To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

TinyCat’s latest Library of the Month is one that offers its visitors a rich assortment of historical collections, housed on the second floor of the T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center in Red Bank, New Jersey. The Carrie Smiley Fortune Research Library, whose namesake was a founding member of the National Urban League, is managed by Researcher/Archivist/Librarian Lynn Humphrey, who was kind enough to field my questions this month:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The Carrie Smiley Fortune Research Library is a small but powerful library, whose goal is to educate the public about the impact of T. Thomas Fortune and others like him who led the way for civil rights and social justice.

Located upstairs at the T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center, we are one of only two New Jersey national historic landmarks dedicated to an African American. In the library we offer reading and reference materials to our patrons, with resources focusing on the unsung heroes of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the beginnings of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and African Genealogy. We also host cultural events, book clubs, and exhibits on a regular basis.

Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community.

The T. Thomas Fortune Foundation practices outreach through education, exhibits, webinars, and public programming which is the basis of our mission.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

My favorites would have to include The Private Collection of T. Thomas Fortune which contains works such as Charles Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream and works by Kelly Miller, First Edition books donated to us such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, and our collection of Arena Magazines (not yet cataloged).

What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?

As a small library it’s always a challenge reaching the public and making our presence known.

Want to learn more about the Carrie Smiley Fortune Research Library? Follow them on Facebook and check out their full TinyCat collection here.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

We’re kicking the new year off with a feel-good story about a retired law librarian who’s been spending his days establishing a free library for a local community in the Philippines. He recently completed the library and Librarian Peter Mazzei was kind enough to answer my questions this month! Read on:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

Tito Peter’s Free Public Library is a small, charitable library and education center located in Tambo, Batangas, Philippines. It has been a dream of mine for many years to build a library in my wife’s barangay (village) where books and educational resources are scarce. The mission and purpose of the library is to promote literacy, provide free educational resources (books, computer access, paper, school supplies, etc.) for students of all ages, and encourage reading, writing and education.

Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community.

As books and computer access to educational and research resources are relatively expensive and scarce, the library provides these resources in a safe, quiet environment that is conducive to learning, thinking and discovering. The barangay does not have a library of its own, so our library sort of acts as an ad hoc public or community library. In the near future, post COVID, I plan on having special activities such as poetry writing, science experiments, identifying plants, rocks and minerals, star-gazing, fun with mathematics, reading groups, and classical music appreciation.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

Children’s books of all kinds, especially picture books with those wonderful illustrations. The kids are enthralled with interactive books like pop-up books, lift-the-flap books and other books with movable parts.

What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?

The librarian’s perennial paradox: Not enough space, yet always looking for more books to add to the collection.

What is your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented/developed?

I have many favorite things about TinyCat, too numerous to mention here. Suffice it to say that it is a first-rate online cataloging/circulation system for small libraries. I think it is the best out there.

For circulation statistics, you currently have data for “Records, Checked out, On hold, Overdue, and Patrons”. Can you add “Total Checked Out” which would be the total number of books checked out since the inception of the library using TinyCat. It would be even better if you can also give the option to break down the total number of books checked out by month or year. That would really help the librarian quickly visualize how the library collection as a whole is being circulated.

Great idea! We do give you the option to generate your own checkout reports and/or export your lending Transactions, but adding a quick reference to total checkouts might be nice.

Want to learn more about Tito Peter’s Free Public Library? Check out their full TinyCat collection here.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

December’s Library of the Month is a fascinating organization focusing on the most curious phenomena this world has to offer: congratulations to The Anomaly Archives Library! The Founder of the Anomaly Archives, SMiles Lewis, was kind enough to take my questions this month:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

Our legal name is the Scientific Anomaly Institute, but we generally refer to our organization as the Anomaly Archives and that’s how we promote ourselves. I founded the organization with the State of Texas in 2003 and we became an established nonprofit in 2006.

Our raison d’etre is the, “Preservation and dissemination of scientific research into anomalous phenomena; Research and analysis of accumulated collections; Education of the public regarding scientific investigations into these phenomena.” Put another way the purposes of the organization are:

• Managing and developing an archive and library for documents and literature with regards to a multi-disciplinary approach to anomalous phenomena
• Supporting, promoting and pursuing research to obtain increased knowledge about anomalous phenomena
• Pursuing and stimulating a critical, scientific discussion of anomalous phenomena, and providing a forum for information, support, and sharing among researchers
• Functioning as the archives and library for like-minded organizations, and other groups in the community that have similar interests.

Some of the types of subject matter our special collections cover include: UFOs and Ufology, Consciousness (“What is it?”, meditation, dreams, lucid dreaming, and more), Parapsychology (ESP, PSI, Remote Viewing, etc.) and the Paranormal (Ghosts, Hauntings, etc.), Fortean (after Charles Fort: chronicler of the unexplained) Phenomena, Cryptozoology (Bigfoot and undiscovered hominids, lake monsters, sea serpents, and other undiscovered/out of place or sightings of presumed extinct animals), ParaPolitical Science (after Professor Peter Dale Scott’s, Mae Brussell’s and John Judge’s approach to “ParaPolitics” aka Conspiracy Theory), Human Potential, Jungian Theory, Frontier Physics and much more!

Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community.

Far too often, the personal libraries and research materials of researchers—including correspondence among researchers and witnesses—of these mysterious phenomena end up lost or thrown into landfills by family who don’t recognize the importance of such legacy materials. Or such collections end up being sold online via eBay or passed along to other researchers who may not share the material with others nor properly protect and preserve the materials. That’s where we, and the small network of similar anomalous archives (see our “Other Archives” online directory), come in.

We are constantly looking for such abandoned or forgotten collections while also actively working with still living researchers to help make sure their legacy, in the form of the materials making up their personal collections and life’s work, is preserved for future generations. We serve as a research resource for other investigators looking into the many and various anomalous subjects covered by the collections within our archives. We also host regular public events featuring researchers and experiencers of these strange phenomena. Our current Streamathon event series is our most ambitious such event to date!

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

There is so much, it’s very hard to identify specific items but…our oldest materials include historical texts from the 1600s that are part of our biggest donated collection: that of rare book collector and seller Bob Girard. Robert Charles Girard was the entrepreneur behind North America’s largest reseller of UFO related books, called ARCTURUS BOOKS INC. He published a long-running CataZine in which he’d write reviews of everything he sold. Bob has been called the “Proust of the UFO phenomenon” (John Chambers, Paranormal journalist, 2004).

Bob Girard’s collection has books on everything from Alchemy and Atlantis to all aspects of the Unexplained but also contains some of the most rare early Flying Saucer-era UFO books. We also have a nearly complete collection of his CataZine.

Other gems of our collection include an amazing collection of 1990s alternative media zine scene publications as well as rare audio and video recordings, materials from a local Past-life Regression Hypnotherapy clinician, the unpublished manuscript, daily diary, personal letters and more of a local Alien Abductee and Trance Medium who was featured in a 1990s anthology of similar cases, and much more!

What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?

Funding and staffing: we’ve grown considerably over the past 3 years, acquiring more collections and getting more volunteers active in our ongoing activities. However, we still have no paid staff and this severely limits the amount of hours we are open to the public. Then with the current COVID situation, we’ve had to completely shut down and this has been the single greatest threat to our ongoing existence.

What is your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented/developed?

My favorite thing about TinyCat is its ease of use and inexpensiveness. I have many ideas I’d love to see implemented but mainly I’d like to see a desktop cataloging extension that synced with the online version in ways that allowed easier updating of both a local catalog and the online catalog.

