About Us: ABOUT US

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Who We Are
QML's Mission Statement
Our Guiding Principles
Our Goals
QML's History
Policy Summaries

 

 

Who We Are

Quimby Memorial Library (QML) is a hybrid physical/digital academic library, which directly supports research and scholarship among the Southwestern College community. QML provides access to approximately 12,000 books and other media in its physical collections, and greater than 400,000 ebooks, academic articles, and videos in its digital collections. The library’s materials are curated to facilitate education and research in art therapy, counseling, grief and loss, transformational eco-psychology, and applied psychology, among other disciplines, concentrations, and interests. QML also offers a variety of services, such as research, academic writing, and APA help.

QML's building and physical collections are located on the campus of Southwestern College, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Remotely accessible resources provided by the library include academic databases aggregated by EBSCOhost and Taylor & Francis Online, educational videos and landmark films, streaming through the library’s streaming service at Kanopy, an interactive catalog of the library’s physical holdings, and access to library staff, who are available to address inquiries and connect users with the resources they need, wherever they are.

 

Quimby Memorial Library's Mission Statement

The mission of Quimby Memorial Library is to support Southwestern College students in their scholarship and development of information literacy skills; Southwestern College faculty in their curriculum building and instruction; and the entirety of Southwestern College in its sustained growth and development as an academic institution; and to be a reliable resource to the wider community of which we are a part.

 

Our Guiding Principles

• All persons deserve access to the information they seek and to data derived from valid research methods.
• A well-rounded and epistemologically fortifying library collection deliberately curates resources whose ideas and contentions challenge those of other resources within the library’s collections. 
• One’s biases, presuppositions, and dogmas are the first and most daunting barrier between the user and the discernment of accurate information. Thus engaging with the actions of inquiry, information retrieval, and information analysis with conscious humility and information literacy skills is fundamental to the successful access and utilization of information. 

 

Our Goals

• To provide equal access to library resources, among all library users
• To develop and maintain collections of resources, which reflect a diversity of perspectives, backgrounds, and social and cultural contexts
• To organize and catalog resources in accordance with Library of Congress standards for metadata and call number application
• To provide catalogs, inventories, bibliographies, and databases of resources, which are visible, organized, sharable, and easily accessed via the web
• To nurture the conceiving, constructing, and asking of questions, by employing reference interview skills toward helping users best understand and articulate the scope and character of their inquiries and by connecting users with resources which inspire further inquiry
• To facilitate the development, augmentation, and refinement of library users’ information literacy skills, by: curating resources whose claims are supported by rigorous and fully transparent processes; promoting cooperation and accountability in academic research by connecting users with resources whose methodologies have passed peer review; and by demonstrating critical thinking and information literacy skills as well as epistemological humility in interactions with library users
• To honor the library’s governing institution, past library administrators and staff, and the history and culture of the Southwestern College community by preserving, organizing, and (when possible) providing sustained access to materials integral to the inception and evolution of the college

 

Our History

In the mid-1940s a spiritualist, numerologist, teacher, and practitioner of aura balancing named Neva Dell Hunter (1903 – 1978), began amassing a group of followers in Livonia, Michigan. Claiming an ability to channel consciousness from another plane of existence, Hunter led dialogues and sermonized, while embodying mysterious entities, whose knowledge of the future and other realms answered the anxieties and uncertainties of her acolytes. 

QML's founder Neva Dell Hunter

One such entity Hunter channeled consistently she called Dr. Ralph Gordon. It was in the "voice" of this entity that Hunter shared much of the enlightenment and revelation that so inspired her followers. It was also through Dr. Ralph Gordon, that Hunter claimed communion with a deceased 19th-century faith healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. Regarded as the founder of the New Thought Movement, Quimby promoted a "mind over matter" approach to healing, growth, and engagement with the natural world. Quimby's professed ability to reach past scientific understanding and appeal to supernatural methods for correcting human ailments and augmenting human knowledge appealed to Hunter and inspired her continued research into such methods and refinement of her own mysterious practices.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

It was with this unique perspective and this purported otherworldly guidance that Neva Dell Hunter began seeking out and collecting books, to serve as foundation for her research and practice. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Hunter amassed a collection of texts on metaphysics, alternative medicine and healing, Christian mysticism, early UFOlogy and unexplained phenomena, and comparative religion. These books were circulated among her followers and gave shape to the modes of discovery and interpersonal healing, with which Hunter engaged for the remainder of her life.

