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Native American Water Rights in Arizona

About the Project

Bibliographic Notes

Government documents can be a particularly difficult field of research. The document indexes are substantial and cumbersome, and the topic headings often deceiving. For example, many documents relating to "water rights" are found under "irrigation." Similarly, documents pertaining to the Pima Indian Tribe are indexed under "Gila River Reservation." Thus, it is the purpose of this project to identify and digitize all relevant federal government documents, dated 1700 through 1990, which address the water rights of the Navajo, Hopi, and Pima tribes in Arizona. Document sources include the University of Arizona Main Library, Law Library, and Special Collections, and the Arizona State Museum Library.

The need to preserve the content of these documents is another concern, since nearly all of the documents come from books that are brittle and deteriorating. It is important that these documents be preserved for continued use and scholarly research, and their digitization will accomplish that goal.

This project began under the direction of Ms. Atifa R. Rawan, a government documents librarian at the University of Arizona, who was responding to suggestions received from University of Arizona faculty members. The topic of water rights is one of great interest to researchers in Arizona and the western states generally. The Navajo, Hopi, and Pima Indian Tribes were selected, initially, because of their significance to the State of Arizona and/or to Tucson.

Now as part of the larger Western Waters initiative, the web site will eventually expend to include all government documents, regardless of time period, for all tribes of Arizona.

Technical Notes

All documents are digitized (converted to electronic text format) and marked up in XML, following the teixlite DTD. A copy of this DTD is available from the Text Encoding Initiative. We have modified this DTD slightly. The XML documents are transformed to HTML for viewing on the Web through XSLT stylesheets scripted by Sebastian Rahtz and adapted to conform to our display standards.

To improve identification and retrieval of documents, this site will eventually include mechanisms beyond the listing by tribes.

For additional information about this project, please feel free to contact us.

Credits

Atifa R. Rawan - project bibliographer

Project interns from the School of Library and Information Science:
Melinda Hardman
Diane Velasquez
Bill Easton

Catherine Larson - technical project manager




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