LEWISTON — At the tail end of a long career as Lewiston’s library director, Richard Speer isn’t ambiguous about his feelings.

“I’ve had the world’s greatest job,” Speer said Friday, hours after announcing that he would retire in the spring. “I got to dabble in everything.”

Those aren’t just fancy words, either. After taking on the role of director in 1984, Speer has seemed to be in the middle of a whole lot of changes to the library and to the community as a whole.

He oversaw the transformation of the library from humble card catalogs into the computer age. He saw the facility grow from a modest 13,000-square-foot building into the 46,000-square-foot modern library that sprawls between Park and Lisbon streets.

In 2005, under Speer’s direction, the library completed its Marsden Hartley Cultural Center, which includes a computer lab, historical archives and Callahan Hall, a performance and meeting space that provides a home for a wide variety of cultural programs for the public.

Speer’s work transcended computers and construction, though. Much of the work he is noted for was of a more delicate and less obvious variety.

When waves of Somali immigrants began to arrive in Lewiston, for instance, Speer was there to help integrate them into the library and its various programs.

“The diversity of our community is there sharing space across all kinds of differences,” said Darby Ray, chairwoman of the Lewiston Public Library’s board of trustees. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

Ray credits Speer with much more than simply managing the library. It’s not just the activities he helps to make possible, either — the book-signings, author talks, conventions, reading clubs — it’s the dedication and positive energy, Ray said, that Speer brings to everything he does.

“He has really helped to make the library into something that is not just a library, but a community center,” she said. “What makes that work is his commitment to this community and all of its wonderful complexities.”

“Rick is extremely good at what he does,” Deputy City Administrator Phil Nadeau said. “He’s an absolutely wonderful person. It’s one of those rare instances where you’d have an extremely difficult time saying anything bad about the guy.”

When the computer age exploded on the world, Speer, more than most, was ready for it. More than ready, really. He’d been dabbling in personal computers before most people had even heard of them.

“Early on,” Speer said, “I considered myself a techie.”

In 1985, in fact, he convinced the city to purchase a PC, which ultimately became two PCs networked together.

Speer was also a part of a group called the Androscoggin Valley Community Network, which by the early 1990s was able to deliver emailed news bulletins to anyone with a computer modem.

“This was before there were any internet service providers,” Speer said. “That was really radical back in those days.”

The story of how Speer came to Maine from Pennsylvania is pure romance. At a library conference in the early ’80s, he met and fell in love with a woman named Judith who worked in Cleveland at the time.

Speer had no interest in moving to Cleveland and there was nothing in Oil City, Pennsylvania, for Judith to do, so what was the young couple to do?

They took a vacation to Maine, where Judith had family, and quickly fell in love with the state. A couple months later, the job at the Lewiston library opened up and that was that. Speer got that job and Judith Frost, who would become his wife, would ultimately take over as library director at Central Maine Community College.

In Lewiston, Speer would become so entrenched in the lives of the reading community that it would become difficult for most to think about the library without imagining Speer’s bearded face.

“He’s beloved,” Nadeau said. “He’s beloved by staff, he’s beloved by the management team and by the employees who have had the opportunity to get to know him. He’s achieved that by just being the kind of person that he is.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Nadeau said, “to replace that kind of person.”

Speer will officially retire on the last day of May. Word of his pending retirement spread quickly Friday after Speer made the announcement to his staff.

“The board is sad about the news,” said Jennifer Gendron Carleton, outgoing chairwoman of the library board of trustees, “but we’re happy for Rick and wish him well on his future endeavors. The board is reaching out to city administration, offering help in finding a candidate worthy of filling Rick’s shoes. Rick is a very important part of the library and will be missed by all board members.”

In 2004, Speer received a New York Times Librarian Award, being one of 27 librarians recognized nationally for outstanding community service. In 2008, he was the recipient of the ProQuest/SIRS Intellectual Freedom Award for Maine, which recognized his leadership in the library’s fight to keep a sex education book on the shelves after its illegal removal by a local citizen.

Speer himself has no doubt that in his absence, Lewiston’s library will continue to provide valuable services to the community, even in an age where information is literally at the fingertips — it’s about more than fast access to information, Speer maintains. It’s about showing people what that information can do for them.

“I’ve got some unbelievable staff here,” Speer said. “They help people put their lives together with information all the time.”

From his office on the third floor, Speer can see people coming and going on Pine Street all day long. Likewise, the lower library floors are almost always abuzz with activity, whether it’s people coming in to use the computers, students researching projects or readers browsing the stacks.

Speer expects that it will stay that way, even after he’s gone. The public library, after all, provides something that Google, Bing and Apple cannot.

“The library allows people to come together,” he said, “and to meet face-to-face to talk about the big issues of the day.

“I have no doubt,” Speer said, “that the future is bright for this library.”