THE Catholic diocese is one of the institutions in the CNMI with valuable resources that have greatly influenced local cultural heritage, but they are in poor condition and need to be protected.
Joeten-Kiyu Public Library Executive Director John O. Gonzales, the project director for the Fiscal Year 2010 Connecting to Collections Statewide Planning Grant, said in a report: “If you are looking for birth records for example from any year prior to 1954, you will not find it at the Commonwealth Recorder but you can find it at the baptismal records at the diocese.”
The diocese also has volumes 1 and 2 of the 1856 baptismal records, the islands’ oldest, but they are in poor condition.
“These volumes must at once be diligently preserved,” Gonzales said.
The diocese has not adequately digitized its holdings of valuable materials because it is not government-funded, he added.
According to Gonzales, the CNMI has a wealth of cultural heritage resources besides those that are already in existing cultural heritage agencies and institutions, and these include those in various formats that still have to be documented.
“We stressed the importance of a culture of systematic and formal memory keeping and record-keeping,” Gonzales said.
He intends to submit a grant application of up to $250,000 for the preservation of local cultural heritage for future generations.
Gonzales noted the lack of storage environment and facility to house local cultural heritage resources and collections.
Currently, the different agencies that take care of the heritage collections in the CNMI are the NMI Museum of History and Culture which operates on government funding; the Catholic diocese, which operates on its own funding; the Commonwealth Recorder whose operational costs are primarily shouldered by the CNMI government; the CNMI Division of Historic Preservation which operates on government funds and assistance from federal government preservation programs; the CNMI Division of Land Registration funded by the government; the Hillbloom Law Library whose operational funds come from the Hillbloom Foundation and various sources; the NMI Humanities Council which operates on funds from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities; the Joeten-Kiyu Public Library and the NMI Archives which are both funded by the local government.
