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POSTERS

Automation from Scratch
How to Turn a Room Full of Books  
into a Monastic Library
By Derek J. Rieckens, St. Michael’s Abbey

ABSTR ACT Fifty thousand volumes and no bibliographic control: Such 
was the state of affairs in the library of St. Michael’s Abbey in south-
ern California when, in 2012, the abbey acquired the sizable personal 
library of the late historian Henry Chadwick. The abbey community had 
long desired to improve the organization of its library anyway, so the 
Chadwick Collection finally supplied the impetus to hire a librarian. Here 
follows the tale of how that lone arranger is introducing automation and 
formal policies in an institution that for sixty years has had neither.

THE ABBEY

The Norbertine order, officially called the Order of Canons Regular of 
Prémontré, is a Roman Catholic religious order founded in 1120 by 
St. Norbert of Xanten at Prémontré, France. As a species of Augustin-
ian canons, they lead a life that combines the structure of a monastic 
community with flexibility for active ministry.

St. Michael’s Abbey is a rapidly growing Norbertine community 
in Orange County, California, currently home to over eighty canons, 
including fifty priests and over thirty seminarians. It was founded 



320  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

in 1961 by seven priests from Csorna, Hungary who fled Communist 
persecution in 1950. Today, the canons of St. Michael’s operate an 
on-site high school, administer two nearby parishes, provide chaplains 
for various ministries, and generally go wherever they are needed.

Each of the thirty-three seminarians currently preparing to 
become Norbertine priests at St. Michael’s will undergo nearly ten 
years of formation. Most of that time will be spent at the abbey itself, 
except for four years of theological studies in Toronto and Rome. 
Seminarian life is filled with liturgy, manual labor, pastoral work, and 
classes in philosophy, theology, Latin, Gregorian chant, and Norber-
tine spirituality. While some academic courses for seminarians are 
held on site, the abbey is not a degree-granting institution.

THE LIBRARY

The library’s holdings consist of roughly 50,000 print volumes, includ-
ing 14,000 which comprise the Henry Chadwick Collection (detailed 
below). When the abbey hired me in 2016, none of the holdings had 
ever been cataloged or even inventoried. Items were shelved accord-
ing to a simple, homegrown scheme, which was loosely based on LCC 
and inconsistently applied. The Chadwick Collection initially had no 
order at all. There had never before been an integrated library system 
(ILS) in use. Circulation operated (and for the moment still operates) 
on a variation of the honor system: The borrower writes his name and 
the item’s title on a placeholder slip and sticks the slip into the gap on 
the shelf where the item was.

The library has a user base of about 150, including the Norbertines 
themselves, and approximately sixty high school boys. In the future, 
once the holdings are organized, the library will be available to outside 
researchers as well. The staff consists of one full-time librarian/archi-
vist, plus one or two seminarians who shelve books one afternoon 
per week. The abbey has an institutional IT staff of less than one FTE.

In 2012, the abbey increased its library holdings by nearly 40% all 
at once by acquiring the personal library of Sir Henry Chadwick KBE 
DD FBA (1920-2008), one of the great church historians of our time. 
Chadwick was a priest of the Church of England, an avid participant 
in ecumenical dialogues, and a patristics specialist who served as 
Regius Professor of Divinity at both Oxford and Cambridge. He was 
also head of a constituent college at each of those universities—the 



Posters  321

first such “double head” in over 400 years. With approximately 14,000 
print volumes and over 30 linear feet of personal papers, his library is 
a trove of resources in early church history, general theology, philoso-
phy, classical literature, and more.

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

Goals

 1.  To help the canons at the abbey live their communal rule more 
perfectly.
The Rule of St. Augustine, brief though it be, takes pains to 
address the orderly administration of the library, for it says: 
“Books should be requested at a fixed hour each day. Those who 
demand them outside this hour may not receive them.”