Want to learn more about The Anomaly Archives? Follow them on social media (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook), visit their website at https://www.anomalyarchives.org/, and check out their TinyCat collection here.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

We’re moving just west of our October Library of the Month in New Zealand to a library built for car lovers: congratulations to The Australian Motorlife Library! Volunteer Librarians Tracy Westall and Brian Wye were kind enough to field my questions this month:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The Australian Motorlife Library is housed in the Australian Motorlife Museum in New South Wales, Australia. It consists of 2,200 general motoring books, a motoring magazine collection of approximately 12,000 volumes, and around 3,000 ephemera items. The library material comprises contemporary and historic items, some of which are unique and rare. The collection integrates and supports the wider museum which consists of historic vehicles, automotive memorabilia, and social history.

Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community.

We provide books and material that is niche and usually not available in the public libraries. We have a large technical and reference selection which we make available to the community and car enthusiasts alike, especially to those who are restoring or researching vintage and collectable automobiles.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

Our library contains an extensive collection of early and rare motoring books—like the ones pictured above—car repair manuals, and collectable vintage magazines. This enables us to provide a unique service that encourages communication with patrons from all over Australia: equally interesting and enjoyable for us volunteer librarians.

What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?

The library relies totally on donations of collectable material; we have no acquisitions budget which requires us to recycle resources and exercise our creativity and housekeeping skills. This has been the main challenge when establishing an online presence and an operational procedure: to enable the library’s resources to be accessed by the wider community. Another challenge has been to organise and upload our catalogue to TinyCat, for which the steps to achieve this has been further exacerbated due to COVID-19 and its restrictions.

What is your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented/developed?

One of our favourite things is the interface of TinyCat. As many of our patrons are seniors, the similarity of the interface to that of the public library makes it familiar and user-friendly. The online access to LibraryThing and TinyCat has enabled us to achieve our goal of uploading the catalogue in record time while working in isolation from home. The catalogue is easy to use and understand. As for improvements, the only thing that currently comes to mind is having more control over the content of the homepage’s animated cover display.

Want to learn more about The Australian Motorlife Library and Museum? Visit their website at https://www.australianmotorlifemuseum.com/ and check out their TinyCat collection here.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

TinyCat’s October Library of the Month looks at a New Zealand-based organization working to make a sustainable lifestyle easy for anyone. The Sustainability Trust’s Volunteer Librarian Marion Llenart was kind enough to field my questions this month:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The Sustainability Trust is a social enterprise that believes sustainable living should be an available option for us all. With a focus on energy efficiency the Trust helps those economically and socially disadvantaged in our community to use energy efficiently in their houses and flats and create healthy homes. The library provides information that helps people reduce their impact on the environment.

Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community.

Our library has books and information which support our sustainable living community programmes such as learning how to compost and making garden containers from pallets, making cleaning products from natural products, making natural face products, and recycling.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

My favourite books include The Natural Home by Wendyl Nissen, which gives practical advice on sustainable living such as making a garden and cooking healthy food. Creating Cohousing by Kathryn McCamant is another favourite as this is a way of the future for those who like to live in sustainable communities. Lastly, Living Big in a Tiny House by Bryce Langston provides another alternative way of living sustainably, and this book gives beautiful examples of very small homey spaces.

What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?

The ongoing challenge for the library is always promotion and making sure people know we have all these resources and information on sustainability readily available and free of charge. As a small library we don’t have a large acquisitions budget so every new item needs careful research.

What is your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented/developed?

TinyCat has provided an online portal to the library. As well as providing access to physical resources, it allows promotion of online resources including films and websites. It has enabled me to promote the library’s Wiki, giving information on second hand shops, places to dispose of waste sustainably and local climate change organisations. It would be great to have the library Wiki developed so it can enable feedback, suggestions and discussion from library users.

Want to learn more about The Sustainability Trust? Visit their website at https://sustaintrust.org.nz/our-story and check out their TinyCat collection here.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

TinyCat is continuing its focus on amplifying libraries supporting the BIPOC community and Solid Ground’s Anti-Racism Initiative Library is a wonderful representation of that. Anti-Racism Initiative Manager Tiffany Lamoreaux was kind enough to field my questions:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

Solid Ground believes that housing and family stability are foundational to ending poverty. We help families keep or obtain housing and get the support they need to overcome poverty and thrive.

Our mission: Solid Ground works to end poverty and undo racism and other oppressions that are root causes of poverty. Our vision: Solid Ground envisions a community beyond poverty and oppression where all people have equitable opportunity to thrive.

Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community.

Solid Ground has an Anti-Racism Initiative (ARI) and the Anti-racism library serves to strengthen and support our anti-racism work by providing rich resources from academic examinations of racism to literature by authors from marginalized groups.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

My personal current favorites in the collection are How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, Emergent Strategy by adrianne maree-brown, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.

What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?

We house our library at our headquarters building in the Wallingford Neighborhood, but we have a few other locations. Though the curated library is viewable online, and the books can be shipped through interoffice mail, the library remains underutilized by other sites. We are working to continue increasing awareness about the library to all of our locations.

What is your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented/developed?

Before transitioning to TinyCat we had our library in a conference room, but without a clear way to check out books and manage the inventory, it was largely ignored. In 2019 we moved the library to the central break-room and transitioned the library management to TinyCat. My favorite thing about TinyCat is how easily I can add books to the library and display them for our staff that are at various locations. Since making this transition, the library usage has seen a significant increase!

That’s so great to hear! It’s exactly why we offer TinyCat to small libraries.

Want to support Solid Ground’s Anti-Racism Initiative? Donations can be sent to their Social Justice Fund to support our Anti-Racism Work at solid-ground.org/donate/.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

TinyCat is honored to feature a library this month that offers an amazing selection of resources centering on the Black Diaspora. The Center for Black Diaspora at DePaul University’s Assistant Director Juelle Daley was kind enough to field my questions this month:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The Center for Black Diaspora’s reading room is a non-circulating special collection of books, films and audio-visual materials at DePaul University focused on every topic as it relates to the Black experience in the United States and the rest of the world. Our center’s mission since 1993 is to promote the culture and history of the Black Diaspora through our programming and events but more importantly, to provide a space for scholarly work. Our reading room is an integral component to this goal.

Though the university has its main library system, our reading room is a gem because of the sheer diversity of materials acquired about the Black Diaspora not found in the main library. As such, researchers, faculty and students have first-hand access to our resources.

Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community.

The library primarily serves the DePaul University community which includes all students, faculty and staff. It is also open to Chicagoland individuals who need access to the Center’s private collection.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

My favorite part of our collection would be the film collection which has expanded over the last five years. We have scoured the globe and international film festivals looking for stories about the complexity of the Black experience and the multiplicity of its expressions. The diversity of these acquisitions and books are what makes us unique. Items that reflect this diversity include the following:

• Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui directed by Susan Vogel
• The documentary series Black in Latin America by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
• The documentary Kinshasa Symphony directed by Claus Wischmann
• How the Other Half Worships by Camilo José Vergara

What is a particular challenge your library experiences?

One major challenge is making our vast resources more visible to the larger public.

What is your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented/developed?

We are delighted to finally have an online catalogue that individuals can consult remotely. TinyCat is a priceless additional step in promoting our special collection’s visibility.

Want to learn more about The Center for Black Diaspora at DePaul University? Visit their website here, follow them on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), and check out their collection on TinyCat. If you’d like to support the library, please contact DePaul University’s Office of Development.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

In honor of Pride Month, we’re thrilled to feature The LGBT Library at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. Executive Director Adrian Shanker was kind enough to field my questions this month:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The LGBT Library at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center celebrates LGBT literature, history, and culture with our collection of more than 2,300 LGBT library materials, frequent book talks, and community reading groups focused on memoir and poetry.

Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community.

All of our programs are free for the community, from borrowing books—which often are not available from mainstream libraries—to attending book talks or reading groups, where we even provide free copies of books to interested community members. We try to remove participation barriers and provide leading-edge programs on topics that need to be discussed. We do hope that soon more public libraries will expand their LGBT collections. For now, we are often the only place in our region where people can access the library materials we provide.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

As a small library, our collection is unique in that it is reserved only to materials that celebrate LGBT literature, history, and culture. We have been intentional about ensuring that our library collection includes materials celebrating multiple- or further-marginalized populations, such as BIPOC LGBT people, queer people of faith, asexual community members, and trans people.

What is a particular challenge your library experiences?

It’s always a challenge for a small library like ours to acquire newly-released library materials. Much of our collection has been acquired by donations of used books, but we strive to keep our collection relevant to current community needs and interests.

What is your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented/developed?

We love that the community can access our catalog from our website with the Tinycat search widget! It would be great if there could be an integration with GoodReads so community members can see reviews when searching our catalog.

I’m happy to say that LibraryThing actually offers some of the best reviews around, with over 2.5 million members! You can include your own review, published media reviews (such as from the NY Times, etc.), and LibraryThing member reviews from your Detail page sections settings.

Want to learn more about The LGBT Library at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center? Visit them at bradburysullivancenter.org/library, follow them on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram), and check out their collection on TinyCat. If you’d like to support the library, monetary donations are always welcome at www.bradburysullivancenter.org/donate and donations of new books can be mailed to the library at 522 W. Maple St., Allentown, PA 18101. (Used book donations cannot be accepted at this time.)

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

This month we highlight a center doing great things for their local senior citizens, the Canton Woods Senior Center! Here’s what Librarian Lorraine Melita—aka “Lorraine the Librarian”—had to say about their library:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

Canton Woods helps seniors remain active members of their community. The official mission of Canton Woods Senior Center reads as follows: Senior citizens are a valuable community resource. Canton Woods Multipurpose Senior Center meets the challenges facing older Americans by offering stimulating social activities, education and recreation programs, nutrition, health, and other activities.

Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community.

The small area that houses our collection is used as a senior writing center, a wonderful book club led by a retired English teacher, a health center for blood pressure checks, and a reading area for quiet times. The center offers seniors various exercise classes including a falls and prevention class, Tai Chi, cooking demonstrations, free band concerts, a craft club, art classes, pool, card games, Wii bowling, and many other activities.

Because the center is a municipally funded center, the library, in particular, is always looking for unique funding methods. For the past two years in the fall, several volunteers at the center have peeled apples and made many apple crisps to sell by the piece as a fundraiser for our small library. It was a great deal of work but was very successful and enjoyed by everyone who participated, especially the seniors! I also do a list of new books in our monthly newsletter and feature these books on our “new books” shelf in the library.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

Our seniors are voracious readers and often love mystery novels with James Patterson, David Baldacci and Stuart Woods being some of their favorite authors.

What’s a particular challenge you experience as a small library?

I find the biggest challenge to this library is technology. Three years ago, the collection was put online with the help of Syracuse University, several area grants from various donors, and LibraryThing. The technology itself works very well but the majority of our seniors are not used to looking at an online catalog for their books. Some of our readers would easily be able to use the internet to navigate our system whereas most of them like to peruse the shelves and see what’s been added to the new book shelf. I put the collection online to have the technology available and in use when more tech-savvy patrons begin using this facility. When that happens, we may begin using the lending features TinyCat offers.

Regarding the current COVID-19 pandemic, how has your library and your organization been affected? Is there anything TinyCat could be doing to meet your needs during this time?

The center has been closed to the public and our seniors since the pandemic began; however, our Director has met our loyal patrons on the front porch with a basket of books by the author they request. She takes a photo of the books, the patron’s name and number, and prints the photo for our records, all while practicing social distancing and wearing a mask. She is dedicated to our mission and our seniors!

Without our library open at this time, there isn’t much TinyCat can do to help our operations.

What is your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented/developed?

I am thrilled with the recent improvement for getting statistics. That is extremely useful to me as I need to show circulation to have any increase to my meager budget.

Want to learn more about the Canton Woods Senior Center? Check out their collection on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re featuring the library of the Sitting Room!

Karen Peterson, Librarian and co-founder of the Sitting Room with J.J. Wilson, fielded my questions this month:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The Sitting Room provides the local community with a library and reading room for researching women’s literature, art and related issues. To that end, we present cultural events such as poetry readings, lectures, exhibits, and performances, and we provide a place for writers’ workshops and other educational activities. The building and cataloguing of an extensive collection of reading and research material and the development of a supportive, friendly, non-intimidating environment for study are thus primary.

Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community.

The Sitting Room is within walking distance of Sonoma State University and we are fortunate to have regular student interns work with us. We have also served as a residency for students in the online Masters of Library Science program at San José State University. Northern California is home to an abundance of writers and artists and our public events provide a space for them to share their work. All special events are free and open to all, no membership needed or gender excluded. The free monthly book groups and writing workshops are open to all and provide a unique emphasis on women’s voices and visions.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

We have a fabulous 1,000-volume collection of poetry filling an entire wall. Many of these are chapbooks by local as well as nationally renowned women poets. The chapbook collection of over 400 has the droll name “Spineless Wonders.”

One of the founders of The Sitting Room, J.J. Wilson, is a Virginia Woolf scholar. Over the course of her research and teaching, she amassed an amazing collection of Woolf’s writing and critical works, and creative works and history of the Bloomsbury Group.

Our International Fiction collection provides excellent opportunities to experience how women writers view and experience their native countries. Historical and contemporary perspectives from a wide range of countries are represented. With over 600 volumes, and some hard to find translations, it is a great browsing collection, either in person or online through TinyCat.

What’s a particular challenge you experience as a small library?

The Sitting Room is located in a lovely home surrounded by redwood trees. We have a kitchen! And all are welcome to brew a cup of tea or join us for lunch. The domestic setting suits the collection and while visitors are at first a bit bemused to find us in a residential neighborhood, they quickly make themselves at home.

What is your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented/developed?

First of all, TinyCat is quite simply visually appealing. We love the parade of book jackets that adorn the simple search page, announcing recently cataloged items. The design draws people in: it is inviting, not intimidating.

Some items are on our implementation wish list:

• We would love to be able to curate the animated cover display on the home page.
• We don’t use the circulation module of TinyCat, but would love to generate some usage statistics.

Great suggestions. Customizing the cover display is on our list of requests, and you can add your own Google Analytics to your TinyCat via the custom JavaScript setting on your Content Settings page. Hope this helps!

Want to learn more about the Sitting Room? Follow them on Facebook, visit their website here, and check out their collection on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

TinyCat’s February Library of the Month, the Asia Art Archive in America (AAA-A), is doing great work supporting contemporary art from and of Asia.

AAA-A’s Manager and Program Coordinator Hilary Chassé discussed more with my questions this month:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

Asia Art Archive in America (AAA in A) is an independently established and operated nonprofit program space and reading room based in Brooklyn, NY and is the first overseas mini hub of Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong. AAA’s mission is to collect, preserve, and make information on contemporary art from and of Asia easily accessible in order to facilitate understanding, research and writing in the field. AAA in A strives to be proactive in instigating dialogue and critical thinking by both making our research collection more accessible to a U.S.-based audience and also through a series of regular educational programs. By doing so we hope to raise awareness of and support for the activities of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong.

Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community.

Besides making our reading room and digital archive collection available freely and open to the public five days a week, we also host a twice-monthly public program series, which includes artist talks, screenings, seminars, and workshops. So far in 2020 we’ve hosted a local artist book maker to lead a book-binding workshop, presented a performance-lecture by two Vietnamese-American artists on diaspora, refugees, and identity, and had one of our recent research grantees present her project examining the impact of photography and other images from the Cultural Revolution in China. Coming up, we’ll be hosting a Wikipedia edit-a-thon on women in art in Asia on International Women’s Day and will be hosting a zine-making workshop later this spring with the Australian zine publisher Red Pocket Press. We hope that by offering these programs we not only engage and educate our community in New York, but also help activate the materials in our collection and provide a platform for the artists, curators, and scholars whose work we admire and informs our own collection priorities.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

It’s very tough to choose but here are three books that I love and that I also think are a good illustration of the range of materials in our collection:

• The Speech Writer by Pakistani video artist Bani Abidi: This artist book was published by the Sri Lankan press Raking Leaves in 2012. It tells the story of a fictional “documentary” presented in the form of ten photo flip books, which are then neatly housed in order in a slipcase. I think this book used a very clever method of taking the artist’s usual medium of film and rendering it into book form, and the publisher behind Raking Leaves, Sharmini Pereira, is extremely thoughtful and meticulous in her designs and execution of the books she collaborates with artists on.
• South Vietnam: Land and People, Part I-III (pictured right): This 1967 book series, which features sketches and watercolors of everyday life and political propaganda scenes produced by North Vietnamese artists, is one of the oldest books in our collection. It came to us as part of a larger donation of rare catalogs and monographs from Vietnam in the mid-to late 20th century, donated by an American art historian and curator who spent many years in Southeast Asia. Socialist Realist Art was quite prominent in the last century in Asia, but has been consistently understudied and misunderstood in the West and we hope that by collecting materials such as these we can help spark more scholarly interest in the subject.
• The Way of Chopsticks III by Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen: This exhibition catalog is the culmination of three joint exhibitions by the Chinese performance and video artists (and married couple) Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen, who, although they have very distinguished independent careers, have collaborated frequently on works inspired by chopsticks, exploring the fact that two are required to function properly as symbols of their personal and professional relationship. The dual ring binders of the catalog, one devoted to Song Dong and the other to Yin Xiuzhen, allow the reader to simultaneously study the development of this theme in their work from 2001 to 2011. I love this catalog not only because these are two of my favorite artists, but also because it’s form so neatly mirrors it’s content, and shows that even if a book isn’t conceived as an “artist book”, it can still be experimental with the form to create a unique object.

Fascinating! I love the concept and execution of Dong’s and Xiuzhen’s art. I’ll have to check them out.

You mentioned the Socialist Realist Art movement not being properly understood in the West, with your hopes to shed further light on the subject. What’s a challenge you experience, particularly, as a small library?

Our reading room collection is not only small (containing around ~3,800 books, periodicals, and A/V materials) but we also have a fairly small space to house it in, so balancing growing our collection with the constraints of shelving/storing what we already have safely and accessibly is a constant challenge. In addition to responding to researcher’s needs in our decisions for what to accession, we do our best to be rigorous about only accepting donations that meet our specific subject criteria. It’s often hard to turn away some amazing material that we might personally find interesting and worthy of being preserved, but we have to be responsible and realistic about what we can handle. When we can’t accept a donation though we always do our best to use our network to find homes at other libraries/institutions so it still is made available to as wide a public as possible.

That’s a valuable service you provide. When using TinyCat to manage such a library, what’s your favorite thing about it? What’s something you’d love to see implemented?

We love the streamlined design and very user-friendly search function on TinyCat, it’s made sharing our catalog with our researchers much simpler and has also empowered them to search our collection on their own before they arrive in the reading room so they can request specific materials they’re interested and then get started with working right away! Making our materials as accessible as possible is one of our main priorities and TinyCat has helped us achieve that enormously since we adopted it a little over three years ago.

In terms of improvements, the actual platform itself is pretty perfect and isn’t lacking anything major that we’re looking for in terms of cataloging or searching functionality, so the only thing on our wishlist is if there would be a simple way of embedding the TinyCat catalog homepage, or at least the search function, directly into our website through a plug-in instead of only through iframe coding, which is a bit beyond our small team’s capacity at the moment.

We have a basic Search widget you can add to your website! Find the coding on our Help page here.

Want to learn more about the Asia Art Archive in America? Follow them on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, and YouTube), visit their website here, and check out their collection on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

For our readers in the Northern Hemisphere, it is deep winter right now. We’re excited to be bringing in a little bit of green for January’s Library of the Month! Congrats to the Glasgow Botanic Gardens Library.

Project Librarian Rob Westwood was kind enough to answer my questions:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

We’re a small library inside the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. We’re mainly a reference resource for those working directly with the Gardens, but we also serve botanical or horticultural students from Scottish Rural College and researchers from many different institutions. Those that have membership of the Friends of Glasgow Botanic Gardens also have access.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

We hope that the library serves well as a space for study and research, but we use it for interesting science and cultural events too. It’s used as the start- or end-point of Botanic Gardens health walking tours. For a couple of weeks in summer, we let the library to serve as a dressing room for the “Bard in the Botanics” (Shakespeare performance) team. We held an event at this year’s Doors Open festival too, so that the wider community could come and see the library. A lot of people are surprised that the library even exists! It is something of a curiosity.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

My personal fave is Treasures of the Deep, a Nineteenth Century collection of pressed seaweeds. When I first opened it, I thought it contained hand-painted plates but quickly realised they weren’t plates at all but beautiful, natural pressings. I also like John Curtis’ Farm Insects, which contains painted plates of minibeasts at various stages of the life cycle (including eggs!) to actual 1:1 scale. Some of them are as small as a poppy seed.

I have a fondness for certain books from 1950-1975, like Science Out of Doors, Pilbeam’s The First Fifty Haworthias, and Mushrooms, Moulds and Miracles; they’re not rare or particularly noteworthy but their design and language speak of a socially-minded post-War optimism that’s hard not to admire.

What’s a particular challenge you experience as a small library?

It’s a Collections Management challenge. Most all of our books are donated, often from the collections of retired academics and botanists, and we have limited space. It can be hard to say no when confronted with long-loved libraries of beautiful, often-unique books. We have to prioritise areas of knowledge that we know will be most useful to our users, or perhaps to fill an unusual gap.

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

I love that it’s so straightforward, out of the box, and yet doesn’t lack anything important from a user point-of-view. When you’re such a small library, the user experience is really all that matters. The original brief when the Gardens brought me in was to create an inventory so that the Curator and General Manager could see precisely what the library had; but I said “why not catalogue it?” and we ended up with a proper user-facing catalogue and a neat little homepage. We couldn’t have done that with a more complex (and expensive) catalogue system. TinyCat has really delivered.

Improvements? It would be nice to be able to select which books, collections, or tagged groups appear in the image scroller: at the moment we can select either ‘random items’ or ‘recent items,’ but it would be nice to showcase particular treasures or themes.

Heard! We’ve had a couple of requests for more customization to the animated cover display, and we’ll let you know if we change anything on that front.

