practitioners making some mail art together, sharing ideas and having fun. The Co-op meets the third Sunday of every month; no meeting in December.

Presented by Book Arts & Special Collections.

Sunday, October 18th, 2026: 1:00pm

Learning Studio - 5th Floor

Main Library

100 Larkin Street

bookarts@sfpl.org

Presentation: Destination San Francisco

A glimpse into the archives highlighting the golden age of San Francisco travel

Explore how San Francisco became a global tourist destination through decades of promotional campaigns, from evocative travel posters and airline memorabilia to advertising that shaped the city’s image around the world. It is easy to take the global allure of San Francisco for granted, but “Everybody’s Favorite City” is not an international destination by chance. Quite the opposite: its appeal has been nurtured by decades of promotional efforts to make people from around the world want to come and see what the fuss is all about.

For a fascinating glimpse into how the story has been spun, be on hand as former San Francisco Chronicle design critic John King and SFO Museum curator Samuel Scott dip into the archives of both the museum and the Library's History Center to show how they put together “Destination: San Francisco,” an exhibition on view at the SFO museum’s home in the International Terminal through January of 2027.

It’s quite a story: the commercial airline industry has been a key player in the touristic mythmaking for 90 years, using everything from evocative travel posters to matchbooks and playing cards to stir interest. The city’s convention and visitors’ bureau, meanwhile, launched ad campaigns on all fronts and shifted its messaging to respond to changing times – but never dropping such well-known icons as Golden Gate Bridge and the cable cars from the mix.

5 p.m. - Hand's On History with San Francisco History Center archives

6 p.m. - Presentation by John King and Samuel Scott

Thursday, October 22nd, 2026: 5:00pm

Saroyan Area - 6th Floor

Main Library

100 Larkin Street

sfplcpp@sfpl.org

One City One Book:

Awake in the Floating City

San Francisco Public Library’s 2026 One City One Book selection is the debut novel by San Francisco author and artist Susanna Kwan, Awake in the Floating City. Set in a future San Francisco transformed by rising waters, the novel follows Bo, an artist, and Mia, an elderly woman, whose unlikely relationship brings memory, art, caregiving, loss and belonging into focus. As the city around them changes, Kwan asks what we hold onto when the places we love are transformed—and how we preserve the stories that make a place home.

Thou Drawest All Things: San Francisco by Its Artists 
Selections from the San Francisco History Center

01 October, 2026 - 07 January, 2027

San Francisco History Center Exhibit Space - 6th Floor

Harry Washington Seawell (1865-1945), [Chinese men reading billboard], 1901.

San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

Over the years, the San Francisco History Center archives has welcomed gifts of original works of art. This exhibition presents a selection of drawings, watercolors, lithographs and etchings that illuminate life in San Francisco across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Lands End to the county line, explore how visual artists have interpreted this kaleidoscopic city. 

Curated by San Francisco History Center librarian Tom Carey. The works on view are drawn from the San Francisco Collection of Works on Paper. 

The American Indian Cultural District's

Mapping Genocide

04 September, 2026 - 21 January, 2027

Government Information Center - 5th Floor

The American Indian Cultural District's Mapping Genocide exhibition examines San Francisco's legacy of commemorating the ideologies and individuals who spearheaded the genocide and displacement of American Indians through public art in the Civic Art Collection and street place names in San Francisco.

Through visual art, sculpture, mapping and documented interviews, the exhibition explores whose histories have been celebrated in the public realm and whose have been erased. It confronts these difficult truths while reimagining the future of public art, monuments and place names through an Indigenous lens.

This interactive exhibition expands public understanding of San Francisco's history by elevating Native perspectives, increasing the visibility of American Indian cultures and histories and fostering community dialogue about truth, healing and representation.

Presentation: Mapping Genocide with San Francisco's American Indian Cultural District

Little Brown Dolls No More:

The Rise of Filipino Boxers in the Squared Circle

21 August, 2026 - 14 January, 2027

Filipino American Center Exhibit Space - 3t Floor

Little Brown Dolls No More: The Rise of Filipino Boxers in the Squared Circle pays reverence to Filipino boxers and their innovation to American boxing, a colonial import turned powerful expression of identity, resilience and resistance. The “little brown doll of the Philippines” was a patronizing nickname used by sports writers in the 1920s and 1930s to refer to Filipino boxers. The boxing ring or “the squared circle,” however, became a platform for these fighters to claim dignity, pride and visibility in the early twentieth century amid racial tensions and American empire expansion. 

