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. 

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...

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...

After getting a late start due to car rental issues, I made it to the Raynor Library at Marquette University, which houses the Catholic Library Association archives. I arrived there to research the life and work of Fr. Simeon Daly, a Benedictine monk who has been one of the most influential Catholic librarians in the U.S. The nice archivists had pulled about fifteen boxes of correspondence, conference programs, and other material that might contain references to the work of Fr. Simeon in CLA. My research will (I hope) be published sometime in the next year or so. So about that I will just put in a plug for archives. If you belong to an organization that generates documentation--consider finding an appropriate archival home for it. I believe archival material will just keep becoming more and more important for research in the coming years. If you are unsure if your possible archive is important, consult a librarian or archivist.  I managed to get in a couple of hours of wor...