Special Collections

E2 | Sunday, February 16, 2020 | lmtonline.com | Laredo Morning Times 50 Anniversary By Christian Alejandro Ocampo Laredo Morning Times T AMIU has been a monumental achievement for the City of Laredo, Webb County and the surrounding re- gion. With constant change and growth, history is made often and the TAMIU Special Collections and Archives has been gathering as much information as possible since July 1999. According to TAMIU, regional history is the primary focus of the repository, and the archives serve as a regional historical resource depository for Webb, Dimmit, La- Salle, Maverick, Zapata and Zavala counties. Documents saved include both civil and criminal court cases, engineering and planning docu- ments and city to federal files. Hatcher is a Laredo-born citi- zen who is tasked with caring for and adding to the collection. As the depository’s record keeper, Hatcher is in charge of overlooking new ad- ditions with the use of collection parameters, research trends and her own history professional input. She holds undergraduate degrees in history and government from the University of Texas at Austin. She also has a master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Public Affairs and is a professional librarian. Hatcher has been at TAMIU since 2003 and has been working on building the collections and helping students with their research needs. Hatcher said the whole idea of knowing what happened before and being able to learn from the past is important to her. She also said be- ing able to be a part of preserving history in the region and being able to disseminate that research is trans- formational and important. “That’s what we’re about here in the archives, it’s preserving the original material for as long as pos- sible,” Hatcher said. The archives are temperature- controlled environments that have UV filtering in order to protect each piece of the collection. Hatcher said there is no substitute for the materi- als which include letters written by TAMIU’s 50th anniversary Special Collections Ribbon cutting of the current Special Collection and Archives “History is constantly being made, and so it’s an active process here trying to see what’s important to document and what’s important to preserve. We continue to collect.” - Jeannette Hatcher, Special Collections Librarian