Studies Institute a work of 'Ark'

LITTLE ROCK Walk into the new Arkansas Studies Institute on President Clinton Avenue, and throughout the sunlit galleries and research rooms are pieces of history and culture lovingly preserved or on exhibit.

Among archival photographs, Arkansas suffragettes in 1919 rally at the state Capitol, Hackett coal miners of 1939 pose for a photographer, a black farmer in the 1940s works a field in Wilson, Japanese-American children clutch Easter baskets at a World War II relocation camp in Rohwer, and a train laden with soybeans is loaded in 1952 with the first soybean shipment from the U.S. to Japan.

Two miles of historical records are stored in rooms specially supported by steel beams and geo-piers to hold their weight and withstand an earthquake. Materials from Bill Clinton's years before he moved to the White House are part of the collection, along with the papers of several other former Arkansas governors.

Saturday was the grand opening of the $21 million building. The new institute opens to the public for research Monday. Nine years of collaborative work between the Central Arkansas Library System and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock culminated in the weekend event.

Besides the library system's Butler Center and the UALR Archives and Special Collections, the 72,000-square-foot building is home to the Arkansas Humanities Council, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, the UALR Urban Policy Forum, the Bill Clinton State Government Project, and the Central Arkansas Library System Art Galleries.

The Clinton School of Public Service, located down the avenue that ends at the presidential library, also claims space in the new building as the graduate school expands.

"We're trying to do two things with this facility one is create a place where anybody who wants to know about Arkansas will have at their fingertips an immense amount of resources to do that," Butler Center director David Stricklin said. "The other thing we're trying to do is stimulate the pursuit of further knowledge about the state's history."

The combined collection of the Butler Center and the UALR archives amounts to more than 40,000 books and 10,000 linear feet of manuscripts related to Arkansas and its people. It includes photographs, maps, letters, pamphlets, and other original documents.

"This is a giant public history laboratory," Stricklin said.

The building itself is something of an architectural feat a structure that combines three buildings from three centuries to serve a common purpose. To begin with, the architects Polk Stanley Rowland Curzon Porter had an 1882 warehouse from a liquor distributorship that had no foundation and an adjacent 1914 wholesale grocers with a sloped floor and a basement that had been under water for years. They renovated and combined the two buildings and added a third that houses the weighty collection in rooms visible through glass walls.

They created art galleries, a sizable research room, meeting rooms, and classrooms, and preserved remnants of Corcordia Hall, a social meeting place for a local Jewish organization of the 19th century. They retained the original cypress beams and created floors from wood representing various parts of the state: black walnut, cherry, persimmon, pine, sweet gum and others.

The building itself is partly made of sandstone from Batesville. It features decorative copper, original columns and brick, as well as an "industrial-sized" coffee roaster that was used by earlier occupants of the building.