By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
The Hays Public Library celebrated the renovation of the Kansas Room with a Chamber in Hays ribbon cutting on Friday.
The Kansas Room is in the basement of the library. It holds circulating books on Kansas and from Kansas authors and reference materials on local history and genealogy.
The $170,000 project included moving the stacks to the west side of the basement to allow for more seating, programming and study space, Jeremy Gill, Kansas Room coordinator, said.
Brandon Hines, library director, said the Kansas Room is the final piece in a five-year renovation of the entire library. Much of the library had not been updated since the 1960s. The Kansas Room had last been updated in 2004.
Renovations on the first and second floors began in 2020.
Hines said the library staff wanted to create space in the basement where people could study or do research.
"We wanted to create a quiet reference-type space on the lower level because if you have been in the library on the main floor or especially the children's library on the second floor, it's not really the shushing library that you might have grown up with," Hines said. "There's a lot of activity."
Paul-Wertenberger Construction was the general contractor on the project.
Lead donors on the project included the estate of Ann Liston and the Robert E. and Patricia Schmidt Foundation.
Major contributors who gave between $1,000 and $10,000 included Diana Pantle, Ken and Rose Marie Staab, Layton and Jerry Kaiser, Kyle and Stephanie Carlin, Friends of the Hays Library, Carol Vajnar, Sharon Dreher, Heartland Community Foundation, Teget Foundation, Cloud Storage, Kent and Ruth Deines, Jon and Cindy Lightle, the Hines family and Paul-Wertenberger Construction.
Gill said the Kansas Room is officially named the Dorothy B. Richards Kansas Room, which was named for the library director who created the collection as a shelf in the original Carnegie Library in Hays.
The collection grew to a room in the Carnegie Library's basement and was eventually moved to the present library.
"There haven't been a lot of Kansas Room librarians or coordinators over the years, and I really do appreciate the work and effort of all of those different people," Gill said.
The collection also contains rare books, books on the Great Plains, a local photo collection and local yearbooks.
"It's fun to see people go down memory lane with those kinds of things," he said.
The library has a complete collection of Fort Hays State University yearbooks but is missing a few yearbooks from area high schools, or their copies have been well-worn from use, Gill said.
Residents can contact Gill at the library if they want to donate materials to the collection.
The Kansas Room has a bank of computers for research and an overhead scanner for digitizing images.
"I get emails and phone calls from all over the country and sometimes all over the world," Gill said. "It's a really special place."
After COVID, the Kansas Room initiated a coffee hour during which residents can talk to Gill and each other about local history.
That group meets at 10 a.m. Thursday mornings in the Kansas Room.
Hines said, "This place is just a collection of things without people like Jeremy. Jeremy is the one who connects people. He is the one who tells these stories about everything we have. Without people connecting with people, this would not be what it is."
"The Kansas Room is like a lot of other components of the library. It has its own little life. We have the children's area and the young adults' area. It has this life because of the people."
You can learn more about the Hays Public Library and the Kansas Room at hayslibrary.org. Follow the library on Facebook for information on upcoming events.