Category: CALS Roberts Library Blog

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.

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.

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,

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.

The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, housed in the CALS Roberts Library, hosted its annual genealogy workshop on Saturday, October 7, in the CALS Ron Robinson Theater. The Butler Center has been hosting this event since 2002.

The expert speaker this year was Ronnie A. Nichols, a descendant of a Black Civil War veteran and a scholar of the American Civil War,

My long-suffering colleague Ali Welky, who manages the Roberts Library and Encyclopedia of Arkansas blogs, occasionally complains that my own contributions here too often take the form of rambling ruminations upon some book I’ve recently read that take a long time to tie back into the work we do at the EOA, and sometimes tie in rather indirectly.

This year, the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies processed an addition of forty-four boxes of material for the Dee Brown papers. This additional material includes personal items from the lives of Arkansas author Dee Brown, his wife Sally, their children Mitch and Linda, and other family members. Letters to or from Dee and Sally,

From 1930 to 1960, the tallest building in Arkansas was the Hotel Ben McGehee. Located on the northwest corner of Main and Markham Streets in downtown Little Rock, the sixteen-story Art Deco structure was designed by architect Julian Bunn Davidson.

The Ben McGehee was a mid-grade hotel while the Hotel Marion,

With the Main Library now closed for renovations, the CALS art program has had to get, well, creative!

With the closing of the Galleries & Bookstore at Library Square to make way for “Mini Main,” there have been questions about how the library system will display art and care for the works of art it owns.

Recently, I went to the memorial service for Grif Stockley, a well-known Arkansas lawyer, writer, and historian who died in January in Virginia, where he had been living to be close to his daughter. As we all told stories about the experiences we had had with Grif, it occurred to me that no biography,