Rio Grande Library Initiative aims to preserve and showcase the water, land and cultural history of the San Luis Valley

An effort to create a new library at Adams State University in Alamosa that focuses on the water, land and cultural history of the Upper Rio Grande River Basin is in the works.  

Paul Formisano leads the school's Salazar Rio Grande del Norte Center, which supports conservation in the region. He said they want to gather and digitize all kinds of materials ranging from photographs and books to maps and legal documents for this Rio Grande Library.

“It may be a box of clippings and other things that somebody just has in their back closet,” he said. “That's important history, and we’d love to be able to preserve that.”

There’s a lot of water history in the San Luis Valley, including Colorado's first water right for the People’s Ditch, two water compacts and current challenges caused by drought and a depleting groundwater aquifer. Formisano said they’ll be working with the communities in the valley to collect materials related to this history.

“There's a whole slew of photographs and other items that exist through some of these different reservoir and ditch companies about some of the reservoirs here,” he said. “Like photos from the late 1800s, early 1900s. They do exist in some other libraries, others, I think, are just in personal collections that people have.”

There are water libraries elsewhere in the state, but having a resource specific to the San Luis Valley is important, Formisano said. Whether someone is working on water court cases or possibly personal or family histories, the library’s collection would be available to them to do “more research about the Valley and its unique water history,” he said. “Researchers could come here and benefit from that.”

He said he’s starting with a number of articles “that capture some of the legal history of the valley and documents related to the Rio Grande Compact, formations of subdistricts and other water related entities.”

Formisano said at first they'll have an online archive available to everyone, but they want the library to eventually have a physical space too. They are in the early stages of planning the entire project.