Do you dream of having a church library? So did some people at my church, and today we have one! We’ve been loaning out books since 2022. This morning was my turn to be the “library lady”. Perhaps you will be inspired to start a library of your own.
Oasis Mennonite Fellowship in New Holland, PA, formed in 2015 and moved to our current location in 2020. The building we now occupy was once a sewing factory. During World War II, workers sewed parachutes for the war effort. When we sit in church, we can see outlines of the factory windows—now bricked in, but once large enough to let in plenty of light for seamstresses toiling over their machines.
Many of the congregants love reading. Dawn, a mom of four, was the one who really got the ball rolling. “We have bored children after church,” was one of her reasons. In late 2021, Dawn, Kaitlyn (a schoolteacher), and I formed a committee to get a library started. Pretty soon we were joined by Marty, a grandmother with a lot of teaching experience.
To build the collection, Dawn suggested we all write a list of our top must-haves for a church library, with a special focus on children’s books. She waited for sales and ordered books online. We all hit thrift stores and book sales.
One of the other women at church, Phoebe, offered us books from her late mother’s home, which the family was cleaning for sale. Her mother had been a big reader, and it was a nice way to give some of the books a second home.
The question of what is and is not appropriate for a church library isn’t something we have ironclad rules about, but we do want a library where our church families feel comfortable with the books, especially in the children’s section. One thing we don’t do is put white-out over words— it just draws attention to those words. If a book has inappropriate content, we don’t put it in the library.
For a library management system, we use Tiny Cat, which is designed for small libraries (less than 20,000 books) and has all the basic features for a good price. If you’re looking for a library software and like me, aren’t a programmer, I recommend Tiny Cat. (If you are a programmer, or have the means to hire one, I recommend open source Koha software, but that’s another library story.)
The only serious drawback to Tiny Cat is that printing the book labels is a pain, but I cobbled together a method that works for us. So while many church librarians have to handwrite their records, we check the books in and out with a barcode scanner.
We arrange our fiction books by authors’ last names, and the nonfiction by subject matter, using the Dewey Decimal system, which is commonly used in public libraries. If you’ve ever wondered why career librarians need master’s degrees, start digging into subjects like classification and MARC records. Librarians do more than shushing noisy patrons and collecting fines.
To keep the books in good condition, we cover the paperbacks with contact paper. To keep them from getting lost, we stamp our library’s name and address inside the book.
One of the men from church built shelves in one of the Sunday School rooms and we came up with a monthly schedule. The library is usually open right after services for about fifteen or thirty minutes, depending on how long people keep coming. Books are checked out for two weeks at a time, although we don’t charge fines. Kaitlyn did send out a bunch of emails one time reminding patrons about overdue books. The following Sunday, the return basket was crammed full. If someone loses a book, or a child destroys one, the patron usually replaces it.
“Are you one of the library ladies?” Noelle asked me this morning. She and many of the other children were hanging out in the library, some reading to books to themselves or other children.
Yes, I’m a library lady. Perhaps you could be one, too!
To see our online catalog, you can visit Oasis Mennonite Fellowship Library here. Or you can always come visit!
I am starting up a church library. I was planning on using TinyCat. You said printing the labels was difficult but you had a method. Could you share your method and the supplies needed?
Hi Karen,
Not knowing your library’s specific needs, such as what you want on your labels, I can’t give step-by-step instructions. But I’ll try to give you an overview. You will know need to know spreadsheet basics like working with formulas.
1. Export the books you want to print labels for from https://www.librarything.com/export.php . If you have Excel, select the “Excel” option otherwise use “Tab-Delimited Text”. I use “Books Entered Since” filter to find only the recent ones. The first time, you’ll probably want to export them all.
2. Open the spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets. I use Google Sheets because it’s free.
3. Delete the columns you don’t need and modify the columns you need. This is where the formulas come in. For example, I want the author’s last name on the spine labels, but not the whole name because it won’t fit. So I use the formula =LEFT(C2, 6) to only print the first six letters.
4. HARDEST PART: if you want every book to be scannable (and it will be a big timesaver when you are checking books in and out) you will need either a barcode or a QR code based on the Book ID number. (Could you use the barcode already on the book? Yes, except you run into problems if the book doesn’t have a barcode or if you have two copies of the same book). I wanted to use a barcode label, but I simply couldn’t figure out how to convert a whole column of different numbers into barcodes, but I did find a free way create QR codes.
Use this formula (A2 being the first cell of your column of Book ID numbers):
=”https://image-charts.com/chart?chs=150×150&cht=qr&choe=UTF-8&chl=”&A2
Use this for the column heading: < img|75x75> Photo
75×75 is the size, you can change that (remove the spaces, I added them so my website displays them properly.)
5. Print the labels. You may need to use an add-on, I use Avery Label Merge, which costs $39.99 per year and is worth every penny. Select the label size that matches the label you have. I use Avery 22805 square labels for both the spine and the QR code labels, using the same size for both is much easier.
The QR codes will be stubborn, sometimes it takes me a couple of tries to pull them in. Check the PDFs before you hit print.
6. After putting the labels on the books, put clear tape over the labels. They aren’t very durable without tape.
Supplies needed: (besides computer) regular desktop printer, Avery labels, barcode scanner, tape. We also use a stamp to put our church’s name inside every book.
Since the Avery labels I use come in sheets of 24, I like to print books in increments of 24 to avoid wasted labels.
Creating the labels this way is cumbersome and it’ll probably take you a few hours to figure out it the first time but the good news that you can put huge batches through quickly. It takes about as much work to create labels for hundreds of books as it does for printing 5 labels.
Blessing on your church library, Karen!