Inspired by The Network, I’ve been perusing my local paper’s older archives and looking for mentions of Signor Marconi. I thought it might be interesting to see how his invention was received at the time. I was amused to find this huffy piece:
Whoopsie! On the same page was an interesting piece contributed by non other than Andrew Carnegie, who calls for a general European merger. Interestingly, the Scottish emigre doesn’t consider Great Britain a likely participant, writing that it should instead seek the companionship of its daughter-nation:
Reading Freely 
Carnegie was pretty much a humanitarian in spite of his money, i guess; vis a vie the libraries… did he build the one you work in?
Sort of! My library began as a Carnegie library in 1904, though citizens had been organized for years about establishing one in Selma; there was a society that met in one of the hotels in town. Carnegie met with them and established a deal where they put up some money, he put up the rest, and voila — library. In time the library established its own independent foundation, and in 1974 it became the Selma-Dallas County Public Library at a new, larger location. The Carnegie structure still stands and today houses the Center for Commerce. Interestingly enough, the Hotel Albert — where the original library society used to meet — would have been our next door neighbor had it not been demolished in a fit of shortsighted and vulgar ‘urban renewal’.
This is the Carnegie building:
This is the new and current building:
The right-most wing is newer than the left-most wing; it was added in ’96-97 to add a separate children’s wing and an auditorium.
v interesting. i like the Carnegie one; the other looks like a joint effort, altho it’s probably bigger with, as you indicated, more facilities..
Oh, yes, huge. Everyone who visits comments that we’re far larger than they’d expect for a city of Selma’s size.
We have a Carnagie Library in a nearby town and also one near where my parents live in Florida. Very interesting buildings. I hope they’re never torn down. So interesting to peruse archived newspapers. I never of thought of doing that. Is it in your library?
The actual microfilm are held in the building, and we have both a projection and a digital reader — but these days we also ship the film off to be scanned by Ancestry’s “Newspapers.com” project, so I use it for searches. It’s been a godsend –an obituary that used to take me a week of manually reading through papers can be taken care of in a few seconds now!