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F I S C A L I M P A C T R E P O R T

SPONSOR Rodriquez

ORIGINAL DATE

LAST UPDATED

2-14-2007

HB

SHORT TITLE Fray

Angélico Chávez

History Library

SB 1054

ANALYST Dearing

APPROPRIATION (dollars in thousands)

Appropriation

Recurring

or Non-Rec

Fund

Affected

FY07

FY08

$350.0

Recurring

General Fund

(Parenthesis ( ) Indicate Expenditure Decreases)

Relates to House Bill 1177

SOURCES OF INFORMATION

LFC Files

Responses Received From

No agency responses received as of 2-14-2007.

SUMMARY

Synopsis of Bill

Senate Bill 1054 appropriates $350 thousand from the general fund to Cultural Affairs

department for the acquisition of materials for the Fray Angélico Chávez history library.

Materials to will include publishers’ archives, historical writings and recorded videotaped

interviews of New Mexico senior citizens.

FISCAL IMPLICATIONS

The appropriation of $350 thousand contained in Senate Bill 1054 is a recurring expense to the

General Fund. Any unexpended or unencumbered balance remaining at the end of FY08 shall

revert to the General Fund.

SIGNIFICANT ISSUES

The Fray Angélico Chávez History Library is the institutional successor of New Mexico's oldest

library (dated to 1851) and is part of the Palace of the Governors on the Santa Fe plaza. A non-

Senate Bill 1054 – Page

2

circulating, closed stack research facility, it preserves historical materials in many formats

documenting the history of the state, the Southwest, and meso-America from pre-European

contact to the present.

1

The appropriation in Senate Bill 1054 will provide funding for

acquisition of historical and archival materials for the library.

Producing oral history documents is a systematic attempt to enlist people with first-hand

knowledge of special historical developments and experiences into video-recording their

memoirs while they are still able to do so effectively, with sufficient powers of recall. Oral

history is spoken history, subject to all the biases and vagaries inherent in human recall; yet it is

not substantially different from other historical sources (diaries, correspondence, official

documents, newspapers, photographs, etc.) which are distorted, partial, and viewed through the

screen of contemporary experience. Oral history data must be subjected to the same tests of

evidence as other sources, examined along with other contemporary sources for corroboration

and authentication. The primary value of oral history testimony is its usefulness in social history,

for reconstructing the fabric of daily life since the turn-of-the-century, and for documenting the

mundane details of family and community life for which written evidence is often scarce.

2

PERFORMANCE IMPLICATIONS

No performance implications noted. It is unknown whether the department counts researching

visitors to the

Fray

Angélico Chávez

History Library at the Palace of the Governors within its

“Number of participants to on-site educational, outreach, and special events related to museum missions"

performance measure.

ADMINISTRATIVE IMPLICATIONS

The Cultural Affairs department will be the fiscal agent for the appropriation in Senate Bill 1054.

RELATIONSHIP

Senate Bill 1054 nearly duplicates House Bill 1177. Very insignificant linguistic differences

separate the two bills from being parallel.

PD/mt

1

Many of the library’s materials are available at the Online Archive of New Mexico, hosted by UNM;

http://elibrary.unm.edu/oanm/index_NmSm.html

2

University of California at Santa Cruz Library; Primer, Overview of Significance of Oral Histories; http://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/ohprimer.html