Melody's Blog

Here is a photo of the Library itself--the whole thing, residence and all is called the Library, but this is the Library proper! Not very good, I recommend looking all around the website for information and photos, but this page describes the wonderful collections. I have been keeping my nose to the grindstone and working away on Fr. Simeon project, but today I took a few minutes to take note of journals that CTU doesn't purchase, and the reference book collection. I am hoping to get time to take a very close look at the Moorman Collection of Franciscan Books.  What would be fun would be to come here with only a bit of work, be able to go for rambles in the village, and just sit in the common room reading most of the day. Besides the wonderful collection in the Common Room, there is also the Tom West Fiction collection up on the landing, mostly Brit Lit, but very enticing.    The food and company are marvelous! I highly recommend it for a place for scholarly retreat!

Borges would think this place filled the bill for paradise! About 15 years ago, some colleague handed me a photocopy of a paper that read St. Deiniol's (pronounced Dean-ee-uls--all pronunciations thanks to my fabulous Welsh cabbie who gave me Welsh 101 in about 15 minutes) Library and I have carried it around with me all these years and now I am here, in Wales, at the residential library built by Gladstone with his personal library and added to all these years since. Built in 1906 to house the collection and provide temporary residence for scholars studying or writing here, it is quite lovely and comfy, in a small village where the Gladstone ancestral home is located, Hawarden (pronounced Harden). I am here to write an article which I started planning many years ago about a colleague librarian, Fr. Simeon Daly, and to take a look at the Moorman Franciscan collection here, which is said to be the best in Northern Europe. (We--CTU--say we have the second best in the U.S., so I want

Most readers of my blog know that in early March I spent three days in the hospital wondering why I had no platelets! Doctor made a really good guess and put me on a really high dose of steroids which made it difficult for me to focus and write. I had a couple of projects that had hard deadlines, so I abandoned my blog for a while and now I am hoping to pick it up again.  One project was a paper on scholarly sustainability and lifelong learning which I presented in May at the  Kent State University Conference on Information and Religion. This paper is posted on my Academia.edu site along with a pre-print of my paper on Scholarly Sustainability and Theological Librarianship which was presented at the 2010 ATLA conference. The other project was Never Enough Singing: Essays in Honor of Seth Kasten , a festschrift I edited for the ATLA choirmaster who recently retired. I also manged to finish an article on "Three London Catholic Libraries" which will be published in July in