"Frequently Used Sites" is one of those navigation labels that dates a website precisely. It belongs to an era when a library's own site was, for many readers, the front door to the internet — a curated list of places worth going, maintained by people whose job was knowing which sources were reliable.
The library system kept that directory for its entire online life, and by 2017 it had grown into a properly faceted catalogue with subject categories, an audience filter for children, teenagers and adults, and a toggle to show only the statewide database resources. This page reconstructs what it pointed at, and links onward to the public services that still exist.
How the directory was organised
The 2017 version sorted resources into seven categories: Genealogy and Research, General Information, Government, Library Affiliations, Local Points of Interest, Recreation and Culture, and Reference. Each entry carried a short description written in-house.
The audience facet is the interesting part. Filtering the same directory for children, teenagers or adults is a small piece of interface design doing a librarian's work — it is reader's advisory, encoded.
Georgia's statewide research services
Several resources in the old directory were not the library's at all; they were state-level public services that any Georgia library card reaches. These are the ones worth knowing about, and they are all still running.
- GALILEO — Georgia's virtual library. A statewide programme providing licensed research databases, journals and reference works to public libraries, schools and universities. This is the single largest thing a Georgia public library card gets you that you cannot get for free elsewhere.
- PINES — the shared statewide catalogue and single-card borrowing network described on the borrowing and policy page.
- Digital Library of Georgia — a free, open, statewide digitisation programme holding photographs, manuscripts, government records, maps and newspapers from institutions across the state. No card required.
- Georgia Historic Newspapers — full-text searchable scanned newspapers spanning well over a century, including titles from Middle Georgia. For local research this is often the single most productive place to start.
- Georgia Public Library Service — the state agency that coordinates the public library network and the shared services above.
Licensed commercial platforms
The directory also listed a set of subscription platforms that libraries license on their readers' behalf — e-book and audiobook lending, film and documentary streaming, language learning, test preparation, legal form collections, business directories, and a genealogy database available only inside the building.
Those are commercial products and this archive does not advertise them by brand. The general point is what matters: a substantial share of what a modern library card unlocks is not owned by the library at all but rented annually on behalf of every cardholder, and which platforms a given library has is a budget decision that changes from year to year. Anyone wanting to know what is currently available should ask the operating library.
National reference anchors
Two entries in the old directory were straightforward institutional reference points and remain the right starting places for their subjects:
- The American Library Association, the profession's national body, whose mission the library's own directory quoted at length.
- The Library of Congress, whose digital collections are free, enormous and consistently underused by general researchers.
For Georgia subject matter specifically, the New Georgia Encyclopedia is an authoritative, edited, freely available reference on the state's history, geography, culture and institutions.
Local points of interest
The directory's local section pointed at municipal and county government, the county board of education, the area's universities and technical college, a preserved literary property associated with a major American novelist, the town's arts and main-street organisations, and the local festivals. Those are described in the local history page rather than listed as links here — organisations change, and an archive that keeps pointing at addresses it cannot maintain rapidly becomes a list of dead ends.
What a curated link directory was for
It is easy to be condescending about the era of the hand-maintained link list. But the underlying job — someone who knows the subject deciding which sources are worth your time, and saying why — did not become less necessary when search engines improved. It became less visible. The 2017 directory's short in-house descriptions, written by people who had actually used the resources, are still better guidance than a results page.
See also genealogy and local history research for how to use several of these sources in practice.