501-918-3025
calsfoundation@cals.org
calsfoundation@cals.org
A New Face at the EOA, Alongside Older Ones
You probably don’t regularly check the Staff or Contact Us pages on the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA) website, but if you happened to click on either of those recently, you might have noticed a new name in the mix: Starr M. Carr.
Michael Keckhaver (a.k.a. Sterno) retired at the end of 2024 after serving as the EOA’s media editor for nearly twenty years. He will very much be missed, especially when April 1 rolls around, for he was always great at devising some ridiculous image to accompany our April Fools’ Day entry.
In his place is Starr, who will be dividing her hours between helping to digitize media for the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the CALS Roberts Library and serving as the media editor of the EOA. We’ll let Starr introduce herself and update everyone on EOA media happenings a little farther down the line, maybe when she finally realizes exactly what she’s gotten herself into.
I didn’t realize until we began the hiring process just how stable the EOA staff has been over the years compared to most workplaces. There simply has not been much turnover here. Granted, when I came on back in 2005, much of the first wave of hires were either departing or soon to depart, with Tom Dillard, who got the whole project rolling, taking the directorship of Special Collections at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, soon to be followed by Tim Nutt, the original staff historian. Jill Curran left as project editor to pursue other things, and editorial assistant Shirley Schuette moved over to the Butler Center archives after the launch of the EOA. Nathania Sawyer, the senior editor at the time of launch, eventually moved over to the archival side of things, too, as did Anna Lancaster, who had been editorial assistant, and Steven Teske, originally a fact checker for the EOA.
As for the current staff, I started full time in September 2005 after serving as an EOA intern that summer. Our staff historian Mike Polston started at the same time. Our associate editor Ali Welky, who began freelance editing for the EOA in the early days of the project, joined the staff in 2007. Aside from the occasional intern, our last hire before Starr was Jasmine Jobe, our current editorial assistant, who joined the staff in 2009. That’s an unusual level of stability for any workplace. I don’t know if this is indicative of us having all found our niche, the place where our particular talents overlap with the needs of our broader service area and readership—or maybe if we’ve all reached some dead end in our careers and have no hope of fitting in elsewhere. (Or maybe I’ve been watching too much Slow Horses.) Either way, we’ve all worked together very well for quite some years. And now a new person is joining us for the first time in fifteen years.
But first we had to pick that person. During the interviews, there was a moment that took me aback: one of our interviewees said, “I’ve been using the Encyclopedia of Arkansas my entire life!” It was a bit of hyperbole, this person being some five years older than the EOA, but the website has indeed been around for eighteen-plus years, meaning that for people graduating from high school these days, the EOA just is—there has never been a time without it.
When we started all those years ago, we were the scrappy upstart, and there were plenty who doubted that a history project produced by neither the state government nor the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville (not at Fayetteville—they are very particular about that) would ever get off the ground. But it did. And this scrappy underdog of a history project kept scrapping, continuing to add somewhere between 300 and 500 entries each year, and when the original grant funding from the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute ran out, the Central Arkansas Library System took most of our staff on the payroll and let us continue doing our thing.
In 2025, the EOA will hit 8,000 entries. Of all the state encyclopedias created exclusively for the web, right now only HistoryLink, the Washington state encyclopedia, is larger, with some 8,200 articles—and it launched in 1998. Yes, the Handbook of Texas has some 27,000 entries, but it also started life as a print project begun in 1939, and by 1996, the six volumes of the printed Handbook of Texas already featured more than 23,000 entries. I am probably safe in describing us as the fastest-growing state and local encyclopedia out there. And we are a rare one that is part of a regional library system.
Yet all this time, even as I have seen the EOA cited in news media across the country and in books both academic and popular, I somehow maintain the delusion that we were still having to prove ourselves. But the once-scrappy newcomer has become an institution.
Maybe I have just been too busy writing, editing, and updating entries to do much thinking about the EOA’s place in the world. After all, everything we add to the site just results in more people emailing us to contribute something. As newspapers and other resources become digitized and keyword-searchable, it becomes easier to do the sort of research needed to write certain entries. We’ve not really had an idle moment in the past two decades.
This year will mark my twenty years working for CALS and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, and I still feel a bit like the wide-eyed PhD student I was when I started, both terrified of what I was undertaking but also just lucky to have a job in my field.
Next year will mark twenty years since the launch of the EOA on May 2, 2006. We continue to grow in terms of entries and media, yes, but we are also starting to rethink just what kinds of features an encyclopedia website like ours can offer. As has been noted in earlier blog posts, we’ve recently added more than a dozen quizzes to the site and plan to expand that particular feature in the future. We are also working with our developers, Army of Bees, on a “county explorer” feature that will offer a visually appealing mechanism for diving deep into county-level history. We have more ideas in the works, including the possibility of some curated lists to help people better navigate the wealth of information now online.
If we are an institution, as it seems we are, then I guess we have to take seriously our responsibilities to all our current users—and those in the future. So we intend to keep adding new material and doing new things with the materials we currently have. You can help us by hitting that “Support the EOA” button on the top right of the page (or using this link). You know how it is. All those newer, shiny projects out there, it’s easy for them to attract some funding and love. It’s a little harder for us older historical resources—those of us whose careers have now spanned an entire generation, those of us who are wearing our trousers rolled now. We may not be that young anymore, but you can help us keep this resource alive for those coming after us. If anything was proven by those job interviews, it’s that the EOA’s existence is now simply taken for granted—which is, in many ways, its own definition of success.
By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas
