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Maximum Hours and 
Minimal Staffing 
What Is a Small Library to Do?
By David Kriegh, St. Patrick’s Seminary & University; Derek Rieckens, St. Michael’s Abbey; 
Stephen Sweeney, St. John Vianney Seminary

ABSTR ACT Three directors of theological libraries at small institutions 
discussed the challenges they face that appear particular to their librar-
ies. Participants in the conversation group were then invited to share 
their own challenges and compare them with those of others to see 
how common or unusual such challenges may be in the world of theo-
logical libraries.

INTRODUCTION

The small library has long been commonplace in ATLA and the world 
of theological libraries, but these libraries are not necessarily small 
in every respect. As you will hear from our introductions, although 
we have a small, mostly residential patron base and an accordingly 
small staff, we have generous hours, and our collections can be larger 
than those of bigger and broader academic institutions. This creates 
a special set of challenges. We will briefly share our own experiences 
with this, but we encourage you to explore with one another ways to 
manage the challenge of a library small in staff but large in content 
and operating hours. We will categorize these challenges into security, 
technology, and staffing.

PROCESS

Prior to the convening of the conversation group, the facilitators met 
on a monthly basis via web conference to share stories about their 
libraries and to work toward the development of a framework for a 
discussion with a larger group on the topic. They followed an agenda 
each day:



200  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

5-10 minutes: Introduction of us, our institutions, a challenge 
we face, and the structure through designated facets of secu-
rity, technology, and staffing

4-6 minutes: Ask people to pair up and discuss their list of 
challenges

5-9 minutes: Ask pairs to join one other pair and compare 
lists

15-20 minutes: Ask each of the foursomes to identify their 
challenges

Remaining time: Discuss how these issues are addressed 
in our libraries (some problems will already have been 
addressed at other institutions)

Facilitator Introductions and Challenges
David Kriegh  
(St. Patrick’s Seminary & University, Menlo Park, California)
St. Patrick’s is a Roman Catholic diocesan seminary run by the Arch-
diocese of San Francisco and receives seminarians from around ten 
dioceses in the United States plus Guam and South Korea. Our enroll-
ment last year was 57 but has been as high as 114 just a few years ago. 
Our library staff has also dropped to 2.5 FTE, and we rely on student 
work-study to maintain evening and Sunday hours. The primary chal-
lenge to the library is the casual culture, which makes policies and 
procedures difficult to formulate and enforce.

SECURITY All residents of the seminary carry keys to the building, so 
our posted hours are for those outside the community. We are open 
to the public but not a public library. Facilities may be slow to correct 
potential hazards such as a door that will not shut properly. As we 
are a part of the main seminary building, there are nine different 
entrances to the library, so no security system is feasible. It would be 
akin to arming a single room in a house.

TECHNOLOGY Our library still uses the card catalog as the primary 
point of access for about half the collection. Even though many patrons 



Conversation Groups  201

don’t know how to use it, they seem to show concern that we may 
throw it away in the future. We moved to a modern ILS with a discov-
ery layer for patrons, but some still want to fill out check-out cards 
and feel certain processes like hold requests are unusually complex 
for an institution of our size.

STAFFING As we do not currently offer self-checkout due to many 
books not being in the OPAC, we rely on having staff or work-study 
present for extensive hours to allow patrons to take books. This can 
result in patrons taking materials out of the library without checking 
them out, which they do not view as theft since they plan to return 
the materials eventually. However, our small staff is generally cross-
trained well enough that patrons need not worry about the person 
they need being absent. Our library assistant can handle most patron 
needs, and the librarians don’t mind doing basic circulation and book 
processing and even sometimes shelving to move things along.

Derek Rieckens  
(St. Michael’s Abbey, Orange County, California)
St. Michael’s is a community of Norbertine canons. The Norbertines 
are a Catholic religious order with a quasi-monastic lifestyle: They live 
in community, but they perform a lot of pastoral ministry outside the 
abbey. There are about eighty canons, including about fifty priests and 
thirty seminarians. Some of the coursework for seminarians takes place 
onsite, but the abbey is not a degree-granting institution. The Norber-
tines also run a boys’ high school onsite, with about sixty students. 
The library must therefore serve the pastoral needs of the priests, the 
formational needs of the seminarians, and the academic needs of the 
students. In the future, it will also be open to outside researchers.

