Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers' Literature

The Tulsa City-County Library (TCCL) is the major public library system in Tulsa County, Oklahoma.

The library system serves those who live, work, go to school in, own land in, or pay property taxes on land in Tulsa County. There are 25 branches in the system: Bixby, Broken Arrow, Brookside, Central, Charles Page, Collinsville, Genealogy, Glenpool, Hardesty Regional, Herman & Kate Kaiser, Jenks, Judy Z. Kishner, Kendall-Whittier, Martin Regional, Maxwell Park, Nathan Hale, Owasso, Peggy V. Helmerich, Pratt, Rudisill Regional, Schusterman-Benson, Skiatook, South Broken Arrow, Suburban Acres, and Zarrow Regional.

TCCL’s collection is composed of more than 1.7 million materials, including books, CDs, DVDs (in regular and Blu-ray formats), magazines, audio books, e-books and other formats. TCCL offers numerous services to the public including public use pcs and Wi-Fi at each library branch, a bookmobile, homebound delivery, the Ruth G. Hardman Adult Literacy Service, meeting rooms, and reference support via telephone, email, instant messaging, text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter.

TCCL also maintains specialized collections in some of its library branches. The Rudisill Regional Library houses the African-American Resource Center, the Central Library houses the American Indian Resource Center and the Foundation Center, and the Martin Regional Library houses the Hispanic Resource Center. Martin and Rudisill also both house the Plan4College Center to provide families and students with information about college.

TCCL was named as a “5 Star Library” by the publication “Library Journal]” in their “2009 Index of Public Library Service.”

Public library service began in Tulsa County in the early 1900s. The first library was located in the basement of the Tulsa County courthouse. A Carnegie Library Grant for $12,500 was issued in 1904. The grant was raised to $42,500 in 1913 and to $55,000 in 1915. The original Carnegie Library in downtown Tulsa was demolished in 1965.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that what is today known as Tulsa City-County Library was born when, on November 14, 1961, an election was held in Tulsa County to approve “the expenditure of $3.8 million to construct a new Central Library and three branches, plus a 1.9-mill annual levy for funding the system.” Tulsa voters approved “a countywide system to consolidate metropolitan and suburban libraries the following fiscal year” [Thompson, 115]. The Tulsa City-County Library Commission “officially assumed control of the Library System on July 1, 1962, when the 1.9-mill levy went into effect” [Thompson, 119]. “To be absorbed into the consolidated system were the Broken Arrow Library, founded by the Self Culture Club in 1906 but operated by the city since 1929; the Collinsville Library, created by the Comedy of Errors Club in 1913 and converted into a Carnegie library in 1917; a library in Skiatook opened with WPA funds and operated by the City of Skiatook; and Page Memorial Library of Sand Springs” [Thompson, 121].

...
Wikipedia