Old records get new home in Phoenix

One type of tourism that doesn't get a lot of mention is research.  It's not just university historians that haunt the dusty back corners of old libraries looking for tidbits that most people don't care about.

Among the most avid, and most down-to-earth, users of archives are genealogists. And their upscale cousins, the biographers. There are many other types of users of archives as well. Lawyer, for example, who want to know how a certain state of affairs came to be. Prospectors, who are looking for the best place to seek gold. Journalists, who want a new angle on an old story. Detectives, for a variety of reasons.

Arizona has several "archives" of various types. In my town, our history museum keeps track of shelves and shelves of records and drawers and drawers of microfilm that may or may not list bits and pieces of information about the tens of thousands of men who worked in the mines over the century they were operating. Hundreds of people a year come looking for parents, grandparents and a host of other relatives. That's above and beyond the more formal research: Some historians spend weeks in that one small library.

So it's easy to infer that if hundreds of people check out the archives of a small town museum, tens of thousands will be searching through the records of a state library.  And how much space does it take to host an entire state's public records? (Extend that to a nation: How many good-sized cities would love to have just the research visitors that Washington, D.C. gets each year?)

So in the summer of 2008, all the stuff that had been gathering in those famous dusty rooms in Phoenix was gathered up and moved to a new Archives Building. The $38 million Polly Rosenbaum History and Archives Building, southwest of the Capitol at 1901 W. Madison St., was to be dedicated Jan. 15.

Unlike the stereotype of an archive, this 124,000-square-foot facility controls climate, dust, light and other forces of nature and man that damage old documents. That's a considerable change from the old facilities, which were built in 1919 and 1938.

The archives, which falls under the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, stores those things which one would expect, including state and local government records and photographs, some 125,000 of them.  (Of which about 35,000 have been digitized.)

The facility is open to the public and its website has written guides that will prepare users for what to expect.

Polly Rosenbaum, by the way, was a long-time Arizona legislator who worked hard for the preservation and display of history. She represented the Globe area, succeeding her husband, who served as House majority leader, when he died in 1949. She was in office until 1995, the longest of any state rep. She died in 2004 at age 104. She is pictured above, at right, with her old friend, former Arizona Gov. Rose Mofford.