Research

Special Collections

Local History Collection

Local History is a non-circulating collection composed of works of local importance. It is housed at the Cesar Chavez Central Library on the second floor. The emphasis of the collection is on Stockton, California and San Joaquin County. Access to the collection is through the main library catalog. 

Genealogy Collection

The Genealogy Collection at the Cesar Chavez Central Library consists of over 1,500 reference books and 175 genealogy magazines. Emphasis in the collection is on United States research, though there are some general guides for doing genealogy in other countries.  Genealogy material is for use in the library only. Online resources are also available.

Government Documents Collection

The Library is one of the oldest federal document depositories in California, having been designated in 1884. The collection covers a wide range of subjects, especially statistics, business, and agriculture, with an emphasis on California. The selective depository collection is housed at the Cesar Chavez Central Library in the Storage Services Section on the first floor.

An index of many government documents, including much of the Library's collection, is maintained by the U.S. Government Publishing Office.

World Language Collections

The Cesar Chavez Central Library maintains fully cataloged collections of books, periodicals, music CDs, DVDs, books on tape, and books on CD in Spanish, Chinese, and Vietnamese and is building book collections in Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Philippine languages.

The Central Library also has a large, cataloged collection of Japanese books.

The Central Children's Section supports book collections in all of the above languages. All eleven branch libraries in the system and the Mobile Library have Spanish language collections of varying sizes; the largest are maintained at the Maya Angelou Southeast Library/Biblioteca, and the Tracy Branch Library.

The M. K. Troke Library also has collections of Chinese and Vietnamese language books.

The Tracy Library has Hindi materials.

The Library catalog has the option to limit your search to material in any of these languages.

Library Professional Collection

Located in the Library Administration area of the Cesar Chavez Central Library, the 500+ volume Professional Collection of library science materials and current professional journals is available to staff and by request to 49-99 Cooperative Library System members and other librarians, library school students and to any patrons interested in the field. The collection's titles have been included in the library catalog and may be searched by subject, author, title or keyword.

The holding location of these materials in the catalog is Chavez Central Library, Professional Collection, which as noted above is in the Library Administration area.

Collection strengths include library public relations, administration and management, collection development, adult/reference/children's services, automation and outreach.

 Cady Collection

Miss Gertrude Cady gave the library money to buy books in memory of her niece, Jo Anne Sartini, who died when she was a little girl. These funds were used to purchase one copy of each year's Newbery Award Winner and Caldecott Award Winner (the most distinguished book of children's fiction and picture book illustrations for a given year) to be housed in the Central Library in a permanent reference collection.

The non-circulating Cady collection is located in the Children's Services Section display case with pictures of Miss Cady as a young woman, Jo Anne as a little girl and some of Jo Anne's own favorite books. Miss Cady later gave more money to the Central Library, the interest of which is used to purchase circulating, browsing non-fiction, picture books, poetry and fairy tales.