Category: CALS Roberts Library Blog

Art Happenings at the Roberts Library and Beyond

Throughout the Central Arkansas Library System, you’ll see art nearly everywhere you look: in galleries, on the walls, and in progress. CALS offers exhibition galleries in the Roberts Library and elsewhere. It also actively collects and exhibits works by artists working and living in Arkansas and has a permanent collection of art that it displays throughout the buildings and grounds of its various libraries.


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Embracing the Random

I believe that it’s important to add a bit of randomness to one’s life. We can be too often confined to our narrow tastes, especially in these days when unseen algorithms dictate much of what we see online or even experience in the real world. Preserving a bit of randomness is a survival technique for the mind and soul.


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Shining a Light on Arkansas’s Jewish History for Hanukkah

As Jewish families in Arkansas illuminate their menorahs during the Hanukkah season, the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the CALS Roberts Library would like to shine our own light on the archival collections illustrating the enduring traditions of the state’s Jewish community.

Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights, carries deep significance in Jewish tradition.


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Memories Around the Holiday Table: Collecting Family Oral Histories

Many stories are shared at family gatherings around the holidays. The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the CALS Roberts Library would like to help you capture those stories in an oral history interview. Oral history interviews are structured conversations that are created to preserve personal or cultural histories, document unique experiences, illuminate historical events from a personal viewpoint,


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Mapping Little Rock’s Historical Theaters

Downtown Little Rock has been home to more than a dozen movie theaters over the years, though one would not guess it in this age of suburban cineplexes. It is hard to believe there was a time when four theaters were clustered within a block of each other, with even more spread around the city blocks.


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My Sister Feeds Me

We will officially acknowledge things we are thankful for in our lives on the day of recognition known as Thanksgiving Day. Some will spend all or part of this day with family or friends who wear the label of family. Some will spend the day alone or with strangers. My day will be repetitive of my family beginnings.


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The EOA’s Project Zelda

I wanted to call it Project Hogthrob after Link Hogthrob of The Muppet Show, but I was outvoted. Instead, it was named Project Zelda.

This has been something with which we have been preoccupied of late, a project that involves revisiting every single entry we have on the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas.


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One Last Research Question

October 6, 2023, was the last day of my thirty-eight-year career at the Central Arkansas Library System. I spent the first thirty years in the Reference Department, now known as Information Services, and the last eight in the Bobby L. Roberts Library of Arkansas History & Art. A substantial portion of both positions involved answering research questions,


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Preserving Legacy for Dia de Muertos: Archives, Art, and Celebration

In Central Arkansas, we have seen a steady growth in the Spanish-speaking community beginning in the late 1980s that continues to the present. Recognizing the importance of these narratives, the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies is working to ensure that the invaluable stories of this community are safeguarded for future generations. These efforts aim to help in the forming and documenting of community memory.


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The Butler Banner archives between 1999-2018 are available in PDF format only. The Butler Banner was our print newsletter.

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We allow certain outlets to reprint our copyrighted Butler Banner or CALS Roberts Library blog posts with express permission. To seek permission, please email Glenn Whaley at gwhaley@cals.org.

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