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F I S C A L I M P A C T R E P O R T
SPONSOR Lujan, B.
ORIGINAL DATE
LAST UPDATED
2-14-2007
HB 1177
SHORT TITLE Fray
Angélico Chávez
History Library
SB
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 Senate Bill 1054
SOURCES OF INFORMATION
LFC Files
Responses Received From
No agency responses received as of 2-14-2007.
SUMMARY
Synopsis of Bill
House Bill 1177 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 House Bill 1177 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-
pg_0002
House Bill 1177 – 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 House Bill 1177 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 House Bill 1177.
RELATIONSHIP
House Bill 1177 nearly duplicates Senate Bill 1054. Very insignificant linguistic differences
separate the two bills from being parallel.
PD/nt
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