'CATALOGING FEVER' STRIKES STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS

Lindsay Hills '04

Books donated by generations of students to several cultural organizations on campus are becoming available to broader audiences, thanks to student leaders who have undertaken cataloging projects with the help of librarians. Nia Turner '05 of Sisterhood and Lindsay Hills '04, on behalf of the Rainbow Alliance, initiated the projects within a couple of weeks of each other, says Associate Chief Information Officer Florence Goff of Canaday Library. Significant portions of the Black Cultural Center Library and the Rainbow Alliance and Women's Center collections are already listed in Tripod, the Bryn Mawr-Haverford-Swarthmore online library catalog, and student catalogers are working hard to enter the remaining titles in the database by the end of the year.

Nia Turner '05

Goff says that students have asked her about cataloging projects several times over the years, but this is the first time such a project has been launched successfully. "These two projects made it off the ground because the student leaders who presented them were passionately committed to the project and thinking about long-term issues," she says. "They had concrete ideas about what they wanted from the projects and good questions about the life of the projects."

"This is my way of thinking beyond my time here," says Turner. "The alumnae who left us these books left us a legacy. I see this project as building on that." Turner says the library is important in the history of the Black Cultural Center: "Part of the reason Sisterhood asked the College for Perry House was that it had a space for the library." She first approached Goff about a year and a half ago, "and I just kept coming back," she says.

Hills says she has been thinking about ways to share the Rainbow Alliance/Women's Center collection since her sophomore year. "I was taking a lot of feminist and gender studies courses," she says, "and I kept checking the same books out of the library. But I also had access to the RA/WC collection, and I realized what an incredibly important resource it was. Cataloging it was important so that we could share it, and also to guide further purchases — it's hard to know what to buy if you don't know what you've got."

To set the projects in motion, Goff introduced the students to Information Acquisition and Delivery Coordinator Berry Chamness and Curriculum and Research Support Coordinator Mark Colvson. "We talked with them about what they wanted their libraries to do for the community and what they needed to do to make it happen," Chamness says. "Both expressed an interest in making the libraries available and searchable through Tripod. But they wanted slightly different things."

"Before Information Services became involved, we wanted to make sure this would be the students' project, rather than the library's project," Goff says. Once we got a commitment from the students, we provided a little seed money to kickstart the process. We funded a certain number of student-worker hours for each organization, with the understanding that they would find additional funding if the cataloging couldn't be finished in one semester."

Cataloger Kim DiGiovanni trained the students who would catalog the books. Hills started work on the RA/WC collection in June, as one of several summer jobs. By the end of the summer, she had cataloged 800 volumes and has since cataloged about 70 more. She estimates that 200 books in the collection remain to be done. She plans to create a collection-management guide for future students.

Turner turned the cataloging over to Alnisa Bell '06 and Phoebe Arde-Acquah '07, younger students who will, she hopes, keep the project alive after she graduates. "The Black Cultural Center Library is shared by Sisterhood, the African-American students' organization, and BACaSO, the group for African and Caribbean students," Turner explains, so she asked one representative of each organization to participate. Bell, representing Sisterhood, and Arde-Acquah, of BACaSO, began cataloging in the fall and have finished about 400 of some 1,200 books, Turner estimates.

The books must be taken from their homes in Perry House and Erdman to Canaday Library to be cataloged, so Hills and Turner can both be seen negotiating campus paths with book-laden hand trucks on occasion. "I get my workout," says Turner.

"BCC books can actually be checked out through Tripod," Turner says. "When someone requests a book, the circulation desk sends me an e-mail and I take the book to Canaday," she says. She hopes to find funding for student workers to keep public library hours in Perry House, she says.

Books in the Rainbow Alliance/Women's Center collection are searchable in Tripod, but users must go to Rainbow Alliance for access to the books themselves. "A lot of these books deal with sensitive issues, and we are concerned about readers' privacy," Hills explains, "especially since the Patriot Act gives the government access to library records."

The students say they've learned a lot through the projects. "Florence gave me a lot of good advice about how to build a collection and what's involved in making books available to the public," says Turner. Says Hills: "It was a really neat experience. I'd never really thought before about how books are cataloged and who does it. Afterward, I thought about going into library science."

Both student libraries are accepting donations of books and funds. For more information about the Black Cultural Center library, contact Turner; for information about the Rainbow Alliance/Women's Center library, contact Hills.

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