March 2026 Library Newsletter

📙 Faculty/Staff Book Club
🌜 Late Night at the Library
💪 Show Your Work(shops)
📚 20 Years of Library Blog
👓 New Magnifiers
🔇 Quiet Zone

Faculty/Staff Book Club: To the Moon and Back

As part of a collaboration with the Employee Giving Campaign and its Space Race Theme, the library is hosting a faculty/staff book club! We are reading Tennessee author Eliana Ramage's To the Moon and Back, and we have a few more copies if there are latecomers who would like to join us. The meeting dates are

• March 25th at 1:30 pm
• April 9th at 3:00 pm

This book club is happening over Zoom, and we are working to arrange one more meeting where the author herself will be joining us! Reach out to Sara Beth Coffman (sara.coffman@chattanoogastate.edu) for more information or to get a book!

Late Night at the Library

Late Night at the Library will be held on Tuesday, April 7 from 5pm - 10pm - please share with your students! 
Fight procrastination and get working on those end-of-semester research papers and studying for exams!
☕ 5pm: Get your snack bag with raffle ticket and a cup of coffee or tea
📢 Set a goal for the evening on our goal-setting board - when you complete it, our library staff will cheer for you!
🐔 6pm: Dinner time! Grab your Chick-fil-a to keep you fueled for the rest of the evening
🎫 7pm: Raffle winners announced
🎤 8pm: Karaoke break in the library classroom
🏆 Celebrate your achievements all night with a spin on the library prize wheel
🖍 Relax with coloring or a puzzle
🐶 Pet a therapy dog
Get the boost you need to finish the semester strong at Late Night at the Library - everything is FREE! 

Show Your Work(shops)
The Library is excited to offer two library workshops to help students prepare for the upcoming research symposium in April. 

Show Your Work(shop): Posters
Tuesday, March 24, 530 pm, Library Mobile Classroom
In this workshop led by Librarian Carla Fulgham, students will learn how to properly format and design an academic poster, with examples and instruction on both traditional scientific-style posters and humanities-focused adaptations.

Show Your Work(shop): Abstracts
Wednesday, March 25, 530 pm, Library Mobile Classroom
In this workshop led by Librarian Amanda Roper, students will learn how to write an abstract for their research project. 

Other important dates: 
Show Your Work Kickoff with Nursing & Allied Health Student Research on April 14 from 9am - 11am, HSC Lobby
Student Research Symposium with Posters, Zines, Presentations & More on April 16 from 10:30am - 12pm, Library

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers to 20 Years of the Library Blog!
On October 12, 2005, we hit "publish" for the very first time. Two decades later, the Library Blog remains the heart of our digital community—showcasing staff-curated content, essential resources, and the vibrant collaborations that define our campus.

What’s New?
We’ve introduced a Display Collaboration category! This section highlights the creative partnerships between the library, college departments, and student organizations. Check out our most recent post in this category featuring the Advance Team/Give Day and their stellar "Space Race" theme.

Explore Our Favorites: 

• Featured Events: Relive the best moments from Late Night at the Library and the Edible Book Festival.
• Book Reviews: Discover your next great read.
• Staff Interviews: Get to know the faces behind the stacks.

Want to see your name in print? If you are interested in reviewing a library book or ebook for the blog, please contact Dwight Hunter at dwight.hunter@chattanoogastate.edu

Magnifiers

The library has two magnifiers with built-in LED lights! One is available for checkout, the other for library use only. Magnifiers are great for reading fine print, low-vision users, and even crafting! 

Quiet Zone

Need a quiet, low-distraction place to study? The Library's Quiet Zone is located behind the bookshelves and features a white noise machine to dim noise and distraction. The Quiet Zone is for individual, silent study only. 

See you at the Library!

College Advancement Space Race / Give Day

Context note: In August 2025, a change was announced for the thematic display area near the entrance of the library. The new display initiative focused on display collaborations and intentional exhibits that highlight the intersection of academic affairs and student life. 

ChattState Give Day is set for April 1st, but the Advancement Team is celebrating throughout March with their theme of the Space Race. This collection features fiction and nonfiction centering the history of NASA's space program and key players in space history, including many women!

The College Advancement team campus email ends with "Together, we can win the Space Race to launch more bright futures." ChattState Give Day encourages the college community to support the ChattState Foundation and contributors will be able to receive a space crew t-shirt to wear on Give Day.

The book display highlights space race and the behind-the-scene stories about the space race history including many women. The book club is reading To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage.

 

  Check out the display throughout the month of March!

Farm Life Ranch Work Women Pioneers Display

During Spring Break, our auxiliary display has a Farm Life | Ranch Work | Women Pioneers display. The display complete with books, eBooks, and images of farm life, ranch life, or women pioneers. March is traditionally women's history month and this display gives a nod to that tradition. Most people associate "pioneers" with a male viewpoint (explorers, outlaws, gold miners). Highlighting the women—the homesteaders, the ranchers, and the healers—adds to that narrative.

The books are a blend of fiction and nonfiction works. Of course one of America's best agrarian novel writers, Willa Cather, books are displayed including My Antonia and O, Pioneers. Diary books of plains women, and women living the ranch life, and young adult fiction about custom harvesting life, and so much more are on display. 

 

Small pictures of farm life surround the book display on the edges. They depict custom wheat harvesting, feeding livestock with bales of hay, cows in the grass, a cotton harvest, and more.

Which pioneer skill would you most want to have? (herbal medicine, navigation, blacksmithing, roping, herding, raising livestock, gardening, planting trees, raising crops, etc)

OverDrive Book Review: In the Country of the Kaw

 

By Dwight Hunter

James Locklear manages to combine history, geology, biology, and sociology topics all in one well-written book. In the Country of the Kaw: A Personal Natural History of the American Plains.

There are so many reasons I enjoyed reading this book. I am a huge fan of history and telling the history of the Kaw and its tributaries was a continual learning lesson while reading the book. I am an enthusiastic fan of sociology and telling the human lessons wrought from living in the Plains were lifelong learning lessons. Learning about the biology and the flowers of the Plains and the Kaw brought me new learning. And there's geology. Erosion, wind-carried dirt and rocks, and limestone. I learned so many different layers of limestone. A lot of reasons to like this book.

So, what is the Kaw? Most people know it as the Kansas River, about 170 miles long. But people who live there know better than to call it the Kansas River. It is the Kaw.

Locklear not only covers the Kaw but all the tributaries that feed into the Kaw. The Kaw is truly a prairie river - the only Plains river whose headwaters do not begin in the Rockies. Instead, the Kaw headwaters rise up from the eastern Colorado plains.

The tributaries of the Kaw once teemed with bison, fish, and unique plants. A narrative of how people affected those things. Bison hunted to near extinction. The Ogallala Aquifer is becoming depleted to the point causing some of the western ends of the Kaw tributaries to be decoupled from ground source water. 

But Locklear brings about hope and continued resilience of the land and of the Kaw.

Take a dive into an eBook that weaves history, biology, geology, and sociology into learning lessons about life. In the Country of the Kaw.