A renewed space for the tens of thousands of rare and historic documents at the San Antonio Public Library is underway.
City Council approved a contractor’s bid in early May to remodel and expand the Texana Resource Center after several years of delays as construction costs grew along with the project scope.
In the coming weeks, a crew from Best Built will begin the work to expand the special collections space holding the history of South Texas on its shelves.
The $5 million project will turn an entire floor of the enchilada-red library in downtown San Antonio into a 21,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art history and research center serving the entire region.
“That’s bigger than our largest branch library,” said Kathy Donellan, interim library director. A 19-year library staffer, Donellan stepped into the interim role following Ramiro Salazar’s retirement in March.
The 2017 and 2022 bond project, a full-scale renovation of the sixth floor of the Central Library, is expected to begin soon and be completed in late 2024.
Preparing for construction
San Antonio-based architecture firm Marmon Mok designed the new Texana Resource Center.
In addition to a large, archival vault with high-density shelving and advanced climate control systems that protect rare and fragile items from potential damage, the remodeled center will have a flexible classroom space, private consulting rooms, a genealogy research room and gallery space.
In preparation for construction, the library’s uppermost floor is bare except for a few empty filing cabinets, a stack of old ceiling tiles and a huddle of dress mannequins from a years-ago fashion exhibit.
For now, most of the center’s collection of thousands of maps, posters, brochures, books, photos and other historic documents are safely stored away or placed in a temporary home on the library’s main floor.
The more popular items in the collection, like newspapers, city directories and clipping files, have been moved to temporary space near the reception desk where library patrons can still access the materials.
There, vertical filing cabinets in blue, yellow and black contain folders with historic documents about everything from the earliest days of Fiesta and sports teams in San Antonio to the city’s theaters, businesses and schools.
Filling the shelves are titles chronicling Texas history, books with spines bearing family names like Martinez and Marroquin, and rows upon rows of hardback city directories with leathery covers and gold-embossed lettering.
Genealogy research
Also kept on file in the resource center are copies of death notices and immigration records, one of the most frequently requested items, said Special Collections Manager Heather Ferguson, who oversees the Texana Resource Center.
“The San Antonio Public Library, throughout its history, had a fairly large collection of books on Texas and general history topics,” Ferguson said.
“But it wasn’t really until the library relocated into the 1995 building that we’re in presently that [the resource center] got rebranded as an entire department with a dedicated space and staff and a special storage vault for housing sensitive materials.”
The special collection continues to grow through acquisitions and donations of precious and historical items.
Prominent lawyer and circus memorabilia collector Harry Hertzberg donated 500 original WWI recruitment posters. Those priceless posters plus an extensive collection of historic maps, including the comprehensive Sanborn Maps, are stored in wide, flat filing cabinets.
The variety of materials on hand in the Texana is broad — and specific to the region.
“The large collection that we have been building on is a collection of African American funeral programs from the San Antonio area,” Ferguson said. Through a grant, the library is working with the University of North Texas to digitize the unique collection.
Since October 2022, the seven-member Texana staff estimates responding to over 16,000 reference questions and research inquiries in addition to hosting 102 Texana-specific programs for more than 1,400 people.
Genealogy research is a big part of what Texana provides, and the library staff, experts at research and familiar with the collection and various databases they subscribe to, work to help people find what they’re looking for.
Not all of them live in San Antonio, and in fact, many visit from outside the area or even the state.
“We have a gentleman who’s going to visit us next month who’s coming in town and wants to do some research on his grandparents,” said Deborah Countess, special collections librarian. “We get people from out of town all the time, sometimes specifically just to do research on their family.”
Funds for book-keeping
The 2017 bond funded the Texana project at $700,000, far less than the $2 million the library requested, Donellan said. The San Antonio Library Foundation stepped forward to raise an additional $850,000 toward the project.
The remaining balance came from other private donations and from the $6 million in total funding for library improvements in the 2022 bond, of which $3.4 million was earmarked for Texana.
Since its creation 41 years ago, the foundation has worked hand-in-hand with the public library, raising more than $50 million for library needs, said Amy Hone, executive director of the San Antonio Library Foundation.
“History and all of the family stories and everything that Texana is safeguarding for the citizens of San Antonio, that was a huge priority for the former director, Ramiro Salazar,” Hone said. The foundation began fundraising in 2016 for the resource center as well as for the Latino Collection and Resource Center and the Forest Hills branch renovation.
Several local family foundations have donated generously to those projects, so when it looked as if a planned art gallery and donor recognition space in the Texana Resource Center would exceed the budget, the foundation contributed $200,000 for the space, she added.
While the collection holds priceless and useful information, the seven staffers who work in the Texana could be considered the real resource, often doing the time-consuming work of tracking down information through various sources.
“Part of our job is helping to point researchers where those records or materials might be if they’re not here at the library and where they can find them,” Ferguson said. They also assist people from all over.
The Texana is a regional resource, said Donellan.
“We’re really preserving these materials for the whole region,” she said. “So a lot of [what the project is about] is about giving better accessibility to the public and then also expanding what’s available digitally.”
