One for the road
New app from the Cultural Affairs Dept. puts the entire state at your fingertips
Imagine being able to easily flit from one end of New Mexico to the other, visiting Chaco Canyon in one moment and Cloudcroft the next, all from a smartphone, all with one app.
That is no longer just a wish but a reality as the state Department of Cultural Affairs has released a free tool that not only indicates hundreds of culturally and historically significant spots, but has links to all of them, said Douglas Patinka, department deputy chief information officer.
“The best use of it is to just discover new places,” he said. “The best way to use it is to find out what’s nearby.”
The app has built-in location sensors, Patinka said, to help with local searches. “The information is available on the web, but because it’s locationspecific, where you’re located, it will show the places nearby. It really works best as an app,” he said. “We do have location sensing built into mobile devices, and we also have groupings by region or grouping by different themes and different concepts, like art, for example.”
The locator device is particularly handy, Patinka said.
“So if you’re in downtown Santa Fe and you want to know what museums are nearby, you can open the app; it presents a map with points of interest,” he said. “You can find out more information about those points that are near you. If you’re interested in a specific type of thing, like archaeology, for instance, you can follow the tags and see related places with
those similar tags.”
The project began with a $128,000 appropriation from the Legislature in 2014. The department spent more than a year soliciting suggestions of sites to include in the app, Patinka said.
“We also wanted to include information about our own facilities, historic sites, museums around the state to create a resource that would direct people to public places that have cultural significance,” he said.
It was quite the laborious chore and one that is not yet even close to complete, Patinka said.
“We had to assess the datareadiness of different collections, not only assessing our own, and inviting institutions to submit information to us,” Patinka said. “We reached out to the museum community, the Forest Service, national park system. We told them that we’re creating this resource and tell us what’s important.”
This is just the beginning of what the department anticipates being an ongoing process.
“Once we had determined what was going to be included in it, at least in the first phase, then we started generating public information for it,” he said, “–– gathering photographs and creating the narrative.”
Including active links — including social media sites — photographs and any other resource imaginable was included in the app, Patinka said.
“That was one of the things that we wanted to ensure, to not include outdated information,” he said. “We wanted to link directly to websites, in some cases, social media and where a resource has a website, we link out. We have photographs, as well. We have a lot of photographs, about 800.”
At the moment, about 225 sites are listed, primarily museums and historic sites, he said.
“But we’ll be building on it,” Patinka said. “Historical markers, we have about 600 of those in our database. What we’ve been doing is collecting photos and GPS coordinates. That’s going to be the next big push once we get through the launch.”
The project will not only help local residents discover New Mexico, but also out-of-state visitors, said Veronica Gonzales, cultural affairs Cabinet secretary.
“The Cultural Atlas provides access to an enormous database of diverse and eclectic cultural opportunities,” she said. “Exploring the traditions and history of peoples and cultures across the state of New Mexico has never been easier to navigate and discover.”