As I retired, I became the librarian of our church. It sort of happened by default. I worked as Interim Minister of Faith Formation for two years at the end of my career. the position involved some general oversight of the church library. As the end of the interim approached the former church librarian died suddenly. When it occurred the library was in the process of transition to a digital catalogue and completing a new system of organization. One of the mistakes we made in setting up the system is that we started cataloguing books as an experiment, with limited access to the software and management of the website. We focused on getting books catalogued and not on overall management. So when the librarian died, I was the only one left who had the passwords and knowledge of the system. Although that issue has now been resolved, the easiest way to make the transition was for me to step in as church librarian.

I have enjoyed serving in this capacity and continue to do so. Although I have no formal training as a librarian, our son is a community librarian. He earned his Master of Library Science degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and served as a medical librarian and director of information services for a large hospital corporation before becoming a community librarian. He has coached me and continues to be a valued consultant as I seek to manage the small church library.

Libraries are often misunderstood by many people and church libraries often suffer from a lack of clarity about their mission and purpose. As a church librarian, I have encountered that lack of clarity multiple times. People think of the library as a room full of books and often believe that the library can be improved by having more books. When I became church librarian there were boxes and boxes of uncatalogued books. Many of them did not belong to the categories of the church collection. For example, our church library does not have a fiction section. But a lot of fiction books are donated to the church library. I soon discovered that for some of the members of the church, the church library was a place to get rid of books when they were downsizing or moving. In October we went on an eight-day trip and when we returned there were two additional boxes of books that had been left in the library.

Having boxes of books in addition to the shelves seems to attract more boxes of books, so with the advice and consent of the church’s Faith Formation Committee, I have sorted the books and set up a give away table in the church fellowship hall. There are no more boxes of unsorted books in the church library. Some of the donated books have been catalogued and shelved. In order to do that, other books that previously were a part of the collection needed to become part of the giveaway. The process of giving away books has its formal start today and we have two weeks to see how many books can find new homes before the remainder of the excess books are donated to various places that can accept them.

I have learned from our son that circulating libraries are constantly in the process of disposing of books. At his library, roughly 10% of the total collection is replaced with new volumes every year. If the library does not continue to dispose of books that do not circulate it would soon become overrun with books that no one would read. The bigger the library, the more books need to move on to other homes. It is a constant process of acquisition and disposal.

Many people, however, do not understand this process. They see a library as a static collection. This is particularly true of church libraries. Having been through our church library, I know that there are no rare or collectable books in the collection. There are a few very old books, primarily old Bibles, but no volume in the collection is irreplaceable. What we had and continue to have are books that are dated and that no one has checked out of the library for a long time - perhaps they have never circulated since coming to the church library.

My vision is that the church collection might become a service to its members. That means that the books are in circulation. The church library currently has space for roughly 1,500 books. My goal is to grow the collection to about 2,000 volumes, with 500 volumes in circulation at any given time. That will take time as we need to both grow the collection and expand circulation at the same time. Promoting use of the library is probably more important than expanding the collection at present. We need to be very careful and strategic in our acquisitions so that we gain books that people want to take home and read.

Now that we have gotten through the backlog of donated books, the job of shelving and organizing books is not particularly large. If we averaged half of the collection being checked out once each year, shelving returned books would take less than a half hour a week. Going forward, I will continue to focus on identifying books that do not circulate and finding new homes for them, while paying attention to what does circulate and slowly growing our collection in response to the interests of the congregation. Right now our most circulated books are about grief, death, and loss. Also popular are books about justice. Books on those topics currently are less than a quarter of our collection.

In the meantime devotional books and books about spirituality continue to arrive by donations. Those books often simply occupy shelf space and do not circulate. It appears that members tend to purchase those types of books and use the library as a way to dispose of the ones they no longer want to own. They rarely turn to the library as a source of devotional reading.

I’m aware that I am aging and that my term as church librarian will be brief. Others will take over in the future. They will have different visions and different goals. The role of the library will shift. For this brief time, however, I am trying to be a wise steward of the church’s resources and grow the library’s role of serving our community.