Bexar BiblioTech: The Evolution of the Country's First All-digital Public Library

By Nelson W. Wolff

In this small, compact book I take you on a 20-year journey from my involvement in the building of a 240,000-square-foot public central library that opened in 1995 to the creation of a 4,000-square-foot digital public library in 2013 and its aftermath. It is a fast paced journey, much like the speed of the mobile digital revolution. In its wake, BiblioTech would become the nation’s first all digital public library, opening in September of 2013.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nelson W. Wolff
• Release date: Jan 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311306586

Nelson W. Wolff

Nelson W. Wolff has represented Bexar County in state, city and county political offices since 1971, when he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives. He then was elected to the Texas Senate in 1973, the San Antonio City Council in 1987 and then served as Mayor of San Antonio from 1991 to 1995. He currently serves as Bexar County Judge, a position he was appointed to in 2001 and has since been elected to three times, most recently in November 2010. He is only the second person in more than a century to serve as both Mayor of San Antonio and Bexar County Judge.Wolff has authored four books and is an avid reader and collector of 20th Century first editions. Challenge of Change, published in 1975, is about Wolff’s experience in the Texas Legislature and the Constitutional Convention he participated in and for which he was largely responsible. Baseball for Real Men reflects on life and Wolff’s love of the game. Mayor: An Inside View of San Antonio Politics 1981-1995 takes a look at local politics during his and Henry Cisneros’ years leading the city. Wolff’s most recent book Transforming San Antonio: An Insider’s View of the AT&T Center, Toyota, the PGA Village and the River Walk Extension explores the four major developments in recent history that have provided urban renewal and growth for the city.Wolff holds a bachelor of business administration from St. Mary’s University and a doctorate of jurisprudence from St. Mary’s University School of Law. Throughout his life, Wolff has excelled in both politics and business.In 1961, Wolff, his father and two brothers formed Alamo Enterprises Building Supplies, which they grew to an eight-store chain before selling in 1977. A year later with his brothers George and Gary, Wolff founded Sun Harvest Farms, a successful chain of natural food stores. They sold the nine-store chain in 1999.Together, Wolff and his wife, Tracy, have six children and five grandchildren.

Book preview

BEXAR BIBLIOTECH

THE EVOLUTION OF THE COUNTRY’S

FIRST ALL-DIGITIAL PUBLIC LIBRARY

Nelson W. Wolff

Published by The Hidalgo Foundation of Bexar County

San Antonio, Texas 78205

Copyright 2015 by Nelson W. Wolff

Smashwords edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN 978-0-692-35765-1

This book is dedicated to my two newest grandchildren, Gideon Matthew Wolff and Benjamin Hays Wendland, children of the mobile digital revolution.

Acknowledgements

This small information-packed book would not have been possible without the help of our BiblioTech team. Laura Cole, Cathy Maras, Catarina Velasquez, Ashley Eklof, Thomas Guevara, Marcie Trevino Ripper, David Smith, Alicia Hays, Betty Bueché, and Dan Curry provided valuable insight.

My wife Tracy, my greatest critic, helped me throughout writing this book. By the way, she really likes it. She also likes the fact that all proceeds will go to the Hidalgo

Foundation for the support of BiblioTech.

A special thanks goes to Laura Jesse, who worked into the late night hours editing this book as well as providing valuable advice.

Forward

In this small, compact book I take you on a 20-year journey from my involvement in the building of a 240,000-square-foot public central library that opened in 1995 to the creation of a 4,000-square-foot digital public library in 2013 and its aftermath. It is a fast paced journey, much like the speed of the mobile digital revolution. In its wake, BiblioTech would become the nation’s first all digital public library, opening in September of 2013.

The rapid advances in technology continue to challenge private business as well as the public sector. I have spent about half of my adult life in entrepreneurial pursuits and half in the public sector.

At the age of 21 in 1961, along with my father and two brothers, George and Gary, we started Alamo Enterprises, a building material store that grew to nine locations throughout South Texas. We sold it to a national chain in 1977 at a time when technology was in diapers. In 1979 my two brothers and our friends, Don and Ron Hermann, started a natural foods supermarket that grew to nine stores and sold it in 1999. There must be something magical about nine. By 1999 technology had progressed in quantum leaps, but still had not reached the mobile stage.

Over my years in public service, I have seen the public sector progress with the technology age but not respond as effectively as the private sector. There is something very comfortable about tax dollars instead of having to create profits to survive.

In my some 13 years as County Judge (County Judge is the chief executive officer of the county and chair of the Commissioners Court) we have worked hard to move Bexar County into the digital age.

