HOLYOKE – In honor of its 150th anniversary, the Holyoke Public Library is offering patrons a glimpse into its history.

Archivist Eileen Crosby said they were in the process of planning events in celebration of the anniversary when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the region. “In March I was putting together a poster exhibit, trying to get that up by April 22, that’s when the original charter was approved by the Massachusetts legislature,” she said. “I had a walking tour planned, then everything [happened].”

With the library completely closed, Crosby said she was unable to access the material needed to put together an exhibit, in person or virtual, in time for the April date. However, she said in May she attended a seminar for online exhibits. This, she said, inspired her to work on the library’s website to “get more up to speed,” and inserting online exhibits created onto the website.

Crosby said her work on the exhibit for the library’s 150th anniversary began with a timeline her predecessor had worked on just seven years prior, when the building reopened after an extensive, multi-million dollar renovation in 2013. “A lot of the groundwork was already done, I borrowed from that,” she said.

While she borrowed from what previous archivists put together, Crosby said she also “integrated a lot of material” that wasn’t previously used. She said, “I had a lot of work to draw on, so many things in the library files. [We] probably have [a] 40-feet shelf of library history.”

When the library opened their doors in a limited capacity, Crosby said she began slowly gathering new material for the exhibit, however, it was difficult due to her limited hours. “I was only on site 11 hours a week, [they were] trying to stagger staff. When I was on site, I was working on requests for patrons,” she said.

Crosby said with the April deadline having come and gone, a new deadline was set to roll out the virtual exhibit celebrating the library’s history on Sept. 26. With new tools under her belt from the seminar she’d taken, Crosby got to work putting together the virtual exhibit.

“This webinar I went to introduced me to AdobeSpark, a great program, easy to use,” she said.

Crosby said despite the help of the program, she still had quite a bit of work to do. “It takes your material and does what it wants with it. It wasn’t always good, I couldn’t really place the photo right where you wanted it,” she said. “I had to let the program do it, and if it didn’t look nice you had to go back. It took quite a bit of trial and error.”

The hardest part of putting the library’s – and the city’s – history into a timeline, Crosby said, was figuring out what not to include. “I think a lot of it was deciding what I had to leave out, because there was so much to choose from. I could have been digging around in library history forever,” she joked. “[But] you want it to be digestible.”

In addition to ensuring the timeline was easily understood and enjoyed by all, Crosby said there were points in the library’s history she wanted to ensure were highlighted. “I wanted to show how the library became more and more accessible and in touch with people’s needs. When the library was founded we only had 10,000 people [in the city.] You had to pay a membership fee in order to use the library,” she said. “The city then decided to fund the library and it became a true public library, membership usage quadrupled.”

She said when the library was first founded, “you had to be somebody to have a book reserved for you,” and patrons were not allowed to browse the stacks themselves. This, Crosby said, changed when the “new librarian in 1902 did away with the practice.” She said, “William Whiting called the library the peoples’ college during a speech at the library’s opening. Anybody could come, no matter their education, no matter their work.”

Since the exhibit went live on the library’s website, Crosby said she’s received positive feedback from those who viewed the timeline. At the time of press, she said about 450 people had viewed the exhibit. The part of the exhibit she found most exciting though, wasn’t the number of people that viewed it, but instead how many people were interacting with it on a deeper level. “The thing I’m most pleased with is people have contacted me and ID’d people from the 50s and 60s, and I was able to put their names up there,” she said.

In one instance Crosby said after a previously unnamed individual was identified in a photo by a member of the public, she was able to go back in library archives and find a copy of the photo where all individuals were named. “I’ve since added the names to the exhibit, quite a few of those names came from the public. People are interacting with it,” she said.

Crosby said now that she is comfortable with the AdobeSpark software, she has ideas for future virtual exhibits. Additionally, she said now that the exhibit is a permanent fixture on the library’s website, future exhibits could build on the work she and other earlier archivists put into the timeline.

Those wanting to view the exhibit can do so at http://www.holyokelibrary.org/historyexhibits.asp.