 2. To organize the library for public use.
The Chadwick acquisition came with the expectation, from both 
the Chadwick family and the abbey’s benefactors, that the collec-
tion would be accessible to the public.

Objectives

 1. Deploy an ILS

 2. Establish a workflow

 3. Reform circulation

OBJECTIVE 1: DEPLOY AN ILS

Product research led me to choose an open-source, vendor-hosted ILS 
called OPALS (OPen-source Automated Library System). Open source 
was attractive because of scale and cost: Most proprietary systems, 
even those intended for “small” libraries, are feature-rich beyond all 
necessity for the simple needs of St. Michael’s, and those features are 
built into the price whether they are used or not. A vendor-hosted model 
was preferable to self-hosting mainly because of our limited in-house 
IT expertise. Moreover, hosting options exist for open-source systems 
that are often magnitudes cheaper than their proprietary counterparts.

As I investigated the available open-source systems, two alter-
natives stuck out: Koha hosted by ByWater and OPALS hosted by 
MediaFlex. Both are well-established systems, with over fifteen years 
of existence and more than 700 current deployments, and both are 



322  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

consistently well-reviewed in Marshall Breeding’s annual “Percep-
tions” reports. Koha is in almost every way the more sophisticated 
of the two, but that means it is also more complex and accordingly 
more difficult to learn, at least on the back end. OPALS is the picture 
of simplicity, and the hosting is much cheaper, but it has a somewhat 
outdated appearance and few options for customization. Both hosting 
companies have strong reputations for customer support, although 
ByWater offers more services, such as designing custom functional-
ity. In the end, price and ease of learning weighed more heavily than 
rich features and aesthetics, giving OPALS the edge. Tables 1 and 2 
provide more information about each product and a more detailed 
pro/con comparison.

TABLE 1 Basic product information for the final two ILS choices.

System KOHA OPALS

• First released in 2000
•  Info, demo, & free download at: 

koha-community.org

• First released in 2001
•  Info, demo, & free download at: 

help.opalsinfo.net

Support  
Company

BYWATER MEDIA FLEX

• Founded in 2009
• bywatersolutions.com
•   Leading Koha supporter in U.S.1

•  Serves 745 libraries listed on 
libraries.org—60% public, 16% 
academic2

• Founded in 1985
• mediaflex.net
•   Original developer of OPALS
•  Serves 873 libraries listed on 

libraries.org—74% school, 4% 
academic3

TABLE 2 Pro/con analysis for the final two ILS choices.

Pro KOHA VIA bywater OPALS VIA media flex

•  More features: acquisitions module, 
infinitely customizable reports, rich 
features for search and navigation, 
authority control, API access

•  More stylish appearance

•  Easy to learn and to use: teach 
yourself or attend webinars by 
Media Flex staff (no charge)

•  Lower costs, both to deploy and to 
maintain

Con •  More complex, requiring extensive 
training

•  Higher costs, especially for initial 
setup and training

•   Extra features are not high 
priorities, given our simple needs

•  Fewer features: no acquisitions 
module or authority control, limited 
reports, fewer search options (e.g. 
no federated search), no APIs

• Visually dated
•   Inconsistent sorting in shelflist



Posters  323

OBJECTIVE 2: ESTABLISH A WORKFLOW

Step 1: Choose a Cataloging Utility
I considered three options for obtaining catalog copy: OCLC Connex-
ion, SkyRiver, and direct import via Z39.50 protocol. The main consid-
erations driving the choice were cost and the desire to minimize 
original cataloging. The ideal choice would therefore have been an 
enormous database at a low price, but naturally some compromise 
was unavoidable.

A utility offering a large number of records was desirable because 
of the relative obscurity of Henry Chadwick’s books: Most of them 
predate ISBNs, come from European imprints, and are narrowly 
specialized; many are also not in English. All these factors give the 
obvious edge to OCLC, which boasts nearly ten times the record count 
of SkyRiver. Z39.50 is also at a disadvantage here: Obscure manifesta-
tions make for more laborious queries.

