by Caleb Fort
Daily Lobo
Researchers of the future can expect to search library archives as easily as they search the Internet, said Michael Kelly, director of the Center for Southwest
Research.
"They want it to be like Google," he said. "They want to be able to go to one place, type in what they're looking for, and it searches everything."
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UNM is moving in that direction with the Rocky Mountain Online Archive - Rmoa.unm.edu - a $250,000 Web site launched by the University on March 1.
More than 20 libraries in New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming are part of the archive.
Before the archive, there was no place to search collections in the
three states.
"You'd have to look at a list from each library and find out what you wanted and tell them," Kelly said. "It was pretty laborious."
A search on the site for Billy the Kid lists 65 documents, including Lincoln County documents and a collection of
photographs.
Most of the documents are not available digitally, but the Web site lists enough information to request the documents from the library.
"We'll have people call us and say, 'Could you photocopy the contents of folder six in such-and-such a collection?'" Kelly said. "They wouldn't have been able to do that before."
There are some documents available on the site, such as the diary of William Gordon, a doctor who traveled from Missouri to California in 1850.
Kelly said he would like more documents online.
"The whole point of having this material is for people to use it," he said. "That's why we keep it and preserve it and catalog it. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to find what they're looking for. It's not that sexy, but it's important."
Kelly said the material is good for students as well as researchers.
"You can look at Tony Hillerman's drafts and see the corrections he made," he said. "You can see that writing's a laborious process. You can look at blueprints from John Gaw Meem and see how he approached a building."
The Web site was paid for by the National Endowment for the Humanities and UNM's Center for Regional Studies.
"It was a pretty intense process," Kelly said. "It's pretty new territory, so we were learning as we went. The site goes down sometimes, but we're working out
the bugs."
It's important to give researchers easy access to original documents, he said.
"The more we can put online that allows access to this material, the happier I'll be," he said. "If something's in a book, somebody's already interpreted it. You need to interpret documents to expand knowledge."
