Working Together

On Sunday, May 18 during the morning service, a four alarm blaze erupted inside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints at Longfellow Park in Cambridge, Massachusetts. All 300 worshipers escaped unharmed but much of the church went up in flames. As tragic as this event was to that congregation, I was happy to read this in the article depicting the event:  

“Many church members, all dressed in their finest attire, assembled in a line to rescue books and artwork from the church’s library.”

Excellent work.

Movie Review Websites

For those of you who are working on building up your movie collection for the adults in your congregation, you know that it’s sometimes difficult to decide whether a particular film belongs in the church library or not. It pretty much boils down to the library’s collection development policy and, in some cases, your own discretion. Here are a few websites that you help you makes those decisions more easily!

Plugged In Online – Movie reviews:                                http://www.pluggedinonline.com/movies/

The Dove Foundation – Movie Reviews: http://www.dove.org/reviewmasterframe.asp

Two different worlds

Today I was sitting at my desk at work reflecting on the differences between my job and my work as a volunteer church librarian.

Only yesterday I finally finished up making the subject heading signs for the church library – made up of your basic, everyday white cardboard and black ink. And, quite frankly, I’m ecstatic about having it done. And when I get my new bookshelves up I’m going to be simply over the moon. No online catalogue for this library – yet. With only 2700 items I’m not altogether sure that it’s necessary at the moment. One step at a time people, one step at a time. 

In the meantime, my day job absolutely revolves around the Internet. Since I was hired to be some sort of online research guru, I’m expected to be up to date on not only the latest trends in 2.0, but also how they work and their degree of usefulness.

It seems strange to me now that I was worried when I took this job that I wouldn’t be able to stay current with the programs and applications that many of my colleagues were using in their libraries. Now I deal with them on a daily basis. And now it’s the library that I work at in my free time that is teaching me more of the basics of running a library such as customer service, collection development weeding and marketing. Weird how things sometimes work out!

Spring has Sprung in the Library

I love it when church libraries take the initiative and keep the congregation up to date on what’s going on in the library. This posting from the library on a Baptist Church’s website gives the reader an excellent perspective on what the library has to offer while tying it in with a spring theme! Love it!

Librarians For Christ

Sometimes I like to search around to find where and why church libraries are popping up in the news. For the most part, they aren’t. In fact, today when I did a search in Google News for “Church Library” I came up with the incredible number of 54 results for the past month, most of which were announcements in local papers for meetings that were to be held in the church library’s facilities.

It was only when I was meandering through the news archives of the previous decade that I was able to find some interesting tidbits of information. One excellent example is this article from 1999. It holds some really interesting points, some of which I think still ring true today. It points out that libraries are still not the norm in church life. Some libraries that I’ve seen are fairly vibrant while others simply do not hold that type of tenacity required to hold the attention of a congregation.

Another item of interest that caught my attention was the referral to the  Librarians for Christ ministry. I did a search in order to find more information on this ministry but came up empty. I did, however, find this same article posted on a wiki for Christianmedia.ca, which explained that the ministry is non-denominational in nature and aims to assist church librarians by providing seminars. (Whether it still exists, however, is beyond me at this point)  This find, of course, peaked my interest in discovering what Christianmedia.ca actually was. It turns out that it is a site devoted to Christians who work and minister in media in Canada. It also turns out that I’m a year too late. David Spencer, the one who spearheaded this idea, decided to move ahead with the next project in 2008. You can read the closing interview with him here. It’s pretty interesting what you can find in the depths of the Internet and what people are doing behind the scenes to improve and give support to Christian media literacy!