Want to learn more about the Glasgow Botanic Gardens Library? Follow them on Twitter @GlasgowBotanic, and check out their collection on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

TinyCat’s November Library of the Month goes to the library at Temple Shir Tikvah, where the entire Library Committee was kind enough to answer my questions:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

We are the library for Temple Shir Tikvah, a Reform Jewish congregation in Winchester, MA. Our congregation consists of about 350 families and individual members, and we try to provide materials of interest to all of them. Our collection houses about 2500 books (plus a few DVDs and CDs), which range from storybooks for children to cookbooks, fiction, history, Torah study, “how-to,” spiritual journeys, poetry, and so on.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

Our temple building is quite small, so on Sundays, we hold education for adults and children in a nearby public school. Because we want people to be able to check out applicable books, we bring a portion of the library to the school we use on Sundays, for a monthly “bookmobile” (picture left). The third graders and their parents help pick out the books, which helps them know what’s in our collection. When they pick out the books, they also choose a book for us to read to the class that day.

We’ve also moved some of our books up to the sanctuary—books on poetry, mental health, and aging—so that people can easily find them when attending services.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

We have so much fun with our collection! Some of our most popular books are practical things, like tips for bar/bat mitzvahs, or Passover haggadahs. But we’ve also recently expanded our Young Adult/Teen collection with some really great reads (The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children).

We’ve started carrying some interesting graphic novels, as well (A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York, Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, The Property, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, The Arrival). And our women’s studies area has grown dramatically in the past few years (Sisters At Sinai: New Tales Of Biblical Women, Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story, The Women Who Danced by the Sea: Finding Ourselves in the Stories of our Biblical Foremothers, The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, After Abel and Other Stories).

What’s a particular challenge you experience as a small library?

We are a small library not just in collection size, but also in physical space. The room where we house our collection is quite small, so we have to be fairly ruthless in culling our collection. As hard as it is, we feel it’s important to do so, so that we can keep materials current. If people cannot wander in and see something of interest, either because the collection feels too dated or because the shelves are so packed that they can’t actually find things of interest, then we are not doing our job.

In addition, our library is used as a classroom at least once a week, and as a meeting room several times each week. When it is being used for these other purposes, people cannot come in and browse the collections. It’s hard to get people to see what we have (which is a good part of why we run the bookmobile).

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

The best thing about LibraryThing is being able to find other libraries with similar collections. Often, before we purchase books in a category, we’ll look around to see if those books are popular in other libraries like ours, so we have some assurance that they might be a good fit for our collection as well.

As far as TinyCat goes, before we had TinyCat, people signed out books on a sheet of paper — it was nearly impossible to keep track of what was in or out, plus we had no easy way to track which books were actually being used. TinyCat has totally solved this for us, and we love seeing community members, especially the children, be able to check out books on an iPad, without any help from grown-ups.

The biggest new TinyCat feature that would help us would be for our community members to be able to create their own accounts. It’s a barrier to usage that, unless we create an account for someone, they have no way to check out books (so we have to keep that sheet of paper around). A smaller feature that would help is if TinyCat returned to the home page after people check out a book, rather than remaining on the page containing the book just checked out.

Thanks for your feedback! We’ll be sure to announce if anything gets added for this in the future.

Want to learn more about the Library at Temple Shir Tikvah? You can explore their library on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

TinyCat’s Library of the Month for September, in honor of Back-to-School season, goes to a school library very close to LibraryThing’s Headquarters in Portland, Maine. Hailing a few minutes away from the town of Freeport, congrats to the Pine Tree Academy Library!

School Librarian Laura D. was kind enough to take my questions this month:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

We are the library of Pine Tree Academy, an Adventist school spanning pre-K to 12th grade. The library serves mostly the elementary wing. Our “raison d’être”, bottom line, is to give our students the love of reading—for life. It is perhaps a tall order, but one that is definitely worthwhile. How rewarding to witness young minds fall in love with a book, an author, a series or an entire branch of human knowledge! We are here to ignite their minds through the printed page, to counterbalance the pull of the electronic screen. Our school strongly values literacy and chose two years ago to transform the computer lab into the new library when it converted to laptops. Students are attracted to the new room, which they experience as an oasis in the busy school day. We also come alongside the teachers in complementing their curricula, providing books covering everything from friendship for kindergarteners to American national symbols.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

Right now we are conducting Orientation for K to 6th grade, which focuses on caring for and valuing the books. We teach the students that the books are theirs, and that borrowing them means sharing them with the whole community, which comes with responsibilities. We discuss rules for book care in detail with the help of the P.E.T. Patrol, which includes Officers Finnigan Magee and Tartar O’Sauce (pictured right).

Our next focus is to bring to our students a framework by which to understand the wealth and breadth of Creation, which they are discovering. Through the Dewey Decimal System, we can show them how human knowledge has been organized to be accessed. In this digital age, it is vital that the students understand what constitutes information, how it is used, and can be retrieved. Walking into the library to research a topic or find a book provides the missing link to the Google search box with its instant hits. In contrast to the virtual display, the children can experience directly the permanent information on the printed page.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

I am crazy about children’s picture books—unique stories with beautiful illustrations that ignite the imagination and make a new world come alive each time we open the book and read. I am also proud of our ever-growing Maine collection, which includes titles signed for the students by local authors and illustrators, as well as ancient and out-of-print stories, harkening back to a Maine of long ago.

Among our older collection, I discovered a little gem: The Family Nobody Wanted, by Helen Doss (pictured left), recounting the adventures of a “one family United Nations”, comprised of twelve children of mixed ethnic groups in the 1950’s, then considered un-adoptable. It was amazing how the Dosses’ love and care overcame the prejudices of the times.

What’s a particular challenge you experience as a small library?

With some 200 books added each year, we are running out of space! We also need more “people power” for circulation and shelving as the library is becoming a victim of its own success. Through TinyCat, patrons discover our lesser known titles, bringing more interest and more circulation, a good problem!

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

One favorite thing? No, there are many things to love about TinyCat:

• The clean design and simplicity of use.
• The ability to offer public access to a search platform and online catalog like the public library—we’ve joined the Big Leagues! Now we can provide our teachers and students with more book info than before—reviews, related titles, lists from awards, etc.
• It is wonderful to create links tailored to the interests of our patrons, ready to go right on the home page!
• Last but not least, I appreciate how Kristi and her colleagues are so responsive and willing to assist us with all our questions. Belonging to TinyCat makes us part of a special group of books lovers that spans the world, and though very diverse, all sharing this desire to enrich the lives of others and open new horizons to them, regardless of our size or resources.

Want to learn more about the Pine Tree Academy Library? You can explore their library on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

This month we highlight an interesting organization that studies “Human Learning Ecology”, and whose very interesting library helps support this research.

Laura Kennett, Volunteer Board Member of Human Venture Leadership, fielded my questions this month:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

We are facing enormous challenges from local to global: poverty, crime, fledgling businesses, inequalities, cultural clashes, illnesses and diseases, human rights abuses, resources depletion, population growth, climate change, and the list goes on. And now more than ever, we need to come together to learn from our historical and current patterns of human striving, failure, and achievement to develop the adaptive capacities to innovate, problem solve, and avoid progress traps. The Human Venture—and its resource library (pictured left)—works to fill this role.

The Human Venture is a community of caring volunteers and life-long learners, based primarily in the politically-charged energy hub of Canada (the province of Alberta), who create a mutual learning community. This community supports increasing numbers of resourceful, resilient, responsible, life-ranging human beings who look at the bigger story in which we are all embedded to think and care across economic, social, and political divides, from the local to the global scale. The Human Venture draws from the lifetime research of Ken Low, as well as the research of others across many fields of endeavor, to create a meta-framework to help see the patterns of human learning in all the noise. Ken Low calls this discipline: Human Learning Ecology, or in other words: Learning how humans learn (or sometimes, how humans fail to learn).

