Op-Ed Column: New Building Push Took Us from 'Hush' to 'Hey, Here We Are!'
Op-Ed Column: New Building Push Took Us from 'Hush' to 'Hey, Here We Are!'
By Chuck Sherrill, Tennessee State Librarian and Archivist
###
Librarians, as the stereotype goes, are not attention seekers. We are often thought of as the people who keep everyone else shushed into silence. Yet there are times when we need to make our voices heard, specifically on the issues that affect us and our patrons most directly. Out of necessity, that has led us to some new and different approaches to the way we communicate our story to the public.
For several years, we have been making the case that the Tennessee State Library & Archives needs a new building. We are doing so because the building we have been using for more than 60 years has a number of issues.
Most critically, we’re running out of storage space for books and historical records. In fact, we won’t have room for Gov. Haslam’s papers when his term ends or all the records generated during this session of the Tennessee General Assembly. Also, we are fighting daily battles to prevent mold and mildew from damaging the materials we already have in our collections.
Our front entrance isn’t wheelchair accessible, so people with mobility issues have to enter through a back door beside our loading dock and be escorted by security into our public areas. The cramped quarters also limit the kind of public events we can host and make it impossible for us to expand our programs for exhibits, seminars and educational visits by teachers and students.
To those of us who work here and many of our patrons, the need for a new building seems obvious. However, in order to meet that need, we must convince our governor and state lawmakers to fund a project that will likely cost close to $100 million.
This isn’t an easy sell. We’ve been asked some tough questions, such as: Why not just digitize all of your records? Can’t you operate out of a warehouse? Why build a new building with the relatively small amount of daily foot traffic you have? And – perhaps most painful of them all - does the general public really care about what you do?
Dealing with such questions, particularly the last one, has required a shift in our collective mindset. Generally speaking, our staff would prefer to quietly go about its business of serving our patrons and not spend time worrying about how we can better market ourselves to the outside world. But reality has intervened.
We are researching the cost of digitizing millions of records so we’ll be able to provide legislators with a comparison to the cost of a new building. (Our estimate for digitization already totals more than $500 million - and we are still tallying.) We are finding succinct ways to explain how more records from state agencies arrive at the archives every year. And we have repeated over and over the often-overlooked fact that digital files degrade over time.
As for the question about why we don’t have more visitors, we believe our lack of sufficient building space limits what we can do. With a bigger (and better) building, that problem would take care of itself. We have collected success stories from our counterparts at other libraries and archives around the country who have made their buildings “go-to” places for visiting schoolkids and the broader historical community.
That ties into the “why not a warehouse” question. We’ve been explaining about our statutory responsibility to maintain a clear chain of custody of official records for legal purposes. The costs, limitations and risks of entrusting records to a third-party storage vendor would be crippling - and we want to convey that concern to our elected officials. Moreover, third-party vendors charge pulling and filing fees for retrieving and replacing books and documents – and there’s a question about who would be responsible for paying those fees - people who are requesting the books or documents or the taxpayers. Those fees can quickly add up for extensive research projects that require access to many records.
As an aside, we have learned since we embarked on this journey the best way to blunt the arguments of those who say original records aren’t really needed in a digital age is to show people the original records.
We have visited the editorial boards of the newspapers serving the 10 largest cities in our state. At each stop, we showed the editorial board members copies of historical documents that related to their communities, such as city charters, Supreme Court case records and other items of local interest.
“That’s a copy, right?” we were asked on more than one occasion. Even the most world-weary journalist perked up a bit when we explained that they were looking at the actual documents written by their communities’ earliest leaders. Their appreciation for the value of original historical documents may be part of the reason every one of those newspapers, which cover a broad political spectrum, wrote editorials in support of building a new state library and archives.
Our legislators didn’t provide funding for the new building in the last fiscal year’s budget, but we’re not giving up. We’re going to keep gathering information and sharing it in creative ways to get the word out about the important role our institution plays and the need to plan for the future.
We’ll keep preparing public service announcements for radio and television. We’ll continue to schedule interviews for radio and TV. We’ll write more opinion columns for our local newspapers. We’ll enlist the support of more partner organizations to help us publicize our cause.
Not everything we do will be directly related to the pitch for a new building. Highlighting some of our programs can indirectly help us raise awareness about the value of the Library & Archives and its collections. We will continue to produce videos highlighting items from the collections. We will do everything we can think of to help people understand what we do and why a new building would help us do those things better.
Whether we will get funding for the new building is uncertain, but this process has forced us to think about new and better ways to get our message out. And that exercise has great value – for today and for the future.
Our mission is to exceed the expectations of our customers, the taxpayers, by operating at the highest levels of accuracy, cost-effectiveness and accountability in a customer-centered environment.
