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The Center's special collections, which focus on the Four Corners region, would fill a shelf about two and a quarter miles long. They are cataloged along with Reed Library holdings in the College's TALON Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), searchable on the Web at http://opac.fortlewis.edu/screens/opacmenu.html. To view broad collection-level descriptions in TALON, do a call number search for Sw coll ~ scroll down a bit -- the listing starts with the Book collections, then the Cartographic collections, and through the collections in the order described at http://swcenter.fortlewis.edu/accessing_swcolls.htm
To access online inventories of processed collections, go to http://swcenter.fortlewis.edu/SpecialCollections.htm#Guides
To view thousands of digital images from the collections, start at http://swcenter.fortlewis.edu/images/SWImagesHome.htm
Extent of the special collections at the Center
of Southwest Studies:
Excluding the museum artifacts (approximately 44,000 items), the Center's
special collections include a research library of 17,700 volumes and numerous
periodicals, and
more than five hundred special collections dating from prehistory to the present.
These special collections include:
297 collections of paper-based manuscripts and archives, including the College archives and voluminous records documenting the world's first commercial use of alternating current electricity that was pioneered in the San Juan Mountains in 1891.
106 collections of microforms, containing over seven thousand rolls of microfilm dating from the year 1621, including about 3,000 rolls of microfilm of historic Southwest region newspapers. All of the microfilm is housed together in the research room in the Delaney Library, for self-service on one of the Center's three microfilm viewing machines (two of which are reader/printers).
21 aural (sound/ multimedia) collections -- 1,001 audiotapes, 146 videotapes, 194 digital video data cartridges -- 1,300 audio recordings (980 hours), including oral histories. 70 hours of these "Sounds of the Southwest" are now accessible digitally.
4 digital collections -- materials that are only at the Center in electronic format.
11 cartographic collections-- approximately five thousand maps. These include early world maps dating from the year 1560, maps of the Hayden Survey in 1877, and a collection of more than four thousand historically valuable U.S. Geological Survey maps.
74 photographs collections, containing more than 250,000 photographs (approximately 12,000 of these are accessible digitally on the Center’s website).
3 postcards collections, containing more than 4,000 postcards, approximately 3,000 of which are accessible online, showing both sides of each card.
5,500 maps -- including nearly 4,000 USGS topographic maps, 260 maps of water resources in Southwest Colorado, 202 historic Sanborn fire insurance maps of the Southwest on microfilm, and 1,000 other maps of the Southwest.
The special collections materials fill more than 8,000 linear shelf feet, in approximately 7,622 archival boxes, 76,850 archival folders, and 62,600 polypropylene photo storage sleeves. We had not a single one of these when the Center’s archives program commenced in 8/1991.
The Center's special collections holdings are strongest in
the areas of historically significant materials pertaining to:
Genealogy of the Four Corners region.
Narrow gauge railroads of the San Juan Basin
Native Americans of the Southwest (especially pertaining to U.S. government relations, including Navajo and Ute topics). Click here to view a poster, Sharing Native American Culture with the World, that was produced and presented at the Fall 2007 Colorado Association of Libraries conference by Becky Corning, Susan Doak, Julie Boyle, Sue Keefer and Andrea Gubser, Global Information Infrastructure class library school students of Emporia State University. (You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this poster, which is in pdf file format.)
Local and regional affairs (including news, and records of community, business, politics and government of Durango and La Plata County, Colorado).
Mining of coal and precious metals (including gold, silver, uranium and vanadium) in the Four Corners.
Water and water rights in the Four Corners region.
Electricity
generation and transmission, and other energy issues of the Southwest
Sources of the collections: Most of the materials in the Center's collections were donated. More than 675 donors have given collection items to the Center of Southwest Studies since 1958. The collections are a resource for every member of the community and beyond. The Center's mission includes preserving and making accessible this resource for all who are interested in the history of the Four Corners region.
Page last modified: February 08, 2008
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