In 1963 Hunter moved this collection to Alamogordo, New Mexico. There she established the collection as the Quimby Metaphysical Library. The discernible reasons for the move vary from the pragmatic (the drier climate was more conducive to the preservation of aging texts) to the enigmatic (Hunter hinted that she believed this region of high desert to be a future site of interplanetary colonization). Hunter, personifying Dr. Gordon, orates on the relocation of these texts in The Vision and Dedication of the Quimby Educational Impulse, a speech she delivered upon dedicating the collection in its new home.

Whatever the motivations, the moving of this collection suggests great care, attentiveness, and respect for the books therein, just as the content of the collection betrays the curiosity, ambition, and intellectual yearning that characterized Neva Dell Hunter. Hunter evidently suspected that ideas, remedies, and answers of some value lay obscured in the more erratic corners of the human experience, and she sought out texts that might illuminate those corners. Operating in the Southwest at the turn of the 20th century; in post-Oppenheimer, post-Roswell Southern New Mexico, Hunter appears, through a contemporary and critical lens, uniquely situated to document a time and place, in which fringe beliefs found fertile soil. Her atomic age anxieties led her to collect texts on scientific advancement, new technologies, and flash-in-the-pan pseudosciences. Her spiritual seeking kept her mind and her collection open to first-person narratives of extraordinary human abilities, communication with other worlds, and extraterrestrial encounters. 

Whether or not Hunter could actually give voice to the dead or to otherworldly beings, her work as a collector, preserver, and organizer of books gave voice to many individuals whose ideas and experiences may have been otherwise lost to history; individuals whose search for answers in a strange and rapidly changing time spanned worlds and realms.

Hunter died in 1978. By then Quimby Metaphysical Library was serving the fledging institution known as Quimby College (later Southwestern College of Life Sciences), the continuing formalization of the "educational impulse" conceived by Hunter and her followers.

QML Today 

Hunter's original collection of texts moved to its current location in Santa Fe, NM in 1984 and the educational impulse it inspired and to which it gave shape, became Southwestern College. The collection remains housed at Quimby Memorial Library, where it is designated as the Quimby Collection. It is joined by a main collection of circulating items and by expansive digital holdings, which feature ebooks, academic journals, and other media whose focus is the definition, communication, and application of contemporary knowledge largely in fields related to mental health and psychology. QML's original collection, its circulating collection, and its ever-growing digital collections trace the library's trajectory from its roots in esoterica, through its efforts to support growth, accreditation, and efficacy at its governing institution, to its drive to expand beyond its walls and bring its offerings to the wider world, via digital means.

The policies outlined below are intended as a foundation for understanding the current parameter's of services and resources, which QML offers its users. They are not, however, comprehensive. Please check out our FAQs page for additional information and always feel free to email us with specific questions. 

 

Policy Summaries

 

Circulation Policy

• Students, staff, and faculty of Southwestern College are automatically library members. No library card is issued, but patrons may be asked to verify their account in Populi for authentication. Graduates of SWC maintain their library membership and access to its resources.
• Community members can apply to become a patron by filling out a form and emailing it to askthelibrary@swc.edu. If approved, there will be a one-time charge of $25.
• [STUDENTS, STAFF, & FACULTY] Library resources will check out for three weeks at a time with the option to renew up to three times barring any additional hold requests. The limit is fifteen items total. There are no late charges, but patrons are responsible to pay a replacement fee for any lost or damaged items.
• [COMMUNITY MEMBERS & ALUMNI] Library resources will check out for three weeks at a time with the option to renew up to two times. Late charges accrue at $0.25 per day per item and patrons are responsible to pay a replacement fee for any lost or damaged items.
• Only currently enrolled students of SWC may check out items from the reserves collection. Items in the reserves collection circulate for 3 days. Renewals are not available for these items.

Distance Education Policy

• QML strives to provide students attending SWC, via distance education courses, access to library services that are of equal standard to those provided to on-campus students.
• We acquire ebooks and other online resources, when available, of required and supportive textbooks and articles and configure them for remote access.
• We can scan and electronically deliver to distance students requested sections of physical books and journals, as long as the section requested does not exceed 10 percent of a book’s total page count. Where appropriate, physical items can also be sent through the mail.
• We also offer reference services to address all student questions/requests, via email, telephone, and Zoom in addition to in-person meetings in our physical space.

Copyright Compliance Policy Agreement

• QML reproduces, digitizes, and/or distributes content from copyrighted materials for educational use at SWC, strictly within the bounds of U.S. Copyright Law.
• According to fair use allowances, under U.S. Copyright law section 107, no more than 10 percent or a single chapter of a published book may be reproduced for digital (or physical) distribution. This also applies to ebooks, videos, and other copyrighted media.
• There are two exceptions to these restrictions: If permission is obtained directly from a book’s copyright holder, QML will distribute greater than 10 percent of the work; and QML will also provide access to any text whose copyright has expired and has since entered public domain.