Local History

About Digitizing

We live in a digital age. The Special Collections Library houses many archives onsite, but we acknowledge the growing need to share our collections in a digital format.

• During Albuquerque's Tricentennial in 2006, a New Mexico Postcard Club got the idea of exhibiting a local postcard collection, which eventually turned into a digitization project.
• Special Collections has all 297 issues of Albuquerque Progress, a magazine published by Albuquerque National Bank from 1934 to 1965 which was designed to record Albuquerque's growth and to promote the city to potential investors and residents. Those issues were digitized in 2016 to increase access for local history researchers.
• Another digitization project, completed in 2018, was Janet Kromer's Shopping Notes, a self-published magazine made up of a series of regular articles directed at the homemaker that captures a snapshot of 1950s Albuquerque in a way no other publication does.

There are other candidates for digitization in the pipeline.

We thank our library volunteers, UNM, New Mexico Historical Records Advisory Board, the Friends of the Public Library, the Albuquerque Public Library Foundation,  Albuquerque Historical Society, and Historic Albuquerque, Inc., for all the hard work and administrative and financial assistance that went into these projects, and for their support.