The mobile digital revolution took off in 2007 with the advent of Apple’s iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, leading to an upheaval of how we all interact through the Internet. By 2012 e-books were everywhere. We had to run fast to catch up with the mobile digital revolution, and I believe we have done that with BiblioTech.

Table of Contents

Chapter I: The Enchilada Red Central Library

Chapter II: The Mobile Digital Revolution

Chapter III: The Plan

Chapter IV: Ten-month Dash to Build

Chapter V: Technophiles, e-books and Apple

Chapter VI: The Opening

Chapter VII: One Year Later

CHAPTER I: The Enchilada Red Central Library

My first memories of a public library were when Mom would take my brother and me to the San Antonio Library on her weekend shopping trips. We boarded a bus at the corner of Presa and McKinley Streets on the near south side and made our way to Downtown. It was quite a venture to arrive Downtown during the 1940’s and 50’s as it was a thriving area full of people hurrying along the sidewalks of Commerce and Houston Streets shopping at numerous retail stores.

On each trip we stopped by San Antonio’s grand Art Deco/Neo classical, three-story library building located on the corner of Presa and Market Streets. Built of cut Indiana limestone in 1930, the 38,000-square-foot library was the pride of San Antonio, exhibiting our commitment to learning.

Architect Herbert Green designed relief features on the front of the building, including the icons of freedom, culture, and the rule of law; the Parthenon; the Alamo; Mission Concepcion; the U.S. Capitol; Kings College in London; and the Lincoln Memorial. Portraits of Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes also appear on the front representing the English and Spanish languages of San Antonio. Inscriptions on the east and west sides of the building included a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: Books are the home of the American people.

A two-story high ceiling with floors of Zenitherm, terrazzo and soapstone greeted us as we entered the library. Included in the library were a children’s area, reading rooms, a rare book collection, and a circus collection donated by Harry Hertzberg. We were fascinated by the circus collection and enjoyed playing on the banks of the river behind the library. But not to forget the reason we came, Mother always made sure we checked out books to take home to read.

The public library was important to my family because my parents were working class folks striving to enter the middle class. Mom worked scooping ice cream for Better Home Ice Cream and Dad stacked lumber for Campbell Lumber Company. My grandparents on my father’s side lived with us. Grandpa worked as janitor at the McKinley Avenue Methodist Church and my grandma took in laundry. Living and working together they were able to stretch their earned dimes to enter the fringes of the middle class.

Prior to the building of our 1930 library a Carnegie library had been located on the same site. In 1899, Women Reading Clubs created an organization that successfully attracted $50,000 from industrialist Andrew Carnegie for the building. They also received a donation of the site from Mrs. Caroline Kampmann. The City provided operational funds. The library was opened in 1903 and continued to operate until a flood in 1921 irreparably damaged it, giving rise to the 1930 building.

The public library offered me my first taste of the enjoyment of reading and it stuck. Reading became a lifelong passion that enabled me to progress in my professional and political life. Each night before going to sleep, I like to prop a book up on my pillow, lie on my chest and prepare to exit the present, get lost in the whole new world that is opened to me and envision myself living in the story. Stepping into another time and place frees me from the problems that I face each day. I experience and learn more than I could in a lifetime of talking and listening.

Research has found that fiction novels cultivate our mental and moral development and help mold us into positive, sympathetic individuals who have a deep concern for each other and society at large. Literary novels have certainly impacted my beliefs about mankind and how we should treat each other and, in my specific case, how government should relate to them.

I like to read novels written by authors that have an ability to express themselves in an artistic way that is imaginative, sensitive, and discerning. They have a way with their prose, almost poetic like. The poetic flow of their sentences helped me to better articulate my points of view in the thousands of political speeches I have made.

Reading has also enabled me to develop a broader and deeper vocabulary as well as improve the structure of my sentences expressed both in writing and speaking. It has helped me to organize my thoughts, putting them in a logical sequence that conveys the message I want to deliver.

Literary novels also create memorable characters and the authors’ lyrical phrases bring them to life. I have been inspired by the actions, thoughts, strengths and originality of characters that authors have portrayed.

Some of my favorite literary novel authors are Saul Bellow, Peter Carey, Jeffrey Eugenides, Leo Tolstoy, William Styron, Richard Ford, John Irving, Ian McEwan, John Updike, Thomas Wolfe, Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel García Márquez.

For every novel, I read two nonfiction books on history and the life stories of real figures. The stories of people who have led fascinating lives also have a huge impact on me. They become a role model giving me thoughts about how I could use their experience to change and improve my life.

Over the years, some