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Cataloging Myriad Materials and Myriad Languages in the Marian Library

By Henry Handley and Joan Milligan

Since its beginning in 1943, the Marian Library has collected materials from all over the world, in dozens of different languages. According to early issues of the Marian Library Newsletter and a history of the Marian Library by Brother Stanley G. Mathews, S.M., a librarian in the early years of the Marian Library, the first library volunteers reached out to communities in the United States and other parts of the world to share the Booklist of the Marian Library, an initial list of 2,607 Marian titles and the progenitor of today’s catalog and the more than 112,000 volumes in the Marian Library today. At one early point, “branch directors” in communities around the world — including Lima, Peru and Ixopo, South Africa — also used the Booklist to inform their own library collection development and to report back on additional Marian books. Since then, the international perspective on Mary that has shaped the Marian Library and International Marian Research Institute has been a strong influence on collection development. 

In April 2019, staff from the Marian Library met with staff from the University Libraries’ information acquisition and organization (IAO) department to discuss the possibility of outsourcing the work of creating and revising records for some of the Marian Library’s materials in non-Roman scripts. Brother Andrew Kosmowski, S.M., a librarian at the Marian Library at the time, had already taken the initiative to search for items in the global library cooperative OCLC, identify languages and establish what could be cataloged from existing records. Together with Joan Milligan, Special Collections Cataloger, they whittled away at uncataloged materials until it became apparent that outsourcing some languages was necessary. When Brother Andrew became a librarian at the North American Center for Marianist Studies, I joined the Marian Library in July 2019, I started assisting Joan with the project. 

HH: You catalog the vast majority of books and periodicals in the Marian Library’s collection of published materials written in different languages. What are some of the languages you enjoy working with? What languages do Libraries faculty and staff already know?

JM: Currently the Marian Library has resources in approximately 150 languages. About a third of the library’s collection is in English, and luckily, the majority of new acquisitions are in English and other languages I can manage, such as French, Spanish, Italian and German. Every now and then, I reach out to library staff and students for help. My most recent survey showed we have an astonishing wealth of language ability right here in the building, with people who can read Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Czech, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hebrew, Korean, Latin, Marathi, Norwegian, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Telugu and Ukranian.

HH: How many books are in this project? What are some of the languages that are newly represented?

JM: Approximately 250 books in 21 languages. The majority of these are in Polish. New languages being added to the collection are Bengali, Hmong, Inuktitut, Kikuyu, Luganda, Malayalam, Niger-Kordofanian, Sinhalese, Thai and Visayan languages. We are adding to the books we already have in Hindi, Maltese, Swahili, Vietnamese and many others. Mind you, there are not a lot of these, and it is great to have their representation in the collection increase.

HH: Where did these books come from? 

JM: I believe many of them are gifts. Vowed religious, IMRI students and missionaries who travel the world bring these back to us. Some are from library collections we have absorbed, both institutional and private. The Marian Library also makes special purchases when available. Last spring, we added a 19th-century grammar book in Yakama, a native language from the Pacific Northwest, written by a priest. 

HH: Who is doing the cataloging? How did you find them?

JM: Two library service companies with national reputations won the bids for the more unusual languages. The Polish, Czech and  Slovak titles went to a woman I met a couple of summers ago in a cataloging class at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia. Ohio State librarians cataloged some Arabic, Greek, Chinese and Korean materials for us. In addition, Richard Lenar, an IMRI student, created a detailed spreadsheet of information for more than 50 Ukrainian books and pamphlets. With some help from our IT staff, I will be able to turn his spreadsheet into bibliographic records. 

HH: What are some of the highlights in the newly cataloged books?

JM: Items about Our Lady of Lourdes in Ottoman Turkish in Armenian script; about St. Bernadette in Tamil; about Our Lady of Fatima in the Chewa dialect of Nyanja and in Ukrainian; on the rosary in Kikuyu and Lithuanian; and about Marian shrines in Zagreb (Croatia) and Mumbai (India) in Croatian and Marathi. I believe the oldest is an 1833 Czech pamphlet about a church named for Mary in Prague. There is a real range, everything from some older beautiful, fragile novenas to shiny new paperbacks published recently.

— Henry Handley is an assistant professor and collections librarian in the Marian Library. Joan Milligan is a special collections cataloger in the University Libraries.

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