Letters, diaries, recordings, and photographs provide unique information about the Southwest that is unavailable elsewhere and help understand the role of people who built this region. When you donate materials to the Collection, your experiences become part of the collective memory of the region's heritage. The Southwest Collection preserves collections of written, visual, and audio material. Its purpose is to ensure that these collections will be available for research for generations to come. Once you donate materials, they are stored in a secure, environmentally controlled facility.
Professional archivists oversee preservation, arrangement, and description of the materials.
Equally important, access to these materials is provided to you and interested researchers. As a result, historians, students, genealogists, journalists, and others will have your papers available to assist in their research. The archives accepts donations as small as a single item and as large as hundreds of boxes. Donations do not have to be organized, and do not have to pertain to a famous person, event, or organization. We accept papers, books, films, audio and video tapes, and a limited range of artifacts.