Branen Norton-Giron is a freshman business administration major. At first glance, there wouldn’t seem to be much for him at the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, which specializes primarily in interdisciplinary subjects related to the surrounding region.
In fact, the opposite is true.
For starters, the department, located in Zimmerman, helps him expand interests located outside of his academic studies.
“There are a lot of interesting things, a lot of history. I’m kind of a history nut,” Norton-Giron said. “I’m definitely into conflicts, like wars and political issues.”
Christopher Geherin, library operations manager for the CSWR, said the department can inspire people who already like history to look further into it, like it did for him.
“There are always students who come here and it sparks something in them and they end up majoring in a field, going to work here, or going to graduate school. So for some people, it opens up a career,” Geherin said.
Even though Norton-Giron said he just recently utilized the CSWR for the first time, he got a feel for the motivational abilities of the department as well.
“This would be a way easier place to study for people. It would probably help with their interest in school and actually probably motivate them to do more,” Norton-Giron said.
The CSWR also provides classes to inform students about their resources, and possibly inspire them to study historical documents more in-depth, Geherin said. For example, a professor in the UNM English department took her Enlightenment Survey class there to show them books from 18th-century Europe.
“I’m glad she does that class because a lot of people think we do just Southwestern history, but those are books from the 1700s in England and France,” Geherin said. “It’s something different for us to show people, but it’s also good for students and professors to know we have that stuff here.”
Besides feeding his interest in history, Norton-Giron said the CSWR also helps him with his school studies in multiple ways, including providing more material to use in his general education classes.
He said he was working on a three-page paper about skiing in New Mexico for an English class and found a book in the CSWR titled, “Ski Pioneers: Ernie Blake, His Friends and the Making of Taos Ski Valley” that helped his research for the paper.
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It is not only undergraduate students like Norton-Giron who use this section of the library, Geherin said.
“We might have an undergraduate working on a school project, we might have a community member researching family history or we might have a researcher from wherever and even with three people working there,” Geherin said. “It’s pretty intensive.”
Another way Norton-Giron said the CSWR helps him with his academics is simply through providing him a quiet place to study.
“Out of any other place I’ve studied, this is probably the best. You get good sunlight. In the basement it’s all dark, and I like the sunlight,” Norton-Giron said. “It’s quiet, and there’s not a lot of people that come in. But the people that I assume would come in would be like me.”
Geherin said that the department can get anywhere from a handful of researchers to maybe 15 people any given day, and they are all for the most part focused on their research.
Both Geherin and Norton-Giron said they wanted to encourage people to come use the CSWR.
“We try to make connections with the academic community and encourage classes to come here and make connections with the Albuquerque and New Mexico community, to tell people what we have and try to encourage people to come use the Center,” Geherin said.
Norton-Giron plans to return and do just that, whether for academics or out of his own interest.
“It’s my first time,” he said, “but I will come back.”
Ariel Lutnesky is a sophomore English Studies major at UNM.
