Friends of the library greet new county director

Williamsburg County’s new Library Director Benjamin Hall visited Hemingway with his wife Heather and daughter Hanna Sunday afternoon.

By: | SCNow
Published: July 01, 2008

HEMINGWAY - Williamsburg’s new director of library services was greeted by members of the Hemingway Friends of the Library Sunday afternoon for some chat and refreshments in the (fairly) new library. The Halls are from western Tennessee by way of Kentucky, but are glad to settle down in the Pee Dee; they say it feels like home already.
Benjamin Hall got his Master in Library Science from the University of Kentucky, then stayed on to continue one of his graduate projects as an employee of the University for the next three years.
He was doing a digital preservation project for the famous Keeneland Raceway near Lexington, which has its programs dating back more than a hundred years. The programs contain a lot of history, but are not generally accessible to the public, nor are they safe from being lost. Hall’s project was a test to establish protocols and costs, and it focused on the major Triple Crown racing years. Now, due to Hall’s work, these year’s records are safe and accessible. Each page was first microfilmed, and then the microfilm was scanned and digitized. The computer software was used to straighten out any skew in the text. Then the text was scanned with optical character recognition software, which can create indexable text files from the image. Creating an index of these old records makes them much more valuable for historians.
Mrs. Hall is from a small town almost on the Kentucky border, and Hall is from a small town about two hours west of Nashville. They both got their bachelor’s degrees from Bethel College, a school affiliated with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, where they met.
“I’m learning fast that this area is rich is local history,” he said. He hopes to be able to help continue the process of preserving our heritage, which has been so much enriched by local history groups such as Three Rivers.
“I’ve always had a love for books, and it was a natural transition for me to want to provide them to more people. Despite the arrival of computers and digital information, I don’t think books are ever going to go out of use,” he said of his choice of careers. “Books have the reputation of the publishers behind them. Information you find on the Internet may be good, but it may not – so we need to teach the kids to rely on good sources for their schoolwork.”
He came to Williamsburg on a visit when he interviewed for the job, and was impressed by the friendliness and the small town atmosphere of the area, especially after living in the bustling city of Lexington, Kentucky. Hall plans to establish a small office at the Hemingway library and spend a significant chunk of time here.
His main focus is to build on children’s services to get more kids and teens using the library. “Then I hope they’ll grow up into regular library users and bring the next generation here too.”

Friends of the library greet new county director

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