Hard work is starting to pay off at New Mexico State University’s Library as staff and student employees have been working on a prestigious project that recently earned an award from the Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists.
The Library’s National Endowment for the Humanities project team was selected as the 2024 winner of CIMA’s Archival Project award for their work on the Amador Family Correspondence Digitization Project.
“We feel very honored that our Amador Family Correspondence Digitization Project has been awarded by the archivists, conservators, historians, and other archives professionals in the Inter-mountain West,” said Monika Glowacka-Musial, metadata librarian at NMSU Library. “This project really focuses on introducing NMSU students to the art and craft of preserving unique historical documents, and as such it makes the students Curators and Guardians of their own cultural and linguistic heritage. This CIMA recognition validates our approach and adds meaning to our work.”
The project has been in the works since 2022 and continues to digitize and increase online access for researchers and the public to thousands of historic correspondences between the Amador family, a prominent pioneer Mexican American family that settled in Las Cruces in the late 1840s.
“The Library is extremely proud of the accomplishments of the Amador project team, and this award is very well-deserved,” said Kevin Comerford, dean of NMSU Library.
"This award recognizes an archival project worked on by an archivist, group of archivists, repository, or organization which has provided significant benefits or impacts to its community, the archival profession, or the intermountain region,” said Sarah Patton, committee chair of CIMA Awards.
The 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.
For more information about the Amador Family Correspondence Digitization Project visit https://library.nmsu.edu/neh-amador-project/digitization-project.html.