Automation from Scratch How to Turn a Room Full of Books into a Monastic Library

Abstract

The acquisition of a major collection prompted the residents of St. Michael’s Abbey to hire a librarian who would catalog the hitherto unorganized 50,000 volumes of the abbey’s library. This poster shares how that lone librarian is approaching the challenge of introducing library automation into an institution that has never had a formal system for bibliographic control. The processes of choosing and deploying an ILS, developing a one-person cataloging workflow, and reforming circulation are laid out in the hopes that this experience will be instructive to others who are tasked with organizing collections from square one.