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

The Human Venture is made up of two parts: The Human Venture Institute, which focuses on research and development of resources in the field of Human Learning Ecology, and Human Venture Leadership, which is a charitable organization focused on delivering human venture learning programs. Members within each organization take the time to sense and interpret what is happening in the world, in a mutually supportive environment, and then assess their own capacity to respond appropriately to the situation before taking action. Much time is spent looking at current events and how the patterns of thought and action may be similar or dis-similar to historical events. (It’s the patterns that are observed across time and geographical distances that are important for informing wise action and that’s why the Human Venture Library contains such a wide and deep variety of non-fiction books.)

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

Some of the books in the Human Venture collection that I found to be most awakening are: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (pictured left), An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield, and Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris.

What’s a particular challenge you experience as a small library?

Categorizing! The purpose of categorizing is to help people navigate the immense information-scape contained in books. There are many conventional methods to categorizing books. However, life is complex and categorizing books in a coherent manner to help people methodically learn from life is a challenge that we’re still wrangling with. Also, it takes time to reflect an analog collection of several thousands of books that have been compiled over the past 50 years into a digital catalog.

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

The two things that are great about TinyCat are: 1. That it is so adaptable and we can categorize and re-categorize books as new connections are made between pods of books; and 2. That it has a simple widget that we can display on our website.

Something that would be helpful is if the tags that are applied to books by other users in other libraries could be shared across all libraries. It takes a lot of time to tag books, but the tags applied across library users of many libraries could create a wonderful, community-shared tag list.

Want to learn more about The Human Venture? Visit their website, follow them on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and be sure to explore their library on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Teaching children the value of diversity and social justice is so important, and our next Library of the Month helps to educate our youth with such values through their community library—the Children’s Diversity and Justice Library.

Co-founded with Catherine Farmer Loya, Miriam Davis was kind enough to field my questions about the library:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The Children’s Diversity and Justice Library is a free community library rooted in values of equity, justice and compassion that empowers young people to celebrate diversity and use their voices for social change. We provide books and programs featuring under-represented identities that demonstrate diverse individuals, including children, who raise up justice in our world.

This all volunteer run library hosted by the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee is organized around 12 diversity and justice elements: African American, Bodies and Abilities, Diversity, Gender, Families, Latinx, Justice, LGBTQ+, Cultures and Traditions, Refugees and Immigrants, Religion, and Women and Girls.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

We provide a constantly growing collection of nearly 1000 books (to date), all authored by people who identify as a member of one of the twelve diversity and justice communities (or topically related to these elements). We also host programming such as thematic story times and related service projects including a Native Voices story hour, Celebrating the Stories of Refugees and Immigrants, and the east Tennessee event for the Human Rights Campaign’s “I Am Jazz” National Community Book Event. We look forward to hosting a Not My Idea discussion with older elementary and middle school youth concerning white privilege and the challenges of living within systemic white supremacy.

In June, we took about a third of our library with us to Knoxville’s Children’s Festival of Reading where we set up an inviting shady space for community members to flop down with their favorite diversity and justice read or browse new ones. We were happy to see how well received and enjoyed the library was during the festival and how many new patron accounts were set up that day. At the festival, we also debuted our adult “Parenting and Educating for Social Justice and Diversity Awareness” collection. Through our social media presence and online catalog, we also provide information and resources for anyone interested in diversifying children’s literature choices and availability.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

We are particularly happy to offer books in our collection that are not easily available locally through our school or public libraries and bookstores, or that are hot off the presses and don’t have the wait lists that can develop at our local public libraries. For example, we have made a point to purchase all the Flamingo Rampant* collections (screenshot left) as well as many just published award winning titles as we can.

*Flamingo Rampant is a micropress that produces feminist, racially diverse, LGBTQ positive children’s books. Their stories and illustrations are wonderful and always reflect the true diversity of children’s lived experience within their pages. They have been well received by our audience and are among our most popular titles.

What’s a particular challenge you experience as a small library?

We are limited in that we are entirely volunteer run and donation dependent while committed to making sure our collection is available, usable, and free. We use LibraryThing and TinyCat to create a self-serve library through which people with library accounts can check out books themselves online. However, with no gate keeper or security system in the physical library, one of our biggest fears is that our books will simply walk off the shelves never to be returned. (So far, we have been lucky in that our users support our mission and understand our limitations. We have only lost a few books in the nine months we’ve been operating.)

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

TinyCat is what has allowed us to operate as well as we have with no staff because we have set it up so that patrons can request accounts electronically and check out books to themselves. The fact that it is a true OPAC also increases our reach greatly.

Given our circumstances, we’d love an automatic due date reminder system via email or text. Having an automatic feature would save us a lot of time and probably ensure more of our materials return on time.

I hear you—emailed, automatic checkout reminders and overdue notices is a common request from our libraries, and it’s something that we’re hoping to add sooner than later. We’ll be sure to announce if/when anything changes on that front, so stay tuned!

Want to learn more about The Children’s Diversity and Justice Library? Visit their website here, like them on Facebook here, and be sure to explore their library on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

We’re thrilled to feature The Harriet Hancock Center this month for Pride Month, an organization and lending library that is the only one of its kind in South Carolina.

HHC’s Operations Manager Matthew Butler fielded my questions this month:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The Harriet Hancock Center (pictured right) is South Carolina’s only LGBTQ+ Community Center. We’ve been in operation since 1994. Our mission is to be a safe and inclusive home that supports, educates, and empowers the LGBTQ community, our allies, and our neighbors of good will.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

We offer lots of monthly programming at our center aimed at all corners of our community—some of which we sponsor—and include:

• a community potluck every first Sunday
• a (sponsored) psychosocial supportive youth group the first and third Sundays (and which just had their fourth annual “Queer Prom”)
• a support group dedicated to the bisexual and non-monogendered attracted community, called Bi+Space, that meets the first and third Mondays
• a (sponsored) support group for folx in the trans community, Midlands Area Trangender Support, that meets the second through fourth Tuesday
• a new young adult group called Queer Collective, a social group, that meets the second Wednesday
• a group called GAYARP for our LGBTQ seniors (though they like to remind us that ALL ages are welcome) that meets the first Thursday, and
• a (sponsored) group for LGBTQ folx from the Latinx community, Del Ambiente, that meets the first Saturday of every month.

In addition to these regularly scheduled group meetings we’ve partnered with Palmetto AIDS Life Support Services to offer free STI/HIV testing on the last Saturday of the month, and we host various groups and fun nights of movies.

Beyond programming, we have our Resource Guide that is not exhaustive but certainly encompassing for the community in our area, with a soon-to-be computer lab. We also have our library, named in honor and memory of local activist Sam Nichols. We believe our lending library is one of the largest collection of queer books in the region, so we’re very proud!

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

Some favorite items in our collection include Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, Hiding My Candy: The Autobiography of the Grand Empress of Savannah by Lady Chablis, and Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio by Dr. Ed Madden (pictured left), just to name a few, but really we’re PROUD of them all.

What’s a particular challenge you experience as a small library?

A particular challenge we have as a small library in the age of the e-reader is reminding folks that: (A) we exist and (B) books are wonderful creatures, and an amazing way to experience a story.

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

We love the portal and rolling marquee of our collection for folx who want to search our collection before even stepping foot in our center. One of our challenges is reminding folx it’s time to return the book.

I hear you. Automatic checkout reminders and overdue notices are features high on our list of things to add! We’ll be sure to announce if/when anything changes here.

Want to learn more about The Harriet Hancock Center? Visit their website here, and be sure to explore their library on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

In honor of School Library Month we’re featuring the Asian American Studies Program (AASP) at Cornell University, who’ve been with TinyCat since the beginning!

