Green Library Reading Room
Green Art Research Library
The Old Jail Art Center
201 S. 2nd St.
Albany, TX 76430
Phone: 325-762-2269
Email: archivist@theoldjailartcenter.org
Web site (library): http://www.theoldjailartcenter.org/libarch/library.htm
Web site (museum): http://www.theoldjailartcenter.org
Green Library Reading Room
Library/Archives Work Area
Established in 1984 as part of The Old Jail Center's expansion project, the library exists to provide reference information in support of the center's permanent collection and to provide general art education material to the Shackelford County community. The library’s non-circulating collection now stands at over 2,500 volumes on the general history of cultures represented in the permanent collection, anthropology, art instruction, art education, sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, decorative arts, theatre design, and architecture.
The library space is also used as a meeting room for museum staff, board of trustees, and various community organizations. The furnishings are antiques, most of which came from the Cook Memorial Hospital (now the Cook Children’s Medical Center) when it was renovated in the early 1980s.
The library also features a handful of oversized rare art books including Illustrations of the Book of Job by William Blake (1935 edition), and the New Gallery of British art; containing one hundred and twenty-one engravings on steel from the works of distinguished British painters, 1854.
In addition to its library collection, the Robert E. Nail, Jr. Archives includes archival material documenting the lives of persons, and events occurring in the Shackelford County area; personal and/or professional papers of artists whose work is in the permanent collection; and archival records of the Old Jail Art Center.
The library has one FTE who splits time between the Library and the Archives.
The bulk of our collection comes from donations from the general public and from the absorption of private libraries acquired as part of archival collections. We also receive exhibition catalogs, gallery guides, and museum publication from various library exchange programs.
Though the library was created in 1984, the library is only now offering researchers the opportunity to search its collections via the Web. In June 2006, the library made the long overdue move from card catalog to OPAC. The transition took six months of in-house retrospective conversion to MARC followed by another six months spent finding an institution to host our catalog. We joined the Abilene Library Consortium, a network of libraries in the Abilene area, which supports the library's new OPAC. We currently use cataloging services offered by Marcive in San Antonio whereby items are cataloged through Marcive's Web-based system and then emailed to the ALC system administrator.
Daniel Alonzo