The Catoosa County Library is a single branch

public library A public library is a library that is accessible by the general public and is usually funded from public sources, such as taxes. It is operated by librarians and library paraprofessionals, who are also Civil service, civil servants. There are ...

system serving Catoosa County,

Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...

, United States. The library branch is located in Ringgold. The library is a member of

PINES A pine is any conifer tree or shrub in the genus ''Pinus'' () of the family Pinaceae. ''Pinus'' is the sole genus in the subfamily Pinoideae. The World Flora Online created by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Missouri Botanical Garden accep ...

, a program of the

Georgia Public Library Service The Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) is the state agency for libraries in the U.S. State of Georgia and a unit of the University System of Georgia. The service was initially founded in 1996 after the inception of the Library Services and Tec ...

that covers 53 library systems in 143 counties of Georgia. Any resident in a PINES supported library system has access to the system's collection of 10.6 million books. The library is also serviced by

GALILEO Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He was ...

, a program of the University System of Georgia which stands for "GeorgiA LIbrary LEarning Online". This program offers residents in supported libraries access to over 100 databases indexing thousands of periodicals and scholarly journals. It also boasts over 10,000 journal titles in full text.

History

Two libraries originally served the county of Catoosa. The first was located in Ringgold, named the Ringgold Public Library. It was established in 1937 with help from the

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...

and was housed for one year in the upstairs of the old Methodist parsonage in town. With the completion of a new city courthouse in 1938, the library was rededicated as the Core Jones Murphey Library and moved to the basement, where it remained until 1971. The second library in the county, the Fort Oglethorpe Library, was constructed in 1971 and served the residents in the Fort Oglethorpe section of Catoosa County. In 1943 the State Department of Education and Georgia Legislature passed a bill granting increased state funding to libraries in rural areas if they chose to make a regional library system with neighboring counties. The Dalton Public Library board of Whitfield County approached Catoosa County with the request of a merger to join the system and become eligible for more financial support. The Ringgold Public Library thus became the first affiliate library of what was named the Dalton Regional Library in 1945. Gordon County soon joined in 1957, as did Murray County in 1958. With the creation of the Fort Oglethorpe library in 1971, the system changed its name to the Northwest Georgia Regional Library System. In the late 1990s a

SPLOST A special-purpose local-option sales tax (SPLOST) is a financing method for funding capital outlay projects in the U.S. state of Georgia. It is an optional 1% sales tax levied by any county for the purpose of funding the building of parks, school ...

campaign set out to provide funding for a new library building in the county that would consolidate the Ringgold and Fort Oglethorpe collections into one building. $3 million was set aside to construct a public facility complex named the Benton Place Campus, with $1.9 million dedicated to the new library facility. Construction of the library was completed in 1999, and in the same year the Mildred E. Ward Special Collections Room was dedicated to the community as a genealogical and local history room for south Tennessee and Georgia. The room holds collections of Revolutionary and Civil War military records, local obituaries and pension cards, and a large Native American section focusing on the

Cherokee The Cherokee (; chr, ᎠᏂᏴᏫᏯᎢ, translit=Aniyvwiyaʔi or Anigiduwagi, or chr, ᏣᎳᎩ, links=no, translit=Tsalagi) are one of the indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, t ...

Nation which had originally lived in the area. In 2008 the library joined

, an open border library system across the state of Georgia. This increased the virtual collection size to over 9.5 million books. Upon becoming a PINES affiliated library, Catoosa County opted to leave the Northwest Georgia Regional Library System and create its own system. The Catoosa County Library system was officially dedicated in 2009.

Library systems in neighboring counties

Cherokee Regional Library System The Cherokee Regional Library System (CRLS) is a public library system consisting of four libraries in the counties of Walker and Dade, Georgia. The central library, the Lafayette-Walker County Public Library, is located in LaFayette, Georgia. ...

to the west *

Northwest Georgia Regional Library System The Northwest Georgia Regional Library System (NGRL) is a public library system across the Northwest Georgia counties of Gordon, Murray, and Whitfield. NRGL participates in PINES, a public library network of 281 libraries in 140 counties through ...

to the east

References

External links

PINES catalog
{{authority control County library systems in Georgia (U.S. state) Public libraries in Georgia (U.S. state)