College Students and Staff Await Bigger, Better Library

Larry Kindness, construction liaison and building inspector for Little Big Horn College, discusses building plans for the school's new library.

Story by Brett Thomas-DeJongh|Photos by Tyler Wilson
CrowNews.Net

Children sit around the fireplace, listening to a storyteller weave a tale. A college student—ready to start work on a term paper—searches rows of book shelves. On the periphery, a couple of teens update Myspace pages. Little Big Horn College administrators take care of business on the second floor, and below them the college archives hold the history of the Apsaalooke, the region and more.   

This is the vision librarian Tim Bernardis has for the $7 million library center that is being built a stone’s throw from the school’s administration building.

“Hopefully, everyone will find something here,” he said.

At 25,000-square-feet, the new building is double the size of the
current library, granting Bernardis room to expand the book collection
and add computers. Plans for more comfortable furniture and office
upgrades for the staff are in the works too, he said.

Little Big Horn College's students also are looking forward to the new
digs. Lakisha Flores, a LBHC freshman, said she anticipates
seeing more fiction on the shelves. 

“I know we're college students and we need to do research," Flores
said, "but the library we have now doesn't have books you can read on
your own time." 

Leslie Smith, president of LBHC's student government, said the
increased number of computer workstations will solve a shortage she's
noticed at the current library.

The building will be completed in March, said Shane Ridley of Fisher
Construction, a Billings-based company that began construction in late
2006. Though the foundation was finished that December, the ground
froze and they couldn't backhoe, he said. 

Larry Kindness, LBHC's construction liaison and building inspector,
acknowledged the weather delays but said that some setbacks are to be
expected in a large project — and the weather wasn't the only roadblock for the new library.

Had the
college not received $3 million from a special tribal budget bill,
Kindness said construction might have been halted indefinitely. 

“We wouldn't have been able to finish or furnish the building,”
Kindness said. “We would've had to get creative, and we're creative
already.” 

With Bernardis, Kindness has spent weeks brainstorming ways to make the college’s building a community center, too.

Bernardis envisions creating photo exhibits of Crow families by researching the tribal archives to trace family trees. “We would start with an old photo,” he said.

Digitizing the tribal archive is a priority, he said, because
putting the archive's content online provides a way to both preserve
and share content with other museums.

He is working to gain access to the digital archives at the Buffalo
Bill Historical Center’s Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyo., where the
one-of-a-kind Paul Dyck collection will be housed. 

The Cody museum acquired The Paul Dyck Collection of Plains Indian
artifacts and art work in September, a fact not lost on Bernardis.   

“Initially, [the Paul Dyck Foundation] wanted to give the collection
to the Crow tribe,” he said. “Somehow it slipped through our fingers.”

The collection will not go up for several more years, as the museum
catalogs and restores the items, according to the Historical Center's
Web site.

If the library eventually gains digital access to the collection's
bear claw necklaces, war shirts and other beaded items, then Bernardis
and other staff members could display them on flat screen televisions
mounted to a wall in the new building, Kindness said. 

“I don't think any other college in the country will have that,” Bernardis said.