Tennessee State Library and Archives Breaks Ground on New Building

The Tennessee State Library and Archives, is located in Nashville, Tennessee. It has been announced that the Tennessee State Library and Archives has broken ground on a new building. The project is expected to be completed in the fall of 2019.

Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, Tennessee, State Librarian and Archivist Chuck Sherrill and other state leaders officially broke ground on the new home of the Tennessee State Library and Archives on December 11, 2017.

According to a post on the Tennessee Secretary of State’s website, the new 165,000 square facility will include a climate-controlled chamber for safely storing historical books and manuscripts as well as a state-of-the-art robotic retrieval system There will also be classrooms for teaching students and a meeting space for training librarians and archivists.

Governor Bill Haslam said “Tennessee has a strong and rich history and it is important to preserve our past on to future generations. We have significantly outgrown the space that currently houses Tennessee’s most significant and historic documents and vital records, so I thank the General Assembly for working with us to make this much-needed new Library and Archives facility a reality.”

The new building will feature a conservation lab for the treatment and restoration of books, photographs and documents There will also be dedicated exhibit spaces for Tennessee’s founding documents and rotating exhibits, as well as a grand reading room with seating for 100 readers and scholars.

In addition, the new building will include a vault for storing photographic negatives. It will have an early learning center designed specifically for children with a visual disability, and a recording lab to produce oral histories and audio books on Tennessee history.

The Tennessee State Library and Archives has plenty of online history and genealogy resources. Some include military records, while others focus on Tennessee Supreme Court cases, photograph collections, maps, and what life was like for people who lived in Tennessee during certain parts of history.

The Tennessee State Library also has a collection of newspapers on microfilm. It includes almost every existent newspaper published in Tennessee. The filming project began in 1957 and Library and Archives staff have been preserving Tennessee newspapers ever since. There is a list of information about each known newspaper in the state, arranged by the place of publication.

In Tennessee, adoption records are sealed by a court order. A 1999 ruling of the Supreme Court of Tennessee allows access to some of these records, depending on the date of the adoption. The Library and Archives hold adoption records prior to 1951 that are sealed by law and only available by special order.

Image by Andrew Jameson on Wikimedia Commons

Related Articles at FamilyTree.com:

* The Tennessee State Library and Archives

* Civil War Records-Images From Tennessee

* Tennessee Genealogy