In September 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement spread to
my small city. For 3 months, dozens of protestors camped out in a downtown
park. At the camp, they discussed social issues and held open meetings to come
up with solutions. Five people met at this camp and decided to keep the
movement going by opening up a community space and café. Their mission is to
provide local, sustainably sourced food and beverage in an open, safe space for
the city’s progressive community; a place to gather and continue the work of
social justice, community-building and service to each other and the planet.
Inside the space is a collection of progressive and
radical literature. In the beginning, this collection was unorganized. As a
frequent customer, I had developed a rapport with the worker-owners. I
mentioned that I was a Library Science student, and interested in organizing
their collection. They gave me full reign, and now I am their Library
Coordinator.
This position has proved to be
challenging. While I have worked in a library before, I have never had the
experience of establishing one from scratch. My library science education has provided me
with a foundation of knowledge to work with. First, we established a collection
development policy. Because the library accepts donations, we often receive many
books that do not fit the space’s mission. This policy establishes what types
of books we will and will not accept. (Books that do not fit in with the
mission are always donated to another non-profit organization.) From there, we
decided which categories of books we wanted to feature. Some of these
categories include: Social Action, Gender Studies, Environmentalism, and
Food Politics.
Once we set up physical space and shelved them by topic, the
next step was to create an online catalog. Without any funds for the library, I
needed to come up with a free or low cost solution. I found this solution in
the website, LibraryThing (
www.librarything.com).
This free online tool allows you to easily create an online catalog of your
own. In addition to fields for ISBN, book title, and author, users can enter in
their own tags to describe their collections. We used tags to label each book
by what category it was shelved under.
Our circulation policy is an honor system. We keep a sign
out book for patrons to write their name, what books they are checking out,
that day’s date, and their phone number or email. We ask that the books be
returned within a month’s time. So far this policy has been respected by our
community. While the honor system has worked for us, other small libraries
might need to come up with a different circulation policy that better accommodates
their needs.
For more information about setting up a small special
library, please check out these links:
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How to Organize a Home Library (video) – Howcast
