The NMSU Library faculty, staff, and students working on the National Endowment for the Humanities digitization grant were awarded the Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists’ Special Projects Award for 2024.  The project, an effort to digitize thousands of pages of correspondence from the Amador family, a prominent Mexican American family who settled in Las Cruces in the late 1840’s, began in 2022 and will continue until 2025.  The faculty and staff team members include Monika Glowacka-Musial, Dennis Daily, Matthew Martinez, Jennifer Olguin, Michael Roth, Brita Sauer, Tiffany Schirmer, Elizabeth Villa. Students who have worked on the project include Gaby Gutierrez, Oscar Garcia, Brandy Lozano, Melissa Perez, Emily Duke, Yadira Leyva, Ruby Corona, Angeles Tena, Celeste Cervantes, Ana Villar Licon, and Yanelhy Inzurriaga. 

The award was given on May 31st in Reno, Nevada during CIMA’s annual meeting.  The awards program included the following information about the project: “Funded by an NEH grant, the multi-year project is digitizing over 15,000 pages of family correspondence, largely written in Spanish, and adding metadata in both English and Spanish. The website for the project includes information about the Amador family, the collection, and the digitization project, in addition to the digitized material.  From the nomination letter submitted on the project’s behalf, “...students working on the project need to understand the technical aspects of the work, but they [also] need to translate and understand Spanish-language handwriting from over 100 years ago. This makes the Amador Digitization Project truly focused on multiple areas of student learning, critical thinking, and engagement with archival collections and history in addition to the digitization goals of the project.”  Associate Professor Monika Glowacka-Musial accepted the award on behalf of the team.

To learn more about the project, visit https://library.nmsu.edu/neh-amador-project/digitization-project.html; to search the digitized Amador family correspondence, visit https://nmsu.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/amadorfamily/search.