TECHNOLOGY The collection has never been cataloged. Borrowing 
is self-serve and untraceable. I am in the process of changing all this 
by introducing automation: I have about 10% of the collection cata-
loged, and I am deploying the abbey’s first-ever ILS. But even once 
we are automated, circulation will have to remain self-serve due to 
limited staffing hours, so the challenge will be to induce the commu-
nity to make use of a self-check kiosk after sixty years with no formal 
circulation policy.



202  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

STAFFING I am it. Prior to my hiring, two years ago, the abbey had 
never had an actual librarian before. All the standard library func-
tions, such as cataloging, circulation, and collection development, 
have never before had professional oversight, and so it is up to one 
person to put it all in place.

SECURITY For the canons, the abbey is not their school; it is their 
home. Access to the library is correspondingly casual. The library 
is locked for a good portion of the day, and prep student access is 
limited to certain hours, but the canons can use a key at any time. 
There is also a trickle of guests who may be permitted into the library. 
Special collections have no additional security layer. But to conclude 
on a hopeful note, we have a whole new campus under construction, 
which gives me the chance to ensure that the new library will have 
more security features, such as a locked place for rare books and EM 
gates. Until then, security depends mainly on trusting in the honesty 
of the community and the obscurity of our location.

Stephen Sweeney  
(St. John Vianney Seminary, Denver, Colorado)
We have two houses of priestly formation forming men to be ordained 
Catholic priests from fifteen dioceses, mostly regional but three inter-
national (Vietnam, Uganda, and Myanmar): St. John Vianney (SJV) and 
Redemptoris Mater House of Formation. They both share the intel-
lectual formation provided by SJV.

SECURITY: All seminarians have keys, so our posted hours are for 
those outside the community (the public). The facilities department 
is usually pretty responsive to our requests, especially if the request 
addresses a risk. We share our campus with the management corpo-
ration of the Archdiocese of Denver, so we only have one “official” 
entrance, but facilities and others have keys to the other entry points.

TECHNOLOGY: I was appointed Director of the Library in 2010, and 
since that time we have performed three inventories: 2013, 2015, 
and 2017, with our next one scheduled for the summer of 2019. Our 
collections have been fully cataloged and are almost entirely available  
through OCLC’s WMS; this process of retrospective conversion 
finished in 2011.



Conversation Groups  203

STAFFING: Our small staff is cross-trained well enough that patrons 
need not worry about the person with whom they choose to interact. 
Including myself, our FTE is 3.5, and we only have posted open hours 
to the non-seminary public thirty hours per week. We also have a dedi-
cated group of volunteers, but there are, of course, the challenges that 
come with managing volunteers. Right now, we are working on volun-
teer job descriptions. We have regular volunteer/staff appreciation 
events, and they really help close the gap between where our service 
would be at 3.5 FTE and where they enable us to be with their service.

CONVERSATION

In the ensuing discussion, the following points were brought up 
among the attendees:

 •  One attendee appreciated knowing that they weren’t alone in 
dealing with minimal staffing and shared that they were coping 
with a recent drastic staffing cut. Another expressed interest in 
collaborative approaches to staffing.

 •  Three attendees expressed interest in the role that regular 
inventories of the collection can play in quantitatively measur-
ing losses to the collection. 

 •  It was also raised that the session was a good forum for airing 
problems, but that more exploration toward finding solutions 
would have been beneficial. Another felt that some of the problems 
shared by the facilitators’ libraries were more common among 
libraries in general and not unique to small theological libraries.

CONCLUSION

Based on the feedback received from the attendees, this conversa-
tion group primarily helped other members of the theological library 
community realize that their problems are not unique and they are 
not alone. The facilitators hope that this conversation group will serve 
as a starting point for future discussions on how to convert the prob-
lems faced by small theological libraries into solutions based on best 
practices reached through collaborative networks.


