COLORADO ROCK ART ASSOCIATION ARCHIVES MOVED:

View of Special Collections department, Pueblo City-County

Regional Library, Pueblo, Colorado. Photograph: Tammi Moe,

Librarian-Archivist, June, 2015.

On Monday and Tuesday, June 1 and 2, 2015, the Colorado Rock Art Association (CRAA) archives were moved from the Anthropology Department of Colorado State University (CSU), in Fort Collins, Colorado, to the Special Collections Department of the Pueblo City-County Library District, in Pueblo, Colorado.

 The CRAA Archives were established at the Laboratory of Public Archaeology in the Anthropology Department at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, Colorado, in May 2006. Dr. Jason LaBelle was the academic representative of the Anthropology Department involved in the agreement and he assisted with oversight and provided facilities until the materials were picked up on June 1, 2015. Jason, thank you for all your help and encouragement. It would not have been possible without you.

The original donation to the CRAA Archives consisted of all of the rock art related material from the estate of Dr. William (Bill) Buckles, of Colorado State University, Pueblo. Changing conditions at CSU, including the need to reclaim space led CRAA and CSU to agree on relocating the archives and members of the CRAA Board of Directors began to search for an alternative location. 

View of Special Collections department, Pueblo City-County

Regional Library, Pueblo, Colorado. Photograph: Tammi Moe,

Librarian-Archivist, June, 2015.

The Special Collections and Museum Services Department of the Pueblo City-County Library District, in Pueblo, Colorado, stepped up and offered to provide space and to assume management of the collections, and the material was delivered to them on June 2, 2015. There are some reasons why this is a better solution for housing the material in the collection. First, as a public library, it offers considerably better access to the collections than a university department did. Second, with professionally trained archive personnel they can take better care of materials and do a better job of accessioning and cataloging. Third, the archive is much nearer the concentration of rock art in southern Colorado and so, will be more relevant, and; fourth, the Pueblo City-County Library already housed the rest of the written material and correspondence from the estate of Dr. Bill Buckles, so his material will now be reunited.

View of Special Collections department, Pueblo City-County

Regional Library, Pueblo, Colorado. Photograph: Tammi Moe,

Librarian-Archivist, June, 2015.

The loading, transportation, and unloading of the archives material was done by many people including Dr. Jason LaBelle, Robert Rushforth (CRAA President), Bev Goering, Teresa Weedin, Betsy Weitkamp, Robert and Cecilia Tipton, Peter Faris, and Kathryn Adams and a couple of volunteers from the Pueblo Archaeological and Historical Society, John Norton and Carla Hendrickson. Thank you to all of the people who were involved in this effort. I also wish to express my gratitude to Maria Tucker, Manager of Special Collections and Museum Services of the Pueblo City-County Library District, and Tammi Moe, Librarian-archivist, who will be assuming responsibility for oversight of the archive collections.

View of Special Collections department, Pueblo City-County

Regional Library, Pueblo, Colorado. Photograph: Tammi Moe,

Librarian-Archivist, June, 2015.

The material will not be available for a period of time while they sort and catalog their new acquisitions, but then will be housed under better conditions and will be much more valuable to students and the public for study and research.