LeRoy Harris sits in the memory lab at the New Ulm Public Library. Harris has worked at the Programming and Technology Service Librarian for six years. Tuesday, Feb. 3 will be his last day. He has recently accepted a directors position at the Cortez Public Library in Colorado.

NEW ULM – The New Ulm Public Library is preparing to bid Programming and Technology Service Librarian LeRoy Harris a fond farewell.

For nearly six years, Harris has worked to get the library’s memory lab off the ground as well as start several popular programs that continue to entertain and inform patrons, but on Tuesday, Feb. 3 he will say good-bye to the library. Harris has accepted a position as the Library Director for Cortez Public Library in Cortez, Colorado.

Harris’s road to becoming a library director was not a straight journey. He said at a young age, people told him he would be a librarian some day but he did not believe it at the time.

Harris said first job after graduating from UW Eau Clair in Wisconsin was teaching. He was able to teach high school in New Mexico for a couple of years before he and his wife, Kate, moved back to Minnesota to be closer to her family. Unfortunately, Harris had not been teaching long enough for his teaching license to transfer to Minnesota. He briefly worked for a water heater factory. This eventually led to him working on contract in a plant in Alabama, but after his contract expired, he was out of a job.

Harris and his wife moved out to Arizona next to be caretaker of a family ranch, but for about four months he was out of work. Harris said he found two job offers; one was working for the State Prison system and the other was working at the county library.

Harris said he had a couple of earlier experience that convinced him he would not be happy working at a prison and decided to give the library a try.

His first library job was working the front desk at St. John’s Public Library in Arizona. Early on, he hosted a few library programs with adults and teens and he quickly realized he enjoyed the work.

“It matched my interest and skill set very well,” Harris said.

After receiving a recommendation from the library assistant director, he began working on his Master’s Degree in library science. He would eventually be promoted to assistant director and was in charge of technical services. This allowed Harris’s to do a lot of community outreach and he learned a lot while working at the library. There was one problem. The St. John’s Public Library was located in one of the lowest-income counties in the nation. Harris salary was not enough to support his family, which included four children: Wynnifred, Wallace, Hyrum and Giedon.

Once he had a Master’s degree, he began looking for positions elsewhere. His wife Kate found out about an opening at New Ulm’s library thanks to her parents, who live in St. Peter.

Harris was hired and the family moved to New Ulm in Feb. 2020. He officially began working at the New Ulm Public Library as the Programming & Technology Services Librarian on March 2, 2020.

A week later, the country entered lockdown for the COVID pandemic.

“It was not the orientation/training period I was expecting,” he said.

It was a very difficult time to be starting a new job in a new city, but while the library was closed, Harris was able to get to know the library staff. Together, they began looking for ways to develop programs to serve the community.

“One of the things I was really excited about coming to this job was that New Ulm Cable Access Television (NUCAT) is in the basement,” he said. “That is a fabulous resource and is hard to find. I saw a lot of potential with that.”

Partnering with NUCAT, the library was able to create some original programming. One of the most famous programs is the series “Don’t Forget to Read the Instructions.” In this series, library staff as well as other city staff test play different board games. The series is very popular and Harris said he gets recognized for it a lot.

His first year, he began partnering with State Street Theater on the “Stories for the Season” series that continues to run during the holidays. This was all made possible through NUCAT.

Another benefit of NUCAT is that any program that was held in the library could be recorded and broadcast later.

“People are still benefiting from programs,” he said. “I love seeing that.”

Outside of the board game recording, Harris helped start the Library’s chess club and table top gaming groups. This has expanded to an online board game group that plays on a Discord server.

Another earlier program he worked on was the library’s Memory Lab. In 2018, the New Ulm Library received funding for a memory lab. The computer equipment for the lab was brought to the library, but it was not working when Harris arrived in 2020.

The equipment had a coding error preventing it from starting up. During the shutdown, Harris was asked to work on fixing the error. Harris searched through hours of online user forums to find lines of code to fix these errors. In the end, Harris typed in 36 lines of code by hand, but he was able to fix the memory lab. By the time the library re-opened to the public, the memory lab was open as well.

The memory lab allows individuals to convert older recorded information into a digital format for preservation purposes.

Harris said working with the memory lab is incredibly rewarding. In the past week, he helped a patron digitize a recording of their parents from the 1950s. The patron was able to hear their parents’ voice for the first time in years.

“There are a lot of tears in the memory lab,” he said. “People get emotional because we give them the ability to access and relive the past.”

Another important legacy of Harris’s time in New Ulm is the multi-part program called “Evaluating the News.” The program included some history on news media but also helped people identify whether a news source was reliable. It was an extremely popular programming series for the library. He was asked to give the presentation again at other venues.

“People want to understand what is going on in the world, but they want to be able to trust that the information they are receiving is genuine,” he said.

Harris said one of the best parts of working at a library was being able to provide information.

“Libraries are all about access to information,” he said. “One of the great benefits of working in the library is the exposure to information.”

Harris said it was incredibly satisfying to see people benefit in personal ways from the information the library provides. Sometimes this was meant helping a person use the computer so they can get a job and other times it was finding the right book to spark a child’s interest in reading.

Harris’ final day at the New Ulm Library is Feb. 3, but he will be remaining in New Ulm a little while longer as the family prepares to move to Cortez, Colorado.

Harris said the community of Cortez is smaller than New Ulm, with a population of 9,000, but it has some of the same amenities. He will likely bring some of the programming introduced in New Ulm to Cortez, but as Library Director Harris said, he may have to delegate responsibilities instead of hosting it himself.

Harris said his nearly six years at the New Ulm Library were a very enjoyable experience. He thanked the library directors, staff and community for their help, saying a lot of what he was able to accomplish in New Ulm was due to their support.