Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 9, 1990 TAG: 9007090053
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: WISE LENGTH: Long
Being director of a system with nine libraries covering four rural Southwest Virginia counties and a city leaves little time for the reading room.
Gibson, 68, retired earlier this month after 25 years as director of the Lonesome Pine Regional Library.
"Now I can read all I want," she said.
The region started in 1963 with Wise County and the city of Norton being joined by Dickenson County. Lee County joined in 1965, when Gibson became regional library director. Scott County, the final member, would come on board in 1972.
In 1965, the library in Wise was housed in an old Veterans of Foreign Wars building. Plywood blocked off offices in what had been the orchestra and dance floor.
Piles of uncataloged books leaned against damp dirt walls and collected mildew. A mountain of magazines filled one corner, climbing nearly to the ceiling.
Dickenson County's library was in a long, narrow, rented building on the main street of Clintwood.
Today, the sprawling Wise County Public Library is computerized and boasts nearly 127,000 books, an exhibit room, records and cassettes, films, paintings, sculptures, videotapes, periodicals, a children's library complete with toys, and a separate regional paperback books-by-mail basement facility. It is one of five new library buildings in the region since 1970.
Regionally, Gibson said, "our circulation has been more than a million for several years." But getting the libraries from where they were to where they are was a daunting task.
Gibson began bringing order out of the chaos of unalphabetized piles of novels. "We started a stack of A's at one end of the room and Z's at the other," and went from there, she said. "I worked seven days a week . . . It took us about two years to get the thing in order."
Several hundred boxes of books for which there was no room had to be stored in various places - including the local jail - until the new library opened.
Gibson and other local librarians helped persuade legislators to look at more state funding for libraries. That money, along with demonstration grants when the Lonesome Pine region was getting organized, helped pave the way for the computerized system now in existence.
"We built our own data base here," Gibson said. "Every book had to be linked to the data base, and that hasn't been finished yet." The automation helps with inter-library loans among the nine branches.
There are some who feel modernization has gone too far. These critics cite the more than 13,000 videotapes owned by the system, and suggest that in a region where illiteracy is a problem, library funds should be spent on books.
The videotapes were a major factor in a recently completed Joint Legislative Audit & Review Committee investigation of the system. The question of books vs. videotapes even reached the state library board, where staff members who studied it could give no clear-cut answers.
When the question of non-book library offerings is put to Gibson, she pulls out a page from a 1908 issue of Good Housekeeping quoting Melvil Dewey - who originated the classification system used in most libraries - as predicting that all libraries aiming to be completely equipped will have large collections of player-piano rolls to be lent out like books.
Eighty years ago, she said, that was as controversial as videotapes.
Besides, Gibson said, those 13,000 videos were acquired over eight years and are divided among the region's libraries. They include not only current, popular movies but also travel, nature, historical, instructional, biographical, religious, sports and movie classics not generally available, she said.
Collections of "Alistair Cooke's America," "American Playhouse," "American Short Story," "Civilization," "Great Performances," "Jewel in the Crown," "Life on Earth," "Planet Earth" and "The Story of English" on videotape were obtained through a MacArthur Foundation grant at no cost to the library system, she said. And videocassettes are only part of the library's audiovisual offerings.
"We also own 11,500 phonograph records, 2,072 audio cassettes, 2,208 filmstrips, 561 art prints, and 378 pieces of sculpture. I applied for and received a cultural grant several years ago to buy the framed art prints and sculpture. All of these materials are available for loan, except the sculpture," she said.
"And we also have a good collection of books."
Still, the videocassette debate and other arguments over which localities benefit most from the regional system have been tearing at Lonesome Pine lately. So far, the localities are finding more benefits in remaining in the region than they would separated from it.
Gibson, who lives in Appalachia, will now be using the Big Stone Gap branch library instead of the headquarters branch at Wise and will find out as a user how well branches are served by the region.
A business graduate of East Tennessee State University, she worked at the headquarters of Interstate Railroad near Appalachia until that office was closed.
"I'd have probably been sitting right there, if that hadn't happened," she said. As it was, she went to Peabody Library School in Nashville, Tenn., and became director of Lonesome Pine after she graduated.
Her sister, Neva Gibson, eventually followed her into library work and will retire at the end of July from the technical services department of the Clinch Valley College library here.
"I guess I just thought I'd like it," Theda Gibson said of her reason for going into library work. "And I have."
by CNB