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The EOA at 15: EOA Staff Picks for 15 Must-See Photos
For 15 years since its launch in May 2006, the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas has amassed more than 11,000 pieces of media to accompany its more than 6,000 entries: photos, documents, maps, audio clips,...
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The EOA at 15: CALS Staffers Pick Their Favorite EOA Entries
To help celebrate 15 years of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas—the only state encyclopedia produced and supported by a public library—we asked 15 staff members from around the Central Arkansas Library...
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The EOA at 15: The 15 Most Popular Entries of the Past 15 Months
The past fifteen months have been a tumultuous time, and Arkansans—as they’ve been doing for fifteen years now, since our launch in May 2006—have looked to the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas to provide...
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Star Trek Day with the EOA
George Takei, who played Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu in the Star Trek television series and subsequent movies; circa 1991. Happy Star Trek Day! Arkansas has lots of connections with Star Trek, whose...
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History and the Abyss: What We Know about What Happened
Folklorist Vance Randolph, who traveled throughout the state in the 1940s and 1950s to collect and record traditional music. Most people seem to believe that history is, broadly speaking, “the study of...
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Striving for the Elusive Complete Set
A complete set is a wonderful thing. When I was much younger and collected comic books, I always had to fill out whatever series I was collecting. The first comic book I ever bought was G.I. Joe no....
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A Strange and Historic Time: Chronicling the COVID-19 Pandemic in Arkansas
We are near the end of another year affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic, and we’re taking stock of the work we’ve done at both the CALS Roberts Library and the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas to...
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History as Alchemy
Newspaper columnists and the like usually run a “the people we lost” piece this time of year, a collection of all the notable lives that were sadly extinguished at some point during the previous twelve...
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The Winter of Our Content
Content. Those seven letters essentially make up one word with two somewhat different but related meanings (and different pronunciations). The first sense is the one evoked by a “table of contents,”...
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Famous Couples of Arkansas
On this Valentine’s Day, we’re thinking about love in the Natural State, turning our focus to some Arkansas couples who have made an impact on the state, nation, and world. Click on the names in the...
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A Vision: An Encyclopedia by All, for All
Do you have the right to write for the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas? I’ve had occasion recently to visit with some of the people who were on the ground floor of creating the Encyclopedia of Arkansas...
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“Through a Glass Darkly”: Adapting to Evolving Language
Language changes. This fact is rather frustrating for us editors. And the irony is that, while online resources can most capably respond to changes in usage, they can also appear the most behind the...
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The EOA at 16: We’re Taking the Wheel!
“I am sixteen, going on seventeen…” sings the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas in its best Rodgers and Hammerstein Sound of Music teenager voice. Watch out on the roads—we’re old enough to DRIVE! Born (as...
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The Encyclopedia of Arkansas’s Ever-Growing Media Collection: New Additions
Some of the most recent additions have come from Cabot’s Museum of American History and from the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. The Museum of American History, formerly known as The...
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The Encyclopedia of Arkansas: Creating a Fertile Field
If you have watched many movies from the famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, you have probably seen, in the bleak Scandinavian landscape he often depicts, ancient stone walls lining rural farmsteads...
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The Invisible Work Behind the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas
Work can be like the proverbial iceberg—you don’t see most of its mass because it is hidden under an expanse of water. That is to say that any job, even one with a predominantly public side, entails a...
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The Encyclopedia of Arkansas Launches Redesigned Website
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA), a project of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS), has begun a new phase of its life with a website redesign that improves the user experience for students,...
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Arkansas History’s Ecosystem—and Your Place in It
The history community is like an ecosystem, with its various parts drawing energy and nutrition from other areas and, in turn, contributing energy and nutrition to other parts in ways that might not be...
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The Encyclopedia of Arkansas as a Tool of Social Coordination
I’ve been pondering matters of terminology quite a bit here lately—namely, the limits of our words to capture anything like reality. This stems, in large part, from my own research into racial...
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Taking a New Stand on the EOA’s County Histories
I started reading Stephen King in junior high school, but I didn’t get around to his 1978 book The Stand before he released an expanded version, with more than 400 additional pages, in 1990. I imagine...
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