Lisa Lamont Selected for Faculty Global Engagement Award
On April 20th, Lisa Lamont, Head of Digital Collections, was honored with a Faculty Global Engagement Award for Outstanding Transborder Librarianship by San Diego State University’s Office of International Affairs. These awards, reflecting initiatives outlined in the university’s Global Strategic Plan, are given annually to recognize “faculty whose work advances SDSU’s global mission.”
Lamont was recognized for her leadership in spearheading the Colecciones de Instituciones Mexicanas initiative, a landmark collaboration between SDSU and libraries, archives, and museums in Mexico, including the Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova (BIJC), Biblioteca Francisco Fray de Burgoa, and Archivo General del Estado de Oaxaca. Originally imagined as a means of promoting discovery and use of materials relevant to the SDSU Oaxaca Center for Mesoamerican Studies, Lamont’s leadership of this initiative has resulted in continuing engagement with other cultural heritage organizations in Mexico, including, most notably, the Archivo Histórico de Tijuana. In selecting Lamont for this award, Cristina Alfaro, Associate Vice President for International Affairs, recognized “the remarkable impact of [Lamont’s] leadership in advancing transborder engagement and binational collaboration” at SDSU.
In her nomination letter, Jessica Barlow, Professor of Sustainability in the College of Arts and Letters and Executive Director of SDSU’s Center for Regional Sustainability, lauded the work that Lamont and her Digital Collections team have done to work with partners in Mexico to establish a “vast and remarkable collection of photographs, postales, rare newspapers, indigenous language cartillas, and critical historical documents from Mexican cultural and governmental institutions that bring to light the rich and complex history of Mexico and our binational region and make them accessible to the public.” The impact of Lamont’s work in leading a team promoting the discovery and use of international materials can also be seen in the description that Hilario Castillo, formerly of the Archivo Histórico de Tijuana, provided of the collaboration between the Archivo and the Coronado (CA) Historical Association on “Diseño Coronado: An Exhibition That Celebrates Cross-Border Historical Architecture.” As Castillo wrote: “The use of digitized images from the Historical Archive of Tijuana allowed for a shared visual narrative of our regional architecture that would otherwise have been difficult to articulate.” Barlow and Castillo are among the campus and community partners who have come together with Lamont and her colleagues to design and deliver a strategic initiative that has also been recognized with support from the Modern Endangered Archives Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as individual donors.
Reflecting on her work, Lamont noted its scope, with almost 45,000 images from the Archivo digitized, described, and made accessible through SDSU’s digital collections repository, along with over 29,000 pages of 19th-century newspapers held in the Burgoa, and more than 400 publications in the Indigenous languages of Mexico held in the BIJC. Noting the difficulty that scholars and students might have had in locating and accessing these materials in the past, as well as the danger of deterioration for materials such as newspapers, Lamont concluded: “That’s tens of thousands of pieces of history that might have been lost...now accessible to the world.”
Beyond the scope of the project, Lamont, Barlow, and Alfaro noted the importance of the collaborative approach taken by SDSU in pursuing this initiative, one allowing the cultural heritage materials to remain in their local communities rather than being “acquired” by the university. Digitization of these materials was conducted by graduate students in Tijuana and Oaxaca, while descriptive metadata was applied to each file (in English and Spanish) by members of the SDSU team so that the materials could be made discoverable and accessible through the SDSU repository. As Alfaro noted in making the award, “the way you have approached this work through meaningful, reciprocal partnerships with cultural heritage organizations in Tijuana and Oaxaca is important. By ensuring that collections remain with partner institutions while providing the infrastructure and expertise to make them globally accessible, your work models a deeply respectful and sustainable approach to transborder collaboration.”
Building support for international partnerships and global education initiatives was a key strategy identified both in the SDSU Strategic Plan and in the Library Strategic Plan, and our digital collections initiatives were only one part of our focus on advancing the University’s effort to distinguish itself as a “premier public research university [and] a new kind of HSI.”
Noting that she is honored to accept the Faculty Global Engagement Award on behalf of the entire Digital Collections team, including Erik Beck, Matt Ferrill, and Devan McGirr, “without whom none of the work could be accomplished,” Lamont said: “Our hope is simple, that we continue to work together—across institutions, across borders, across differences—to bring these stories into the light. Because when we do that, we’re not just digitizing materials, we’re expanding access and preserving culture.”
“Most importantly,” she concluded, we’re allowing history to belong to everyone.”