Program Manager of AASP Alexis Boyce was kind enough to answer my questions this month:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

Established in 1989, the Asian American Studies Resource Center at Cornell University serves both the campus and the surrounding Ithaca community. Library materials and media pertaining to Asian America are available for study, research, and viewing. The AASP collection includes over 1200 books, journals, periodicals, and music; over 300 films; and, thanks to TinyCat, is searchable online.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

In addition to housing our online library catalogue, our website serves as a resource for students seeking internship and conference opportunities as well as those looking for courses or applying for a minor in Asian American Studies. Our study lounge is open five days a week and available for group study, organization meetings, film screenings, or just hanging out between classes, and many student groups and departments across campus use the space to advertise events, projects, and materials of interest.

The Resource Center is funded and managed by the Asian American Studies Program, which coordinates a wide range of programming throughout the year, but regularly hosts two weekly lunch series devoted to faculty, staff, and student presentations and discussions as well as a monthly Spam and Eggs Community Breakfast. All events are free and open to the public and take place in the Resource Center itself or across the hall in its conference room.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

The Resource Center employs a small group of student staff members, and each Monday, they choose a Book of the Week that reflects current events or what they are thinking about in general. The last selection was Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines by Warwick Anderson (image right). Students posted:

“Colonial Pathologies details how Colonial doctors and scientists ‘began to focus on microbial pathogens as threats to the health of white colonists, they came to view the Filipino people as a contaminated race, and they launched public health initiatives to reform Filipinos’ personal hygiene practices and social conduct.’ Anderson’s work explains how race and medicine converged to form imperial policies that have had long-lasting effects on Filipino health practices.”

I love these posts for a lot of reasons. They encourage our student staff and their peers to independently engage with the library outside of their required reading and perhaps consider ideas they might not have otherwise encountered. The students also have a lot of fun with the accompanying pictures, usually pulling volunteers from whoever happens to be in the Resource Center at the time and having them strike a dramatic pose with that week’s selection. Posts go up on Facebook and Instagram, and always draw a lot of love from current students as well as alumni and faculty.

What’s a particular challenge you experience as a small library?

Our budget for new materials is relatively small, and we are located in an out-of-the-way part of campus, so people sometimes have some trouble finding us. But they are always delighted when they do.

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

I really appreciate the service that TinyCat provides because it makes us more accessible for people. I’d like to be able to offer electronic versions of books as well in the future.

Want to learn more about the Cornell Asian American Studies Program? Follow them on Facebook and Instagram, visit their website here, and be sure to explore their library on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re proud to feature The Feminist Library on Wheels, our first (free) mobile lending library to join the feature! They’re doing a great service promoting marginalized voices throughout their local communities.

Co-founder and library volunteer Dawn Finley answered my questions this month:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The Feminist Library On Wheels is a free mobile lending library of donated feminist books, founded in July 2014. Our mission is to celebrate and promote feminist works, and move them among communities to center marginalized voices and experiences. F.L.O.W. joyfully empowers people to find tools for liberation, making feminism accessible to all. We try to make feminism, books, and human-powered transportation more available and visible; all three can be tools for self-determination, greater mobility, and welcoming community. Our main branch is located at the Women’s Center for Creative Work, a nonprofit focused on supporting feminist creative communities in Los Angeles.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

We reach a variety of audiences, all of whom have very different relationships to feminism, books, and mobility. A common query from people who approach us at events is something like, “I wish I knew more about feminism but I don’t know where to start.” We try to meet people where they are, and to make feminism less scary and intimidating.

Another question we’re often asked is whether we have men among our cardholders: we do, and we’re glad to offer a free and nonjudgmental resource to men who might not feel comfortable or confident seeking out feminist books elsewhere. We’re also able to provide materials that aren’t on the shelves at local public libraries, or are in such high demand at academic libraries that they become hard for students to find. Because we bring small pieces of the library to so many different settings, it’s interesting to both consider and watch how the books and their new readers connect with whatever is happening—the way someone attending an art opening discovers a collection of essays on an as-yet-unarticulated idea, or someone new to political activism comes to the Women’s March and walks away from our booth with an introduction to anarchism.

Now that we have more volunteers on duty for office hours, we’ve been able to more directly help people in the network of the Women’s Center for Creative Work, like when one of our volunteers provided unique and in-depth research advice for one of the artists-in-residence here. Each month the Women’s Center prints a bulletin and calendar, which includes both news and themed reading recommendations from F.L.O.W., connected to programming and events in our community.

That’s incredible! Speaking of recommendations, what are some of your favorite items in your collection?

We have a neat selection of items in our special collections, which includes signed copies of books authors have sent us or devoted readers have gifted, as well as several uncommonly available publications like the Woman’s Building’s Chrysalis magazine and Country Women (pictured right). We’re also lucky to have a substantial zine collection, donated by small organizations and individuals, which helps us support an expansive and generous take on the idea of authority in our collection. New visitors are often surprised and pleased to know we have a large section for young readers and teens too.

What’s a particular challenge you experience, as a small library?

Since our lending policy is intentionally very open and generous, there’s a decent percentage of the books we check out that are never going to find their way back to us (which is fine, we want the books to live long and full lives out in the world). Since we don’t have a lot of money in the bank, it’s hard to keep some of the titles we’d like to have as staples on our shelves to meet the demand we have for them from cardholders (things like bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, anything by Octavia Butler or Sandra Cisneros, and more). We often find ourselves just outside the qualifying criteria for grant funding, and we’re small enough that both writing and implementing large grants would be a major commitment of labor we can’t quite manage yet (not to mention our more ethical concerns about participating in the non-profit industrial complex).

It sounds like your library accomplishes quite a bit despite its challenges. As far as using TinyCat to help your library: what’s your favorite aspect? Anything you’d love to add?

I love it that TinyCat gives us the ability to have a “real” online catalog anyone can use to browse our collection using tools that don’t require a degree in library science to master. A lot of our volunteers are or have been librarians, or are currently in MLIS programs, but some of our volunteers don’t have any kind of professionalized training, and we like the idea of being able to readily share both the books themselves and the labor involved in running the library with people from many backgrounds, who have lots of different kinds of experience and expertise. I can’t leave out my second favorite thing: the amazingly efficient and cheerful help from staff!

I’d love it if we could search and manipulate our circulation data a little more easily (to generate a list of most-checked-out books to update our donation wishlist, for example). Since we’re mobile, a TinyCat app would also be amazing!

I hear you! Although we don’t have mobile scanning capabilities at this time, TinyCat is mobile-friendly (you’ll just need to keep a bookmark for your TinyCat in your browser, most likely). As far as circulation reports and statistics are concerned, those are high on our list of features we hope to add in the near future—we’ll be sure to let you know if/when anything changes on that front.

Want to learn more about the Feminist Library on Wheels? Follow them on Facebook and Instagram, visit their website here or on Squarespace, check out their Patreon page, and be sure to explore their library on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

This month we feature The Global Literature in Libraries Initiative, an organization doing great work to promote diversity in reading worldwide.

Director Rachel Reynolds was kind enough to field my questions this month:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The Global Literature in Libraries Initiative strives to raise the visibility of world literature for adults and children at the local, national and international levels. We do so by facilitating close and direct collaboration between translators, librarians, publishers, editors, and educators, because we believe that these groups in collaboration are uniquely positioned to help libraries provide support and events to engage readers of all ages in a library framework that explores and celebrates literature from around the world.

