It is.
Good. I’m glad to hear that because it would fall through the cracks. They might stand there and say how wonderful they’ll take care of it, and how important it is to them, and maybe it would be – for maybe one person. But I even would doubt that. Two years would go by, and all of a sudden it would be eased to the backburner. And the first thing you know, it would be gone. The worst thing about that is, of course, you might lose a resource because it suddenly gets packed up and stuffed in Rat Hall (35). That kind of crap.
Who lobbied for the park library? I look at other parks and we have an unusually nice library situation that’s, of course, connected somewhat to our museum collection, and they really work well together.
First, you have to have the physical facilities. Most parks don’t have good libraries. I think they miss it. Every park that I’ve been in the library was kind of always a shirt tail thing. It wasn’t all that bad at Bryce, As an integral part of the planning, we had to have a facility. Because, again, how the hell do you have a library if you haven’t got a physical place? So that came in at the very early stages of the planning process. hat was the first building we did (36).
. . . and you saw the opportunity to have really a nice library?
Oh yes. That’s the only way you’re gonna get it. We had the room. We were able to carve out a significant piece of turf because there was no competing interest for it. In other words, the rangers knew they were gonna have something down the road, the ad people knew they were going to have something down the road, et cetera. So here we could take this thing and we had space to do something right. We saw an opportunity, so let’s go after it. We did. From there, once you have the facility chosen, all it takes is money.
