As the shelves of the Austin History Center groan with the weight of remembrance, archivists work to handle the responsibilities of ensuring that the past does not slip by unnoticed.
18 minutes walk away from the Austin Public Library’s central location sits a building filled to the brim with neatly ordered history waiting patiently for Austinites to scour. When the Austin History Center moved to the Henry Faulk Building, it came after years of inhabiting Austin’s original 1933 Central Library, which was stretched at the seams. After eight years and $14.5 million of updates to the Henry Faulk Building, the Austin History Center reopened its doors to the public Dec. 7, 2025, according to KVUE. While Alex Suarez, the processing archivist at the Austin History Center, believed the move to be long and arduous, it was also extremely necessary.
“Our previous building … had so many decades of serving as the archive,” Suarez said. “And as you can see, it’s not a huge building. We were just completely out of space. We had things in storage, we had things in hallways. We were just so cramped for space, that we were so excited to get a bond from the city to move into this building.”
The Faulk Building provides the History Center with opportunity to expand, whereas the old library constrained the ability of the center to operate. According to Jenna Cooper, the library manager at the Austin History Center, they were unable to accommodate everything that came their way.
“[Now], we have so much more space to collect materials,” Cooper said. “We had to say no to things starting around 2020 ish, because we just didn’t have space. We were bursting at the seam, so we had to tell people, ‘okay, just gotta sit on it for a little bit.’”
To house the extensive record of the History Center, the Faulk Building had to be specifically and carefully prepared to hold up the weight of history. One of the key variables in the move of the historical archival was the shelving. According to Laurie Limbacher who is an architect at small firm Limbacher & Godfrey Architects, the center decided to go with the heavy and expensive form of compact shelving, which required careful forethought.
“In this case, it’s an existing building, and we had to make sure that the existing structural system could accommodate the added load of the more intensive compact shelving weight,” Limbacher said.
“So, in the future, if they get more money, they’ll fill up the rest of the 2nd floor, and I think most of the 3rd floor with compact shelving.”
Beyond shelving, the Faulk Building had to prepare for a large shift. Similarly to the History Center’s old building, in 1979 it operated as the town’s central library. According to Suarez, this involved both the project managers reverting the building back to the original way the architect envisioned it and carefully planning out how they wanted to curate the archives.
“We had to be methodical about, ‘okay, how do we want to use the space now? How do we see ourselves using the space 10, 20, 30 years from now?’” Suarez said. “Because this is our long-term home. It was kind of exciting because it was a really blank slate of like, ‘okay, how, let’s make the archive that we want to make.’ It was a lot of physical lifting and hard work. And it took, probably from start to finish, about 4 or 5 months.”
According to Cooper, a large part of the funding for the center came from the Austin Bond passed back in 2018. This long process sparked a hopeful, yet cautious excitement for Cooper.
“It was a long process of waiting, planning, and dealing with staffing changes,” Cooper said. “We’ve had three division managers, in that time period, from 2017 to 2025. We had different facilities managers. So as far as the move goes, [I was] excited, but also tentatively.”
According to Suarez, this trend of change from the center is not uncommon. During the move, Suarez noticed how the center was run differently by staff in each decade.
“You can see the changeover between staff throughout the decades, so that was really interesting and just the change from seeing the history center managed and run by librarians then that changeover more into the archivist focus,” Suarez said. “Those are 2 distinct roles. How we handle collections is very different. It started out as very much a library, so everything was catalogued. You could check books out. And it’s really morphed more into special collections, more into things that you can only view in the building and more rare items that we just like to keep in-house because we don’t want them to go missing.”
According to Suarez, while there were challenges with the move, the ability to house more key aspects of history encourages people to see that the city values its history. Suarez emphasized that the history center is a space to house the history of all groups within Austin. Cooper shared this sentiment, and is grateful for the opportunities the new building provides.
“Honestly, I’m very thankful because it could be very difficult to fund archives.,” Cooper said. “Especially to the extent. And it is just such a boon to preserving, you know, the history of the city. Our situation was not viable. It wasn’t tenable. And it is now. That’s a huge, huge benefit to the city and to our researchers who come from all over the world.”