Some of our various goals and projects include:

• book lists and guides tied to major translation awards and library themes
• programming ideas for various library user groups: children, teens, college students, adults, English Language Learners, etc.
• ALA conference involvement: workshops and sessions, networking through various ALA units and offices to explore the best ways to provide information and services to librarians
• publisher and journal lists organized by vendors/distributors to help librarians more easily acquire books in translation
• advocacy on behalf of small publishers to increase their visibility on the review platforms that librarians commonly use for their acquisitions decisions
• general education efforts to help librarians understand more thoroughly the value of translated literature and of contemporary foreign-language literature
• pan-publisher catalogs crafted specifically for librarian users, as a form of “one-stop” shopping to learn about new works coming out in translation
• exploration of ways in which non-US publishers of English translations and non-US, non-English-language publishers can more easily promote their works among libraries.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

We provide support to librarians of all kinds seeking to fully diversify and globalize their collections and programs. This support is provided through our blog, social media platforms, the GLLI Translated YA Book Prize, and our booth at ALA’s annual conference. Translations compose a minuscule part of the Anglophone publishing market, and often these works are challenged in terms of visibility in the review and marketing platforms. We want to try to make it easier for librarians to find the international works that will create interest and empathy in their communities.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

Although we don’t have a physical collection, we are especially proud of our YA prize, which is unique in the awards world. We are also building up our reference catalog here on TinyCat (image left), and we see great potential in this tool, which will help us connect librarians more effectively with the books most relevant to their diverse user groups.

What’s a particular challenge you experience, as a small library?

Our greatest challenge is building visibility for our organization in the US publishing and library frameworks.

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

We love the ease with which we can build and tag titles out of the Amazon database, which includes English translations from literally around the world. There aren’t any particular improvements we can think of at this time.

Want to learn more about The Global Literature in Libraries Initiative? Follow them on Facebook and Twitter, visit their website at glli-us.org, or check them out on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

The Pecorella Library of the Center for Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies (CAMNES) has been a personal favorite of mine for some time now, and I’m very pleased to feature them as TinyCat’s January Library of the Month.

Co-Director Dr. Guido Guarducci of CAMNES fielded my questions for the library:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The ‘Pecorella Library’ is part of CAMNES, the Center for Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies. We are a study and research center based in Florence (Italy), which coordinates academic programs related to ancient studies as well as international archaeological excavation projects. The main corpus of the library is based on the private collection of Paolo Emilio Pecorella, an Italian archaeologist of the Near East and professor at the University of Florence who unfortunately died in 2005 at the archaeological site of Tell Barri, Syria. Our library is mainly focused on the history, philology and archaeology of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures and is open to the public.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

We offer research and bibliographical support to the Italian and international students who need further insight on archaeological publications, while scholars from Italian research institutions are also fond of our small library due to the presence of recent and rare publications in the field.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

We are particularly proud of very old publications of the past century, for example preliminary and final excavation reports and a good section on cylinder seals, which professor Pecorella collected in his home library and that now are available to all. Last but not least, we are also very proud of our own series SANEM (Studies on the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean, pictured left) that was recently established—you can find them at camnes.org/publications.

What’s a particular challenge you experience, as a small library?

Due to the small dimensions of the library, we are lacking professional personnel, which is certainly a difficult aspect to handle but at the same time rewarding. It is also difficult to communicate to the rest of the world of our existence since we are located within a building and not directly accessible from a street. Fortunately, scholars and students know about us but we would also like the broad public to interact with us due to our ‘public archaeology’ philosophy.

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

We love it! It is a very flexible and slick interface that gives you high quality service just as a large library with a dedicated OPAC. The possibility to customize certain parts is top notch! Plus the annual fee is very reasonable, especially for our status.

Want to learn more about The Pecorella Library? Check them out on TinyCat and at camnes.org.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

The Brain Charity Library has been with TinyCat for nearly two years now, and we’re thrilled to feature them as TinyCat’s December Library of the Month. Gerard Collis, Information Officer and one of two part-time librarians at The Brain Charity, was able to field my questions this month:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The Brain Charity offers emotional support, practical help and social activities to anyone with a neurological condition and to their family, friends, and carers. There are hundreds of different neurological conditions, including stroke, brain injury, dementia, brain haemorrhage, and many rarer conditions. We have information on more than a hundred different conditions here in the library. We also have a wide range of more general information and guidance on living with a disability or long-term health condition.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

Our library and information service is the hub of our centre in Liverpool (pictured left), and the first port of call for newly-diagnosed people seeking help and support. We are a national service, and we support people from all over the UK.

The library showcases the range of support and information available to people with a neurological condition. And TinyCat helps us to showcase what we have in the library. We have many books that are difficult to find in other public libraries. We also have a large number of leaflets, booklets and other materials produced by other organisations and other charities.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

I really like all the information that we have here which helps children to understand what is happening to them or to their parents. For example, the book My Dad Has Epilepsy (pictured right) is written specially for children aged six to thirteen years old.

What’s a particular challenge you experience, as a small library?

We have a very small staff and rely on our great volunteers to catalogue for us. We have a lot of unique items and ‘grey literature’ which need cataloguing by hand.

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

TinyCat always looks bright and friendly, and it’s very easy to use, both for clients and for staff. And you’re always quick to help out if we have any questions or problems—which doesn’t happen very often!

Perhaps the only thing to improve TinyCat, for us, would be some stats to see how people have found our TinyCat page, and what they are searching for in the catalogue there.

Great feedback. You could try adding Google Analytics to your TinyCat, as a start—just paste your GA code into your Custom Javascript field on TinyCat’s Content Settings!

Want to learn more about The Brain Charity? Follow them on Facebook or Twitter, visit their website here, or check out their library on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

To read more about TinyCat’s Library of the Month feature, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, we couldn’t help but feature one of the most appetizing libraries we know of. We’re thrilled to feature America’s Test Kitchen Library as TinyCat’s Library of the Month! Library Intern Kelly Potter was kind enough to take my interview questions this month:

First, what is your library, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

We’re a rapidly expanding independent media company that has earned the respect of the publishing industry, the culinary world, and most importantly, millions of home cooks (just ask the best cooks you know).

We are passionate about cooking—discovering why recipes work and why they don’t—and sharing what we learn to help everyone cook with confidence. We test cookware and supermarket ingredients to find the best quality products for home cooks. We don’t accept advertising.

Tell us some interesting ways you support your community.

Research development starts at the library. I help our test cooks and interns research recipes and culinary history. I have multiple projects occurring simultaneously. We have two magazines, Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country as well as recipe development for the books. It is satisfactory to see how the recipes come out. Some recipes take a few short months to develop, while others have taken years.

That’s impressive! With R&D starting at the library, what are some of your favorite items in your collection?

We have every book published by America’s Test Kitchen. It is interesting to look at the collection to see how the company has transformed and evolved. Cook’s Illustrated celebrated their 25th Anniversary this year and for the first time started publishing the magazine in full color. We also have Good Housekeeping magazines from the 1940’s and those are very cool to look at.

What’s a particular challenge you experience, as a small library?

I am a graduate student at Simmons University and there have been other interns who maintained and cataloged our collection before me. I have been looking through the collection deleting multiple records of the same item, which has been easy to do with LibraryThing.

What’s your favorite thing about TinyCat? Anything you’d love to add?

TinyCat is easy to use. I have test cooks who can come into the library when I am not there and be able to locate the books they need. As a student and intern, I am still learning all the different facets and capabilities of TinyCat.

Want to learn more about America’s Test Kitchen? Visit their website here, or check out their library on TinyCat.

To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Calling all TinyCat libraries: become TinyCat’s next Library of the Month—just send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.