The decision practically made itself, then, when the bid from OCLC 
turned out to be surprisingly affordable. For the abbey’s situation, 
it was clear that the time-saving benefits of OCLC’s enormous data-
base (i.e., WorldCat) outweighed the relatively modest cost savings of 
the other options. This calculus, however, may change in the future 
because of impending alterations to the pricing structure for OCLC’s 
Cataloging and Metadata Subscription. Within the next three years, the 
abbey will need to weigh the greatly increased minimum subscription 
price against the benefits of access to—and visibility in—the WorldCat 
community. Table 3 summarizes the advantages and disadvantages 
of each option.

TABLE 3 Pro/con analysis of the three cataloging utility options.

OCLC 
Connexion

PRO CON

•  Access to over 415 million 
WorldCat records4

•  Reputedly higher cost than 
alternatives5

SkyRiver •  Reputedly cheaper than OCLC6

•  Still a big database: 43 million 
records7

•  May require a higher rate of 
original cataloging8

Z39.50 
Import

• FREE!
• An inborn feature of the ILS

•  MARC editor in OPALS is less 
flexible than alternatives are



324  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

Step 2: Set Priorities for Cataloging and Processing
To the extent possible, my priorities are guided by MPLP: More Prod-
uct, Less Process. This concept, which has fostered much animated 
discussion in the archival community, may offer a few lessons to 
librarians. First expounded in a 2005 article by archivists Mark Greene 
and Dennis Meissner, the thesis behind MPLP is simple: With a view to 
reducing the backlogs of unprocessed (and thus inaccessible) collec-
tions that saddle many archives, archivists ought to consider, and 
prudently apply, substantially less laborious processing practices. 
“The goal should be to maximize the accessibility of collection mate-
rials to users. … What is the least we can do to get the job done in a way 
that is adequate to user needs, now and in the future?”9

MPLP principles are useful in the library of St. Michael’s Abbey 
because:

 • The entire collection is, in effect, a giant backlog

 • With a staff of one, time for book processing and repair is limited
 •  Circulation rates are low, so there are fewer hazards to mini-

mally protected materials

Some of my MPLP-inspired library practices:

 •  In copy cataloging, extraneous data fields are retained in the 
record, unless retaining them would confuse users (e.g., non-
English subject headings)

 •  Pamphlets are cataloged at an aggregate level instead of individually
 •  Book reinforcements and repairs are limited and minimally inva-

sive (e.g. reinforcing tape is used only on already damaged items)

MPLP is scalable: It does not mean arbitrarily skipping all the 
details all the time. I still perform tasks that could conceivably be 
passed over, such as entering ISBD punctuation, applying label protec-
tors to all (non-rare) volumes, and using dust jacket protectors. Such 
niceties are intended in part to serve as visible evidence to the Chad-
wick family and the abbey’s benefactors that the abbey will be a profes-
sional and responsible steward of Sir Henry’s legacy.

Step 3: Devise Shelving Logistics
With no separate storage space for the backlog, cataloged and uncata-
loged items must occupy the same shelf space within the library for 



Posters  325

the duration of the project. The Chadwick books were already in the 
stacks when I arrived—in no order whatsoever. Except for one wall 
of shelves in my office, there is no place where uncataloged books 
can be kept apart. I have therefore needed to develop a workflow that 
allows cataloged and uncataloged items to coexist in the same shelv-
ing ranges without mixing and while minimizing shifting. I consid-
ered two approaches.

Option A: The “From the Top” Approach

 1. Start in first bay of first range.
 •  Uncataloged items are drawn from the beginning of the whole 

collection.

 2. Proceed linearly to end of collection.
 •  Cataloged items displace uncataloged items by snaking from 

one end of the stacks to the other.

FIGURE 1 The “from the top” approach.

