By Laura Nesbitt
Mountain View Telegraph
A Moriarty librarian is working on a project to keep pace with the public's increasing use of the Internet.
“It became clear to me that getting (material) on the Web is essential. Once it's in a cyber world it doesn't go away,” said Susie McComb, special projects coordinator at the Moriarty Community Library.
McComb just got back from a national conservation forum called “Collaboration in the Digital Age” held in Denver on June 24-25 and sponsored by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.
According to a recent institute study, out of 1.2 billion adult visits to a museum, 310 million were made online. Out of 1.3 billion adult visits to libraries, 560 million were made online.
McComb was selected to participate based on her outstanding leadership skills, and was one of only 50 participants whose travel expenses were underwritten by the institute and the Samuel Kress Foundation, according to a press release.
There were international participants at the conference as well as individuals from 48 states, McComb said.
The majority of the archives of the Moriarty Community Library consist of a newspaper preservation project and are stored at the Moriarty Historical Museum, she said.
The newspaper preservation project began in 2005 when the museum received a grant from the New Mexico Historical Records and Archives Board. The original goal of the project was to have microfiche copies of every edition of eight Estancia Valley newspapers dating from 1883 to 1950.
The collection of newspapers housed at the archives is “the most complete collection of a county's newspapers in the state,” McComb said.
Once that collection is transferred onto microfilm, the next step will be to preserve the newspapers digitally.
“This would be the ultimate in preservation for this time. We're only at the microfilm stage, but we need to take it a step further,” McComb said.
At the conference, McComb learned that to proceed the museum needs to collaborate with a larger entity.
“For example we don't have the means to buy a scanner. We could get a fund or a grant to do this. This is the ultimate in historic preservation. Even when formats change then we can migrate the information from one format to the upcoming format. We've got frayed newspapers. The ultimate is to put them on the Web. That gets them out to the most people,” McComb said.
According to the librarian the project is important not only to preserve the distant past but also for people who may move to Moriarty and have no idea what the area looked like only a few years ago.
“Once you lose it, it's lost. I really believe keeping the history alive is important. Preservation is my passion,” McComb said.
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