This exhibit traces the evolution of the sport from the Presidio of San Francisco where the first American troops were deployed to the Philippines for the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), and then back to San Francisco where these young Filipino men threw their first punches on American soil, and where a fighter forgotten by history named Francisco “Pancho Villa” Guilledo became the first Filipino flyweight boxing world champion in 1923. Many other Filipino boxers would follow Pancho Villa to train and fight in San Francisco at legendary gyms and venues like Civic Auditorium, Dreamland and Newman’s Gym. 

Eyewitness to the Resistance:

Photojournalists on the Front Lines of Protest

17 September, 2026 - 31 December, 2026

Art, Music & Recreation Center Exhibit Space - 4th Floor

Protest photography records more than a crowd. It captures the messages people carry, the coalitions they form, the spaces they occupy and the responses their presence provokes. It also reflects a photographer’s choices: where to stand, when to press the shutter and which moment will represent a larger event.

Historical photographs from the San Francisco History Center are presented alongside recent work by Pro Bono Photo photographers. Together, the images trace continuities in public protest while recognizing the distinct history, purpose and stakes of each movement.

Presented in connection with Eyewitness to the Resistance: Photojournalists on the Front Lines of Protest, an Oct. 22 panel discussion hosted by Indivisible San Francisco and Pro Bono Photo. Participating photographers will share their work and discuss the role of photojournalism in documenting protest, civic action and pro-democracy movements throughout the Bay Area.

The Unbuilding Archive:

Liberated Futures for the Site of Compton's Cafeteria Riot

June 4, 2026 - October 22, 2026

James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center - 3rd Floor

Image: Ach Kab, The Unbuilding Archive, 2026, digital collage.

Source images: Jennifer Cheek (1993); A.D. Bache (1853); Rincon Hill Panorama (c. 1851/1910), OpenSFHistory.

The Unbuilding Archive marks the 60th anniversary of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot, the first well-documented trans and queer uprising against police violence in the country, at the crossroads of Turk and Taylor Streets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. Today, the building at 101-121 Taylor Street is occupied by GEO Group, the largest private prison corporation in the country and main contractor with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to operate detention centers, continuing an occupation of carceral power at a site of historic resistance.

In response, the TurkxTaylor Initiative and the broader Compton’s x Coalition have emerged to liberate the site and imagine an alternative future that honors its legacy of resistance. We approach the building as a microcosm where interconnected structures of oppression—colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and ableism—can be dismantled at a local scale to uncover possibilities for collective liberation.

This exhibition centers trans liberation while recognizing that all systems of domination are intertwined. We begin with the building’s current carceral occupation, tracing its transformation back to its construction in 1908, and grounding our imagination in the land itself by honoring the Ramaytush Ohlone stewardship. From that space, we share speculative works developed through community workshops, drawing from Susan Stryker’s archival materials, and offering expansive visions for transforming Compton’s into a space where liberated futures can be imagined and built together.

From the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor

Food Play by Saxton Freymann (2006). Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor

Ideas for carving your pumpkin and other vegetables for the holiday!

Destination: San Francisco

May 9, 2026 - January 10, 2027

SFO International Terminal

Aviation Museum & Library, Departures Level 3 - Pre-Security

SFO Museum has partnered with SFPL's San Francisco History Center and local historian and former San Francisco Chronicle urban design critic John King on a new exhibition, Destination: San Francisco. The exhibition   offers a vibrant look at how our city built its identity as a world‑class travel destination—tracing decades of promotional efforts from iconic brochures and bold graphic design to imaginative marketing campaigns. The San Francisco History Center's San Francisco Travel Association Records  collection provided rich context for this story .

This exhibition is a wonderful opportunity to see how SFPL’s archival collections are interpreted and brought to life in a museum setting. If you can, take time to visit SFO and explore the city’s travel history.

Pre‑security access; no ticket required.

Read the press release for more information.