Dean of University Libraries Martha Bedard is looking for ways to digitize the information in older collections and university archives that researchers find most valuable so her team is searching for ways to make that possible. Their initial efforts can be viewed at: University Archives.
Photo: Martha Bedard
You can also view the initial efforts at putting the university’s special collections in the Center for Southwest Research at the Rocky Mountain Online Archive. Type in a search term like “Albuquerque” and you will see everything from a listing of buildings designed by architect John Gaw Meem to the records of the Albuquerque & Cerrillos Coal Company, a coal mining operation in the early part of the 20th century near Madrid, New Mexico. The Rocky Mountain Online Archive is now putting more photos and images into the archive.
Full text of most documents is not yet available. Bedard says her department is now thinking about how to prioritize the monumental job of scanning records now stored in boxes.
For example, UNM has copies of nearly every newspaper ever printed in the state, many going back to the territorial years, but most are on microfilm or microfishe. It will take thousands of hours for library staff to scan the newspapers and put them into a digital archive, and there will have to be a determination of whether that project comes before scanning the hundreds of thousands of individual documents in other collections.
Bedard says her administrative team is also looking for ways to allow electronic accesses to theses and dissertations published by graduate students. A sampling is already available as part of a pilot project on the university libraries dspace repository but she doesn’t have the money to set up a system that will allow every thesis or dissertation to be digitized.
Navigating Your Way
Bedard says it is a huge project to make the extensive collections available online and University Libraries still has a great deal of work to do. She is excited by the new opportunities to bring such things as audio versions of folk music in the J.D. Robb Collection or the wide selections of classical music available at the Fine Arts Libraryto anyone who visits the University Libraries web site.
University Libraries has information available in a number of forms and to help navigate the way through a subject area such as music it sometimes takes help, which the library provides in the form of specialists.
For Bedard this transition of information from the written page to the computer screen is an exciting change, but she says the difficulty is in putting together a plan that will allow improvements in technology to feel seamless to everyone who uses the library services. She says much of the information is available, but it is stored in different databases, and it is not always easy to navigate from database to database to assemble the information needed on a particular subject.
Gathering Information in One Place
Bedard says University Libraries is now searching for an easy way to collect and display information for students and researchers. For example, she would like to be able to type ‘Rudolfo Anaya’ into the search engine and find, a list of his books and their location in the library, a list of articles and reviews, biographical information about the former UNM English teacher and other information about his long career as a professor and author. She thinks the library can eventually develop a way to aggregate information scattered in various collections, books and journals about a subject into a display that would make it clear exactly what information is available in the library system.
Bedard thinks that is one of the next major improvements students will see when they visit University Libraries online.
Media contact: Karen Wentworth (505) 277-5627; kwent2@unm.edu