If you have visited the NMSU Library Archives and Special Collections, you probably have some idea of the vast collections we hold of primary source research materials related to New Mexico and our borderlands region. The collections preserve countless stories of our region’s cultural heritage and of the people who have made this place home for centuries. Even if you haven’t visited us in person, you might be familiar with our holdings through the resources we make available on our website. Discovery tools and resources, such as the NMSU Library catalog (where all our Special Collections materials can be found), our photograph database, our online finding aids available through the New Mexico Archives Online, and our Digital Collections site, all help us disseminate information about the rich collections we hold.
Of these, our Digital Collections site gives the closest simulation of a “hands-on” archives experience. There, you can browse, search, view, and engage with high quality digital versions of our original manuscripts, records, photographs, and documents. During the past couple decades, the NMSU Library Digital Collections have grown into an extremely useful tool for research and discovery. The initial focus was on NMSU-related collections from our University Archives, such as yearbooks, annual course catalogs, Board of Regents minutes, Extension Service and Experiment Station reports, bulletins and circulars, university news releases, and the papers of one of our revered faculty members, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh.
Recently, with the help of some external grant funding, the ASC along with our colleagues in the Technical Services department have brought out a host of new digital collections. These collections come primarily from our Rio Grande Historical Collections, an archive of family papers, business records, literary papers, records of community organizations, photographs, and other unique materials that document our region. The funding for these projects came from a few significant grants received during the past two years that have helped us build our digital infrastructure - acquiring the equipment necessary to carry out the projects - and allowing us to hire an amazing workforce of NMSU students, who have performed the time-consuming work of digitizing and describing the collections.
The results of these efforts, 17 new collections with nearly 2,000 digital items, are available for viewing on our Digital Collections site. They include several photograph collections, WWII- propaganda posters, turn-of-the-20th-century broadsides advertising cultural and political events in the borderlands, personal correspondence between Herbert and Nellie Holt, a handwritten book of Spanish Catholic folk hymns, and an 1868-69 Spanish-language register for Doña Ana County third precinct court. Also on the site are the first fruits of our latest project of Amador family correspondence. This collection has only recently come online and will continue to grow over the next few years until we complete about 15,000 pages of original, Spanish-language correspondence from the well-known Amador family of Las Cruces. The Amador project was made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Rare broadsides from the border region can be viewed on the Digital Collections site.
At left are pages from proceedings of the third precinct court in Doña Ana County, 1868, and at right pages from an early 20th century book of Spanish folk hymns.
In today’s world, digital access to materials such as these has become more and more widespread. Digital Collections will never replace our original items, or the experience of interacting with these historical documents in person, but well-curated digital collections can supply access to important, “hidden” archival documentation that informs and educates researchers and the general public for a wide variety of uses. Check them out and let us know what you find!