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

January’s TinyCat Library of the Month goes to the Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) Digital Library Archive! Technical Librarian Shannon O’Grady from Sandia National Laboratories was kind enough to field my questions this month:

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

The Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) Digital Library Archive is a technical reference database of historical CSP documents accessible to domestic and global partners with the purpose of promoting collaboration and information sharing.

It is the only public collection in the world that chronicles the history and growth of the CSP industry through recently digitized documents, beginning with its inception at Sandia National Laboratories in the 1970’s. Until recently, this history was inaccessible to global collaborators. Hardcopy documents were difficult to share and no central repository existed to catalogue and access digital copies. Since the documents had no way to be discovered, knowledge of their existence and substance was limited to those who were aware of these collections, minimizing the opportunity for external collaborators to benefit from their technical contents. Consequently, researchers stood to inadvertently replicate studies instead of building on them.

The Archive contains:

• coverage of research topics such as CSP technologies
• modeling of CSP Plant
• CSP engineered products
• heliostat designs
• heliostat operational systems, and much more.

Tell us some interesting things about how your library supports the community.

Our Library supports anyone around the world interested in solar research. Sandia solar researchers and librarians have spent the past few years collecting, digitizing and cataloging a host of reports, memos, blueprints, photos and more on concentrating solar power, a kind of renewable energy produced by using large mirrors to reflect and concentrate sunlight onto a receiver on a tower to generate electricity. These historical research documents are now in a publicly accessible digital archive for other concentrating solar power researchers, historians, corporations and average citizens to view.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

There are so many unique reports in the catalog, it would be hard to pick one! We recently received this feedback from a user,

“When searching for ‘sunshape’ I actually found a document that is older than myself and acknowledges someone who worked in my office for decades. Time seems to go in cycles!”

It’s very satisfying to provide information that previously was not discoverable!

What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?

The challenge for our library is the process of adding to the archive. We continue to accumulate paper copies of reports, provide all with metadata and an abstract in MARC format, and then digitize.  It’s a time consuming process but well worth it.

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

Our favorite things are the easy-to-use interface and the flexibility of modifying it. We have made several updates to the Home page and have revised the record detailed view to best display report metadata. 

What we’d really love to see implemented is more of a LibraryThing upgrade but has an aspect of TinyCat: it would be really great if there was a way to update information in the originally loaded MARC record that displays as MARC view in TinyCat.

Great feedback, thanks! We’ll take that into consideration.

Want to learn more about the CSP Digital Library Archive? Explore their TinyCat collection here.

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

Want to be considered for TinyCat’s Library of the Month? Send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.