The Jefferson County Library System (JCLS) is a

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 in

Jefferson County, Georgia Jefferson County is a county located in the U.S. state of Georgia. As of the 2020 census, the population was 15,709. The county seat is Louisville. The county was created on February 20, 1796, and named for Thomas Jefferson, the main author of ...

, United States. The system consists of three libraries, with headquarters in

Louisville Louisville ( , , ) is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the 28th most-populous city in the United States. Louisville is the historical seat and, since 2003, the nominal seat of Jefferson County, on the Indiana border. ...

. JCLS 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, 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

The men of Louisville formed the first county library association in 1867, with its first meeting held on April 2 of that year. Not much is known of the collection size of the library during the 19th century, but soon after the turn of the century, in 1907, the library passed control over to the

United Daughters of the Confederacy The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is an American neo-Confederate hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers engaging in the commemoration of these ancestors, the funding of monuments to them, ...

. The Daughters maintained the library and brought the collection up to 80 volumes before donating the collection to the Louisville Academy Library in 1921. With the acquisition of the library by the Louisville Academy Library board, the service to the library became subscription based. An initiation fee of $5 was charged to new patrons of the library with monthly dues of fifty cents. Citizens could instead donate five books of similar value to avoid the registration dues. This early founding lay the groundwork for the Jefferson County Library, which was dedicated on August 16, 1970, as a free public library to the county. The name has since changed to the Louisville Public Library with the addition of the McCollum and Wadley branches to create the regional system.

Branches

Library systems in neighboring counties

Bartram Trail Regional Library System The Bartram Trail Regional Library System (BTRLS) is a public library system serving the counties of Wilkes, McDuffie, and Taliaferro, Georgia, United States. The central library is the Mary Willis Library, a historic library built in 1888 out ...

to the north * Greater Clarks Hill Regional Library System to the northeast *

Augusta-Richmond County Public Library System The Augusta-Richmond County Public Library System is a public library system consisting of six branches serving the county of Richmond, Georgia,United States. The headquarters for the library system is the Augusta-Richmond County Public Library lo ...

to the northeast * Statesboro Regional Public Libraries to the south * Oconee Regional Library System to the west

References

External links

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