Melody's Blog

Here are a few photos of my baby! Yep, at least that is how it feels. My library baby, the new library at the American Islamic College . I have been helping to bring this library to some sort of reality and now here it is looking like a real library! It is, it just needs some more work. Everything needs to be cataloged, for example. But now, the books are on the donated shelving and sorted by categories—Arabic books on one side for now, and English on the other. The library is applying for membership in the local Illinois library regional group and hopes to be able to apply to CARLI soon. I think they need book ends. But more seriously, they really have no current scholarship in English about Islam and once cataloging starts, it will be interesting to find out what kind of primary source material they are missing. Really any Islamica would be greatly appreciated. 

I recently started a new gig as volunteer library advisor for the American Islamic College . When my former student worker, Romana, called up and asked if I could talk with them about their library, I thought I'd go over, check it out, give them some ideas, and call it a day. But I really like their mission, I liked the folks who are working hard to get this going, and so now I am deep in dirty work of sorting books to make a decent library for them. It's all unclear to me how they happen to have thousands and thousands of old books, but 99% of them are not appropriate for their collection, so it is weeding and boxing time. Yesterday I had a couple of volunteers, my friend, Beth and a AIC volunteer. That was so helpful! This exercise is forcing me to think about how important it is to have a collection development policy and stick to it! Since I need to revise the CTU collection development policy, this is useful. It also has provided the reminder of how valued books are. When...