The GCAS Library’s Checkered Past:
The GCAS collects educational and research materials in addition to maintaining the records every nonprofit corporation is required to keep. During our group’s 90-year life, we have gradually built our Library with specific purchases. Past and current GCAS members and our supporters in the community have also generously donated their personal collections of relevant books and papers. We are grateful to have acquired a lot of fascinating archeological literature and related materials in this way. We welcome everyone’s kind offers.
Our acquisitions have been complicated until recently by the lack of a permanent place to store them. Until just a few years ago our GCAS Library had led a nomadic existence, stored in boxes and bins in a succession of temporary locations. They were often separated and stored at the homes of various GCAS members who made room for them for as long as they could. It had been the library equivalent of couch-surfing. For most of our 90 years. That’s a lot of couches. We all knew our group possessed many items worthy of safekeeping, but under the circumstances almost all of it was impossible to use except by a few long-term members who remembered what was stored in whose home.
The Tide Turned:
Our fortunes improved significantly in about 2014-2015 when the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site kindly agreed to make a room available to us in one of their historic buildings in exchange for GCAS volunteers’ work on their museum’s exhibits and the Mattocks Site’s interpretive trails and displays. Our two separate organizations now work together to support and maintain the Mattocks Archaeological Site and its historic buildings. Everyone benefits from the arrangement.
Our Library’s Busy Present:
At present, our Library is closed to the public. After our curation is complete, we want to make our library materials fully accessible to GCAS members, supporters, students, and others. Our educational goal is not only to provide a casual user with useful general archaeological information, but to make our collection of research and reference materials especially available for students’ more specific archaeological research.
Once we had a real-live room in a real-live historical building, the GCAS gathered together some bookcases and display shelves and got to work. We soon discovered two important facts: (1) it takes a very long time to organize and catalog 90 years’ worth of materials; and (2) we have far more materials than we have space.
Beginning in January, 2018, a few GCAS volunteers take time between official MCHS events to identify and organize our Library and our group’s archives. We have begun culling duplicate, irrelevant, damaged, and outdated materials to make room on shelves for more of our collection. We pull loose papers and newspaper clippings out of plastic bins for filing. (Look closely at the photos in this post. Bins. Bins by the file cabinet. Bins under the table. Bins on top of bookcases. So many bins. When I close my eyes I still see them…)
We are reviewing our research materials for items that pertain to specific archaeological sites and labeling those so that students will have better access to materials relating to their particular areas of study. We also need assorted supplies to improve how we organize, store, and display our materials. We are always looking for someone willing to donate either the supplies themselves or the funds to purchase them. Some ideas of what our GCAS Library needs are:
4 letter-size hanging file frames, adjustable to 17.5 inches deep, similar to these; 50 12-inch hanging file folders similar to these; 100 manila file folders similar to these; 3 letter-size clipboards similar to these; Bookends/shelf dividers similar to these; 12 magazine holders similar to these; File cabinet(s) – 4-drawer, 3-drawer, or 2-drawer – Email us at webmaster@gcasnm.org for details on dimensions and number; Bookcase(s) – roughly 70″ H x 48″ W x 13.5″ D – Email us at gcasnm.org@gmail.com for details on dimensions and number – and especially if you can help with other library supplies or volunteer for any projects!
Our Library’s Rosy Future:
In the longer term, as we complete our current projects we will invite volunteers to help us review and organize our collection of photographs and other media. A hands-on project of mounting and hanging maps and posters may appeal to the more artistically-inclined volunteer. We are also planning an educational project in which volunteers will help create educational kits from some of the numerous potsherds that have been donated to us, for local schoolteachers to use in their own classes on local archaeology.
And rumor has it that when we finish with the plastic bins inside the Library, there are many more plastic bins containing our Library materials, still out there…still couch-surfing….