CONWAY — John McGraw of Conway said he was in graduate school at the University of New Mexico when he realized he hated leaving his job in the library to go teach, which was his career goal.
“I wasn’t enjoying teaching,” he said. McGraw was working in the circulation department at the university’s Zimmerman Library. “I was having a great time, and I thought, ‘I’m doing this backward.’”
McGraw turned everything around and hasn’t looked back. The 45-year-old was hired, effective Saturday, as director of the Faulkner County Library. He will oversee the branches in Conway, Greenbrier, Mayflower, Mount Vernon, Twin Groves and Vilonia.
He grew up in Vilonia and Conway, and his family moved to Ashdown when he was in the ninth grade. After graduating from Ashdown High School, he attended Hendrix College in Conway, where he graduated in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.
After his epiphany as a graduate assistant in New Mexico, he wasted no time coming back to Arkansas.
He got a job in 1999 at the Central Arkansas Library System in downtown Little Rock, where he quickly moved up the ranks; then he went to the Sidney Sanders McMath Library in 2004 and was assistant manager for a year and branch manager for five years.
“I helped set up the library, and a year later, I was running the place. It was a beautiful experience,” he said. McGraw was promoted to reference department manager at the main CALS library in September 2010 and remained until September 2014. “I went back downtown and was there four years,” he said.
He received his master’s degree in library and information studies from the University of Alabama in 2008.
McGraw and his wife, Rebecca, have two children, 10 and 3, and he said his daughter was in school in Conway when he was working in Little Rock. McGraw said the commute was unbearable, and he wanted to be in Conway.
“There’s a lovely library here, and I wanted to be a part of this library,” he said. In November 2014, he took a job as library assistant at the Faulkner County Library in Conway.
He started the week of ComiCon-way. “That was a hard initiation,” he said. “It’s unlike any other week of the year. It’s like Christmas at a store or something. It’s like Black Friday every day. This big sprawling building just can’t handle more stuff inside it, and we pulled stuff out for vendors for the weekend. … It boggled my mind.”
The director position for the Faulkner-Van Buren Regional Library System opened when former director Tina Murdock resigned, effective May 1.
“I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, I would really do great at this,’” McGraw said.
Faulkner County Library Board President Bob Schuck said there were “three excellent candidates for the position.”
“John clearly defined his vision for the library during his interview,” Schuck said. “His concept of what the future Faulkner County libraries could become impressed the board. John’s enthusiasm for the position was obvious.”
“I’m certainly full of energy,” McGraw said. “I’ve been doing the management side of libraries practically since I started doing libraries.”
McGraw said he was impressed with the vitality of Faulkner County Library branches.
As he drove to and from Little Rock for his job at the Little Rock libraries, he went through Mayflower.
“Mayflower was kind of like my home library for the last decade or so,” he said. “I’m living in the woods south of Conway in the Conway School District. To get to I-40 from nowhere, you have to go through Mayflower.”
He went to the library branch in Mayflower to check out books or to take his children to summer programs.
“After the tornado went through Vilonia and Mayflower, seeing the way the libraries essentially became community centers for the recovery of the towns — you could recharge your devices, check your email if you had no power, print off government documents … — it occurred to me that these branches are growing like crazy,” McGraw said. “Conway is not the Conway like when I was attending Hendrix in the late ’80s, early ’90s. At this rate, these are going to be bedroom communities for Conway. … People will be coming from those branches.
“I see people on a regular basis from Bee Branch or somewhere else. We are the place they need to come to get faxing done or stuff notarized.”
He said libraries are “not just books and movies and stuff; it’s literally getting what everyone needs done: finding tax forms, printing off resumes, faxing off resumes. As a notary, I do people’s do-your-own divorces. I set up people with email addresses every day.”
Although McGraw has goals, “some things are out of my control,” he said. … “I can’t make it rain money.”
“The branches could certainly use more space. If you go in there now, books go all the way up to the ceiling in some cases. We could do more on the digital side of things as far as downloadable e-books, downloadable audio books. We check out so many audio books to people.”
He said the downloadable books could “get more traffic” than they do. “We don’t pull out all the stops to promote it,” he said. When someone gets a library card, they don’t have information given to them that explains, “By the way, you can literally get books 24/7. If you know your library-card number, you can check out books whenever you get there.”
Books can be downloaded to a Kindle, a phone or other devices. If they’re headed to the beach, they don’t have to lug a bag of books, unless they want to.
“We don’t do the best job of popularizing the things we already have,” McGraw said.
He also wants to promote the “really cool” online learning tool — called Mango Languages — in the library.
“The main focus is just teaching people other languages,” he said. For Spanish, the library has books and CDs, “but we can’t stock every single language. You might think, ‘If I knew Arabic, I could get a sweet job in the military,’” he said. “You can be in the smallest town in Faulkner County and — if you have your library-card number, or there’s an app for it [Mango Languages], too — you can learn Japanese or Cherokee, or there’s even pirate on there.”
A reception will be held in McGraw’s honor later this summer, Schuck said.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.