Oases Of Culture: A History Of Public And Academic Libraries In Nevada

4. Washoe County

     ten years;instead they were forced to endure their cramped quarters twice that long.By the 1980s the functions of the library were scattered among four different buildings,all inadequate. The legislature finally addressed the needs in 1987 when it appropriated $790,000 to plan a 136,000-square-foot building.The architectural firm of DeLorenzo, Sticha and Associates designed the new facility. Ground was broken in February 1990, and the new edifice—a modern steel-and-glass structure that offered compensation for the decades of overcrowded quarters suffered by the staff and collection—opened for public access in January 1993. Its spacious, soaring foyer with a striking view onto the capitol grounds could hardly have been more unlike the rabbit warren conditions in which librarians had toiled for two decades. Symbolically ,it was constructed around the old StateArchives building, which became the repository of the Nevada Constitution of 1864. At the cornerstone ceremony held on October 31 (Nevada Day), 1992,the keynote speaker was James H.Billington,librarian of Congress and a noted historian.Summarizing the challenges of the new age and the place of libraries within it, he emphasized the links between past and future and among peoples of a variegated culture: Economic growth in this country is largely recorded in information -based enterprise. That uniquely American institution , the open public library has a central role to play in this coming Age of Information.This world of information is bewildering, sometimes overwhelming. It is essentially now a rapidly growing network of increasingly available raw material for the inquiring mind. . . . To be true to ourselves, we Americans must preserve the values of the old book culture even as we reap the benefit of the new electronic networking. Humanism and democracy, if they are to be sustainable on a continental scale and in a multicultural context, must have some shared common values and,at the same time,real tolerance for variety and difference.       And that is precisely what the open American library represents .12 In the first ten years of Kerschner’s administration, approximately $120 million was spent in Nevada for the construction of new facilities in various parts of the state. Many of the urban and rural libraries that opened or expanded or computerized during this period relied on the state library for advice and for the administration of state and federal grant money. Kerschner, in the tradition of most of her predecessors, took a keen interest in the needs of the scattered rural libraries.She traveled as often as possible to outlying counties and cities and cooperated with the local staffs in obtaining federal funds and organizing their collections. She was much more fortunate than her predecessors because the state legislature took greater interest in library matters. When Kerschner resigned in 1999 to become director of the Henderson district libraries, she was replaced by Monteria Hightower, previously a regional administrator in the Las Vegas– Clark County Library District. Hightower had been a primary proponent,as chair of the government relations committee of nla, of a statewide policy enacted by the 1997 legislature that enabled local libraries to apply to the state library for support funding for the purchase of books, library materials, and databases. A total of $2.4 million was appropriated from the general fund for this project, half to be awarded in each of the 1998 and 1999 fiscal years. t h e e l e c t r o n i c e r a In the early 1980s, the preliminary steps that Nevada had taken in the automation and computerization of its library collections began to bear fruit.The state library provided leadership for the development of the Cooperative Libraries Automated Network      (clan).The network began as an arrangement for sharing computer resources between the state library and the Carson City and Churchill County libraries and evolved into a consortium of fifteen northern Nevada institutions that shared computer systems and databases with one another. clan has made it possible for the libraries to have a single online catalog for information retrieval, cooperative circulation and cataloging activity, and shared licensing of commercial databases, enabling these institutions to reduce many of the basic costs of processing their materials. The state library publishes an annual directory of Nevada libraries and pertinent statistics, regular masterplans for suggested development,and brochures for the state data center,and manages programs to...