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+# Witnessing New Mexico: The New Mexico Public Media Digitization Project
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+## Summary
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+The New Mexico Public Media (NMPM) Digitization Project, an innovative statewide initiative of five leading New Mexico public media stations and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), was created to digitally preserve decades’ worth of irreplaceable public television and radio programs produced in New Mexico. The project was led by New Mexico PBS and funded through a generous grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources.  
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+The NMPM collection brings together more than 8,000 video and audio items from 1960 to 2021 that form a substantial audiovisual archive illuminating aspects of the state’s complex history. Ranging from half-hour series episodes, hour-long programs, documentaries, interviews, conversations, event coverage, speeches, lectures, debates, town hall meetings, and extensive raw footage, the collection offers a vast array of previously inaccessible content that documents New Mexico’s dynamic political, social, economic, cultural, and artistic landscape. 
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+In addition to preserving the content for present and future generations, the NMPM project was created to make the collection available to the wider public through the ever-growing AAPB online website. The initial AAPB collection lacked materials from 12 states, including New Mexico, and from a number of U.S. territories. Along with recent AAPB initiatives, the NMPM project helps to fill gaps in the AAPB collection and provides a substantive look at New Mexico’s unique contributions to U.S. history. 
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+NMPM Digitization Project’s fellows David P. Saiz and Dr. Rachel Snow have created *Witnessing New Mexico: The New Mexico Public Media Digitization Project*, a digital exhibit to celebrate the newly preserved collection. The exhibit invites viewers to witness numerous ways that communities in the state have historically been impacted by and offered resistance to processes of discrimination and marginalization. Television and radio programs produced by New Mexico public media since 1960 have covered the inequitable treatment of people based on differences in ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship status, tribal affiliations, and intellectual and physical (dis)abilities. *Witnessing New Mexico* presents these programs with the goal of fostering more widespread awareness, while also inspiring community action, tolerance, understanding, and reflection.
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+## Main
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+### Introduction
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+*Witnessing New Mexico* provides a critical look at often obscured perspectives, stories, and peoples. During the past sixty years, New Mexico public media has covered many societal issues that continue to impact communities today. NMPM programs in this exhibit address issues related to policing, drug abuse, nativist discrimination and prejudice, land rights, educational reform, poverty, gang violence, women’s liberation and pursuit of self-determination, and legacies of colonialism. The programs often relate local issues to broader national discussions on topics such as immigration, the AIDS pandemic, mental health awareness, healthcare, and various human rights issues. 
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+The word “witnessing” is key to understanding the intent of this exhibit because it underscores the vital role that contemporary viewers can play in the active, ongoing reinterpretation and relearning of New Mexico’s history. Throughout this exhibit, viewers can witness how language and civic life have changed in response to federal and state policies, social advocacy and resistance, and the re-visioning of historical narratives as conveyed through public media by communities that undergo constant discrimination. 
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+With its three thematic sections, *Witnessing New Mexico* hopes to engage viewers in the process of watching and listening to first-hand, personal expressions of human experiences that have remained inaccessible for decades. The oral stories, conversations, and interviews in this exhibit present an expansive array of past and recent perspectives about New Mexico and its peoples that warrant the attention not only of New Mexicans but of other Americans as well.