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People regularly reach out to the Roberts Library to ask their most pressing questions about Arkansas history.

Sometimes we get a question from someone who needs help locating an Arkansas-based historical journal, or a phone call from someone who is interested in an Arkansas author whose volumes are held in our closed stacks.

Throughout February, and all year long, you can engage with Black history in many ways with the Central Arkansas Library System.

Black Family Expo

CALS community engagement coordinator Jessica McDaniel and community outreach archivist Danielle Afsordeh organized the first Black Family Expo at the Josephine Pankey Community Center for Black History Month in 2023,

I didn’t know my grandfather. Every time I would ask about him, I’d hear a mix of responses: “Gong Gong was frugal.” “He loved ‘Edelweiss.’” “He gave a lot of lectures.” But my dad always said, “He was a great father.” And while I never knew him (he died several months after I was born),

Some years back, my wife and I rented a cabin in Ponca near the Buffalo River. The idea was to snuggle down for a cold weather spell over Thanksgiving week, spend time reading books while a fire crackled in the fireplace, and generally disconnect from work and everything else. However, our dog would need his regular walks,

Winter 2025 offers many opportunities to view and experience art at the Central Arkansas Library System through exhibitions, events, and workshops!

Exhibitions

From the Vault: A Survey of the CALS Art Collection will be on display throughout the spring, with some additions to mark Black History Month.

The art of sending and receiving Christmas cards in the mail has dwindled, though it has not entirely vanished. I remember, when I was young, my parents signing cards and putting them in envelopes, addressing and stamping them, and taking them to the post office for delivery. The cards they received were displayed on the living room wall through the holiday season.

Recently, I was standing outside an abandoned Presbyterian church in rural Clark County thinking about the collapse of civilizations. Or rather, thinking about how they don’t collapse.

I’d come to this spot two years previously with the artist V. L. Cox, who had secured permission from the Presbyterian synod to remove the stained-glass windows from the church (or what remained of the windows,

Katherine Phillips Mitchell was born into a home of hope. Although her parents Clem Phillips and Parthenia Nash Phillips lived in the area of Little Rock known as Hanger Hill, they originally came from Hope in Hempstead County. Her siblings Clemmie, Charles, Doris, and Delois were raised with the value of hope educationally,

While reviewing the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA) usage stats for the month of September, I noticed a huge influx of web visits from South Korea: 8,208 to be exact. (Monthly visits to the CALS EOA from South Korea usually total around 100.) Some of our most common visiting nations include Australia (1,263 in September),

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then we would need millions of words to describe the contents of the CALS Butler Center’s Pulaski County Photograph Collection (BC.PHO.2.A). This collection was started when the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System was founded in 1997, and it now includes more than 3,100 items.