|
|
|
The Civil War in New Mexico The Palace of The Governors - SER Academy Alex Traube
In 1997, The Palace of The Governors, New Mexico's State History Museum, began working on a digitization pilot project with two educational institutions in Santa Fe. Only a few museum projects of any kind had been completed previously in New Mexico, none involving the kind of partnership described here. The partners in this project, along with the Palace, were the SER Academy, an alternative Santa Fe high school for at-risk, predominantly Hispanic youth, and Santa Fe Community College. The focus of this School-To-Work project, as it has become pegged, is a brief but significant episode of the Civil War that took place in New Mexico. Photographs, manuscripts, books, and artifacts associated with the Civil War in New Mexico were photographed, digitized, and catalogued by the teenage Academy students. The same students used the digitized materials to create a CIVIL WAR IN NEW MEXICO web site. The site will be available on publicly accessible computers at The Palace of The Governors, in Santa Fe, and on the World Wide Web. The roles of the partners in the collaboration were pretty straightforward: The Palace of The Governors provided physical materials (artifacts and photographs), intellectual content (scholarly articles), career mentoring from staff, and library resources where the students were taught to do genealogical research. The Academy selected the student-workers and provided daily instruction for them in various subjects, including software and hardware-related skill development. The community college contributed technological leadership, including a course in HTML for the students; the college also provided a clearly delineated educational path for the Academy students for after high school. It was my role as project coordinator to bring the partners to the table, make sure the agreements were clear, and oversee the completion of the project within the framework of agreed upon goals. Dr. Chávez and his colleagues decided that the Civil War represented what was needed for a pilot project: a goodly amount (but not too many) artifacts, photographs, maps, as well as original, in-house scholarship. Two of the teachers at the Academy saw in this project an opportunity to get funding via a Technology Literacy Grant from the New Mexico State Department of Education. They were successful and, within a fairly short period of time, we were able to begin planning the project. So, a unique partnership formed between a museum, an "alternative" high school, and a college. A picture of complementary needs began to emerge. Post Production: The project as the partners envisioned it had not been completed at the end of the 1997-1998 school year. This meant that none of the partners-including the students-would have had anything to show for their effort were it not for the intervention of Dr. Tom Chávez who came to the rescue with the funds to enable New Mexico CultureNet Webmaster, Ash Black, to complete the work. This was done in December, 1998 and early the following January, with the web site going online, January 13, 1999. A Community of Needs The Museum: The Palace of The Governors recognized that it needed to make more of its collections accessible to the public and thus reach a wider audience. After all, it is the state history museum, which in theory, means that its purview is supposed to be statewide. Outreach, however, is not easy in a sparsely populated, geographically large (fifth in the union), poor state. New Mexico's culture, though widely celebrated, is woefully underfunded. In addition to the clearly perceived imperative to extend the museum's reach, the director understands that research ought to be integrated, not discrete and determined by curatorial fiefdoms. Why shouldn't one be able to search through photographs, books, maps, artifacts, and paintings, all at the same time? A good question indeed. The High School: The Academy, as the high school is called, uses computers extensively for self-paced learning. In addition, the school staff see computers as relating directly to the world of work. Programs like the one with the Palace of The Governors tie in with a well funded but underutilized School-To-Work initiative in the Santa Fe Public School District. This project also was viewed as a grant magnet, something which proved to be correct. Employment for young people, along with a 40+% high school drop out rate (higher for Hispanics), is a major concern in Santa Fe. There are few opportunities outside of state government (Santa Fe is the state capital) or tourism-related service industries for employment. There is a crying need for meaningful, sustained, professional level jobs in Santa Fe, in all of New Mexico, really. Education and work-directed training are essential requirements for improvement of this scenario. The Community College: Santa Fe Community College was founded about ten years ago and immediately became one of the cherished institutions of Santa Fe. The college campus is pretty, modern, and clean; tuition is an incredible $17 a credit hour, with complete tuition waivers for any Santa Fe high school graduate who wants to continue his or her education. Santa Fe Community College is highly proactive to the poor and underserved in a community which often only caters to the rich and well connected. In addition to providing post secondary and lifelong educational opportunities to the people of this community, SFCC is a designated New Media Center, one of only 400 such sites worldwide. This designation means that the college has an obligation to use technology in the service of cultural preservation. Implications of the Civil War in New Mexico Project The Possibility of Increased Access to Our Cultural Patrimony. There is a wealth of cultural resources in New Mexico waiting to be harvested and processed. Museum, archival, library, and individual collections need to be translated into electronic forms which people can access, independent of location- in their homes, classrooms, and other public facilities. To cite one example of an underutilized, almost inaccessible collection, the Palace of The Governors has the best collection of historical photographs in the United States, west of the Mississippi. Its Photographic Archives contains over 530,000 images, which are not even in a database, let alone digitized. Other examples of material awaiting digitization and electronic publication are: Indian languages which are oral only, manuscripts which are too fragile to be handled, sites too remote for most people to get to (e.g., El Morro State Park, the site of the Inscription Rock, with the carved names of early Spanish settlers to New Mexico), murals, buildings, furniture, and writing done by WPA writers, etc., etc. The Possibility of Creating Economic Opportunities. Am I being naive or is there a gigantic opportunity inherent in the Information Age in New Mexico? Why is no one in our state talking about INFORMATION as a generator of economic growth? We have the raw materials. Shouldn't we be able to create jobs with the generations-long tasks which lie ahead of us? Are we not at the beginning of a long, long process of using technology in service of building "Cultural Pyramids," new information structures? We contend that these new information structures can turn the economy of New Mexico around. The huge quantity of materials that need to be digitally captured (via still cameras, scanners, video cameras, tape recorders, etc.), shaped (into databases, web sites, curricula, etc.), and published (on the web, over public access television, on radio, on videotape, and, even, on paper) present us with critically needed opportunities to train young people for meaningful work and, in doing so, make the process our own. We need to own the process! Seeing Education & Training As The Keys To Success. Without rigorous education and training, all the meaningful jobs in the world don't mean a thing for citizens of New Mexico. These jobs will go to transplants from California or Chicago. This would be yet another form of colonization that we can't afford. We need to look at the Information Age in New Mexico as the mechanism to foster education, ethnic knowledge and pride, career training, cultural preservation, and equalized access to publicly owned information. Commitment to education is the key to capitalizing on the opportunities presented by technology's capability to deliver information and images of our culture to people who need them the most. Avoiding Cultural Colonization in New Mexico. New Mexico is more than a destination point or a style. It is a cultural confluence, a counterpoint to the history of the United States as it is told in most history books. We need to tell our own history and add it to the fabric of our nation's identity. If we do not, we face the real possibility that, once again, others will come to New Mexico and will do the job for us-at a cost. They will claim to be respectful and objective, but they will not know how to be so. They will mainly know how to profit from our heritage, our patrimony. There is the real possibility that no new jobs will be created, save those of support staff. There is the possibility that corporate outsiders will re-write our culture. There is the chance that we will come to a point where we no longer know who we are, who we were, or who we could have been. This must not happen! Credits: Palace of The Governors SER Academy Santa Fe Community College Project Coordinator Web Design Funding New Mexico CultureNet is funded by the McCune Charitable Foundation, The New Mexico Office of Cultural Affairs, and New Mexico Arts. |
Submit your event
Subscribe to 10-day all-event email
Subscribe to custom category email
© 1997 – 2009 New Mexico CultureNet. All Rights Reserved.
Calendar is available for licensing on other websites. Please