Month: January 2026

The bronze statue of Icarus and Daedalus has been part of the Central Arkansas Library System’s art collection since 1967. It was created in 1965 by Philadelphia artist Evangelos Frudakis (1921–2019) and donated to CALS in 1967 by Raymond Rebsamen, a businessman active in downtown revitalization and a leader of the Urban Progress Association.

Since its beginnings, the Central Arkansas Library System has helped patrons with genealogical research. A donation from the Richard L. Butler family enhanced the collection and elevated the service to the community with the establishment in 1997 of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, now housed in the CALS Bobby L. Roberts Library for Arkansas History &

As the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas heads into our twentieth anniversary year (the EOA debuted online in May 2006), we thought we’d share some numbers from the past year.

In 2025, the CALS EOA had a total of 2.3 million sessions, 2.3 million users engaged, and 3.4 million page views. That’s an average of about 200,000 sessions,

As I type these words, there is a button for the Microsoft Copilot, the company’s AI “assistant,” lurking in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen—its rainbow color a bright contrast to everything else on my screen, just begging to be engaged.

Do you see it? Microsoft would be delighted for me to click on that and make some use of that feature,