GEN: church library catalog

[LilyPCooper <lilypcooper@SOUTHTECH.NET>]

        Have any of you had experience with church libraries?

        The Charleston/Atlantic Presbytery (Presbyterian Church, USA) is
exploring the possibility of making the materials in its resource room
(library) available to churches in other presbyteries via Presbynet (the
denomination's e-mail).  Other presbyteries are interested in doing this,
also.

        There are MANY resource rooms throughout the denomination--one for each
presbytery.  They contain a wide variety of Christian educational
materials, everything from Sunday School curriculum to camping resources
to church polity guides.  They are generally organized and run by church
educators, not by librarians, so the resources are not catalogued by any
standard system.

        The first step, it seems, must be to choose a standard cataloguing system
to be used by all resource rooms which will go online.  The question is,
which one?  Dewey and LOC don't seem to be logical choices, because the
resource room collections are so specific to Christian education.   Surely
there is a good system for church libraries out there somewhere, but I
don't know what it is.  I told the director of the Charleston/Atlantic
resource room that I would ask the experts (That's YOU!), and felt sure
that I would get good advice.  Please let me know what you think.

        TIA for any help you can give.

                                Lily P. Cooper
                                Library Media Specialist
                                Rosenwald/St. David's Elementary
                                Society Hill, SC

                                lilypcooper@southtech.net