For 15 years — a period spanning three governors and two secretaries of state — Tennessee has had plans to add to Bicentennial Mall, a state park in Nashville in the shadow of the Capitol.
The plan was to build in one corner of the park a new Library and Archives facility, a place to keep the hundreds of thousands of books, historical documents,legislative records and other materials.
As plans lagged, across the mall — through the carillon circle where chimes play music every hour — a new building for the Tennessee State Museum was constructed and then opened in 2018.
But at long last theLibrary and Archives building is complete. The$123 million facility opens to the public on Tuesday, and state officials hope researchers and general members of the public alike will stop in.
The massive165,000-square-foot facility replaces a smaller 1950s-era library and archives building on 7th Avenue North by the state Capitol and Tennessee Supreme Court building. The new spaceprovides 40% more storage. Construction began in 2017.
It has been a major priority for Secretary of State Tre Hargett, who inherited the vision when he left the House of Representatives for his current office in 2009, and has had to repeatedly negotiate funding for the project.
"It was the oldest library and archives in the country that hadn’t had a renovation or expansion," Hargett said of the old building, which the state is now able to renovate for another purpose.
Lack of parking at the old space was part of the problem, and it wasn't very accessible to the public, Hargett said. Staff would hear from people who said they kept driving because they couldn't find parking nearby.
The plans began under former Gov. Phil Bredesen before Hargett had to re-pitch the idea when Gov. Bill Haslam got in office. In 2005, it was still a $60 million project.
Inflation and the construction boom in Nashville more than doubled the cost, though Hargett's office said they employed "value engineering" to make changes in materials and other features to save $15 million to $20 million.
While former Haslam championed the new museum facility and Hargett— elected by and thus associated with the legislature— got his building, it remains to be seen whether the judicial branch will take over the old library facility to expand its footprint from the adjacent Supreme Court building.
What's in the new Library and Archives building
Visitors to thenew Library and Archives building can obtain a researcher's card from the front desk, which allows them to scan past security gates to go to the second floor.
There, a reading room offers seating for 100 people, along with tens of thousands of books and genealogies for browsing and a microfilm area featuring newspapers from around the state dating back to 1791and county court records. The library has nearly every book written about Tennessee and its counties.
But the volumes housed on the shelf of the reading room are just the beginning. Another 350,000 titles— which could include more than one book each— are stored in a massive robotic retrieval system that has space for 150,000 more. Another 38,000 boxes of documents are also kept there.
That area is "temperature and humidity controlled to the Nth degree," said state librarian and archivist Chuck Sherrill. But he noted the books are organized by size rather than call number, "which for an old-time librarian is hard to adjust to."
The system tracks books by barcode, and doesn't require that they be placed back in a specific bin.
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People in the reading room can browse the state collection of books and files on a computer, request the items be retrieved, and have them available within 10 minutes.
The robotic system itself can track down the items within 90 seconds. The books are then sent down a small elevator to the librarian desk in the reading room, where a person can then retrieve it.
"Often we have people who come for a week and come everyday to pursue a research topic," Sherill said, explaining visitors have traveled to the state library from other countries and spent months in Nashville using the resources for research.
Some people come to research their family lineage, while others are working on dissertations or long-term projects.
Sherrill himself first visited the 7th Avenue state library with his mother in 1972 at age 12 after asking a lot of questions about his family history. He still remembers discovering his great-great-grandfather's Confederate pension application that day.
He hopes the building's new location, steps away from where families and individuals walk and play at Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park,will draw casual visitors.
The lobby of the new facility is much more welcoming, featuring several interactive exhibits, while the parking garage makes visiting the building much easier.
A glass-walled room off the lobby of rare, historic books remains locked, but visitors can look inside to see shelves of books dating back to the 1500s, books from Presidents James Polk's and Andrew Jackson's personal library andJohn J. Audubon's historic bird illustrations.
Jackson, then president, even left a handwritten note inside the cover of a book of 1834 congressional speeches.
"On a good day" pre-pandemic at the old building, Sherrill said they would see around 50 visitors. He expects that number to increase in the new space, which is also more handicap accessible.
Document restoration takes place in the building
Beyond storing materials, the building is also a place for old documents to be repaired and preserved. They offer thoseservices to libraries in the state if materials are damaged.
The Library and Archives staff are constantly receiving donations of old books and materials, often discovered in less than ideal storage environments like basem*nts and attics.
One of those recent donations came from alongtime state park ranger who was also a historian. Heleft in his will instructions to donate old park photographs and other audio recordings to the state, Sherrill said.
A large walk-in blast freezer set to -30 degrees, an upgrade from the state archive's previous double-door freezer, can help dry out wet books and papers without forming ice crystals and take care of insect problems in an old batch of materials.
In the conservation lab, staff members have equipment at their disposal to do things likerepair tears, suction out stains and humidify and carefully open old rolled-up maps that would otherwise crack.
Facility offers more services for the blind, meeting space for history-oriented groups
While the state library has long offered a service to send audio and Braille books to around 7,000 visually impaired readers, they intend to expand their offerings with the new facility.
The building now features a room where people needing to learn how to use a screen reader for computer access can be trained to do so, along with a child-friendly space to teach kids Braille.The library may also host book discussions for blind readers.
People can sign up for the program online, by calling the library or by inquiring with most eye doctors, Sherrill said.
For other community groups centered around history, library science and other topics relevant to the Library and Archives' mission, a large meeting space is available for use.
A 300-person training or conference room can be divided into three, compared to a meeting space in the old building that couldn't seat more than 50.
"We’d really like to be the go to place for the historical community in Tennessee when they’d like to get together," Sherrill said. "So we built this conference room space for that purpose."
For example, Tennessee Historical Commission has already inquired about using the space for when their in-person meetings resume.
Reach Natalie Allison at nallison@tennessean.com. Follow her on Twitter at @natalie_allison.
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