We thought you’d like to know about a rather significant milestone in the history of Morrab Library. Friday the 14th May saw us catalogue our first library book into KOHA, our new online library system.
Member, volunteer and former Chair Peter Chapman had the honour of barcoding the first of our many thousands of books, and adding the record to our catalogue – it was Annabelle Abbs’ Frieda, by the way!
This is a small but important step in our aim to improve access to our collections. By making our books searchable online, you will all be able to truly discover the extent, and the magic, of our collections, even the ones on the high shelves!
You’ll have to be patient though – we have a lot of books, so it will be quite a number of years before we have completed the retrospective project, but we do feel it’s worth the effort involved! There won’t be any changes to the way you search for or borrow books just now, but we will provide regular updates on progress.
The project is currently in its pilot phase (starting with the fiction collection), with Peter and our Honorary Librarian, Harry Spry-Leverton, testing things for us, but soon we will be looking to recruit some more volunteers to help with the cataloguing, so we’ll put the call out when we’re ready.
A big thank you to Sue Garwood, our Assistant Librarian, who used the lockdown periods very productively coming to terms with KOHA, and to Dr Vivian Cothey, member and cataloguing expert, for his brilliant advice and guidance.