Congregational Library visit
Claudette Newhall, a friend of mine who works at the Congregational Library in downtown Boston gave me a tour of her library on Friday. The library houses a large collection of religious materials (not all on congregationalism), as well as the home libraries of many ministers who donated them upon retirement. The library is free and open to the public, although if you’re looking to do some deep research involving manuscripts, it’s best to make an appointment.
The majority of the collection, save for the reference materials and periodicals in the main reading room (there’s a picture on the home page of their site), is closed stacks. A portion of their collection does circulate, and can be checked out in person or borrowed by mail.
I was lucky enough to get an in-depth tour of the stacks and the climate-controlled archive room. In the stacks, I saw everything from abolitionist pamphlets in acid-free boxes to collections of hymnals and sermons, church pamplets and programs, ship manifests, a whole series of Boston Almanacs, Sunday school curriculum stuff, and different vital records that would be useful for genealogical research. The archives were filled with leather-bound Bibles and other books (most of which were ginormous in size and very, *very* old), as well as papers and photos. It really is a very interesting collection.
Just as interesting is the cataloging system. The classification and numbering system, which starts and one and goes to twenty thirty, was devised by one of the librarians a while back, but never documented, and somewhat loosely followed in the past. This means that browsing the stacks, as an example, you may not find all of the collection’s church minutes in one place, because some of them will be in another area, maybe near that church’s other records. It makes for interesting pick list pulls. Also, the card catalog contains some less-than-complete records, so several boxes filled with pamphlets in the stacks may be each be noted as “pamphlets on slavery” in the catalog, and nothing more, making it necessary to look through each box to see if anything is useful.
This will make their upcoming digitization project quite interesting. The plan is to keep the current classification scheme, but to add subject headings to make the items a bit easier to find via search in the catalog (which will perhaps help discern how the current classification system works). Section by section, items will be added to the catalog. Eventually, the catalog will be linked to from their web site.
Many thanks to Claudette for showing me around!
Tags: librarianship