Option B: The Pre-Segmented Approach

 1. Assign each shelving range a span of classification numbers.
 • Based on a sample—say, 200 random items.

 2. Start in first bay of each range.
 •  Uncataloged items from each “first bay” are vacated to the 

cataloging room.



326  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

 3. Proceed bay-by-bay down each range.
 •  Empty the next uncataloged bay to the right when space is 

needed in a given range.

FIGURE 2 The pre-segmented approach.

With option A, the entire collection must shift every time newly 
cataloged items are shelved; shifting becomes a weekly preoccu-
pation. With option B, shifting occurs within each range as needed; 
some ranges can go months without a shift. Moreover, no item under 
option B needs to shift further than the length of one range—give or 
take, depending on how closely the initial call number segmentation 
corresponds to the final distribution. Option A, by contrast, requires 
that items near the end (i.e. class Z) traverse the entire room over the 
course of the project. I have found that Option B is effective at dividing 
the task of shifting into small, manageable segments.

OBJECTIVE 3: REFORM CIRCULATION

The canons of St. Michael’s have had sixty years to develop super-
latively casual and open-ended borrowing habits. Regularizing the 
circulation process will be necessary as the library’s holdings become 
formally organized, but this need must be balanced against the need 
to respect the internal life of the community. I see opportunities to 
honor the existing culture while also safeguarding the integrity of 
the collection.



Posters  327

First, self-checkout must be the norm, since the library is avail-
able to the canons around the clock. A dedicated self-check station 
will be installed.

Second, lending periods will be generous. The canons are accus-
tomed to borrowing books almost indefinitely, or until someone else 
wants the item, whichever comes first. While it would be difficult—
and not especially desirable—to accommodate this custom within 
the limits of our ILS, the new policy can achieve something similar 
by means of lengthy periods for loans and renewals as well as the use 
of hold requests.

Finally, change will be introduced gradually. Since the Chadwick 
Collection is off-limits until fully organized, there is time to manage 
expectations prior to rolling out the circulation system. When the day 
for rollout arrives, the library will at last be fully capable of assisting 
the abbey in living up to its motto: to be “prepared for every good 
work”—with every good book.

ENDNOTES

1 “Library Systems Report 2018,” American Libraries, May 1, 2018, 
accessed May 4, 2018, https://americanlibrariesmagazine.
org/2018/05/01/library-systems-report-2018.

2 “Library Automation Companies,” Library Technology Guides, 
accessed April 17, 2018, https://librarytechnology.org/vendors.

3 Ibid.
4 “Inside WorldCat,” OCLC, accessed April 9, 2018, https://www.oclc.

org/en/worldcat/inside-worldcat.html.
5 Tony Siciliano and Aaron Skog, “OCLC & SkyRiver: Whitepaper for 

the SWAN Membership” (SWAN Libraries, 2011), 12, accessed 
April 9, 2018, https://support.swanlibraries.net/system/files/
Public/SWAN_Bibliographic_Utilities_Whitepaper.pdf.

6 Siciliano and Skog, “OCLC & SkyRiver,” 12.
7 “Features and Benefits,” SkyRiver, accessed April 9, 2018, https://

theskyriver.com/features-and-benefits.
8 Siciliano and Skog, “OCLC & SkyRiver,” 9.
9 Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less 

Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” American 
Archivist 68 (2005): 240.

https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2018/05/01/library-systems-report-2018
https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2018/05/01/library-systems-report-2018
https://librarytechnology.org/vendors
https://www.oclc.org/en/worldcat/inside-worldcat.html
https://www.oclc.org/en/worldcat/inside-worldcat.html
https://support.swanlibraries.net/system/files/Public/SWAN_Bibliographic_Utilities_Whitepaper.pdf
https://support.swanlibraries.net/system/files/Public/SWAN_Bibliographic_Utilities_Whitepaper.pdf
https://theskyriver.com/features-and-benefits
https://theskyriver.com/features-and-benefits

