Tag: Cataloguing

Brand New Chinese Reading Corner in the School Library

Kirsty MorganLeave a comment

In January, Chetham’s School of Music library hosted the Grand Opening of our new Chinese Reading Corner: the culmination of a year-long project to add a donation of two hundred Chinese-language books to the school library collection. This is how we did it.

Long-term readers of this blog may remember that, not long after I’d first started at Chetham’s, I was asked to contribute to the school’s Chinese New Year celebrations online (the school being mostly locked down due to Covid). At the time, I was mildly surprised by the discrepancy between the proportion of Chinese students in the school and the comparatively low number of fiction books set in China or featuring Chinese protagonists.

Zoom forwards five years, and this past January, the school celebrated the culmination of a year-long project to install a Chinese Reading Corner in the school library. 

The Chinese Music Classroom (CMC) is a collaboration between Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. In September 2024, I was approached by our Music Principal, Tom Redmond, about a donation of roughly a hundred books to the school library through the CMC collaboration. 

At the time, I knew no Chinese, and it was intimidating to approach cataloguing a hundred books in a foreign language. So, I went along to the Chinese classes that were offered to Chetham’s staff by the Chinese Director of the CMC, Sophia Kuai. It’s a happy coincidence that these classes are held at the same time as the Lower School’s Lunchtime Concerts. This meant that the only students using the library would be Y9 and above, allowing me to feel more comfortable ‘abandoning’ the library for one of its busier hours! 

Not exactly library items!

Sophia was managing the Beijing side of the donation itself, so it was also helpful to know her better through the classes, even before the boxes arrived. Attending the classes, alongside signing up for Duolingo, proved to be invaluable in helping the project to even approach feasibility. 

Finally, during the Spring Term 2025, Sophia and I got the chance to properly look through a few of the large donation boxes together. This was the first point that I was able to see what had been donated. What had been initially pitched to me as a hundred-book project was actually around two hundred books, plus some bonus donations that were not library materials at all (including pens, ink, drawing paper, decorations, sports rackets and even a VR Headset)! 

But after some investigation we came up with the following list of library suitable items: 

  • Picture books with Chinese and English text. 
  • Books about Chinese culture (including medicine, music and travel). 
  • Calligraphy books with brushstroke templates. 
  • Chinese masterpieces, in English. 
  • Books for learning Chinese (including textbooks and early reader books). 
  • Books for teaching Chinese (pedagogy). 

We also discussed what Sophia was hoping for from the collection and whether it worked better as its own separate area or to integrate it with the existing library stock. With Tom’s input, we decided that creating a new Chinese Reading Corner would be the way to go. 

The Creation of the Reading Corner 

After deciding to create a discrete section for the donated books, I rearranged our reference area to clear space for the incoming Chinese Reading Corner. I contacted the Head of the Modern Languages department, Nina Geschwendt, who very kindly accepted a large offering of surplus French and German dictionaries. After that, the bulk of the remaining books were reshelved to create a music reference section within the Music Library. What was previously a full reference section was now a Dictionaries section, and four empty shelves for what would become the Chinese Reading Corner. 

With the space cleared, I emailed to say we were ready for the books to be brought over – not realising that I would be brought all six boxes whether they contained books or not! The wonderful evening library assistant, Charlotte Stoddard-Stevenson, went through and sorted the boxes into categories, which we then used as the basis for our final arrangement on the shelves.  

Although the final layout ended up following a genrefication approach, rather than the Dewey classification I had initially planned to use, this was not a huge departure for our current library practice. Most of the music collection is arranged by type rather than classification: String Quartets, Wind + Quintets, Brass Nonets/Dectets, Larger Ensembles, Orchestral Sets, Piano Music, Miniature Scores, etc. 

Our final categories for the Chinese Reading Corner were: 

  • Early Chinese Readers 
  • Full Chinese Readers 
  • Chinese Music 
  • Chinese Picture Books 
  • Chinese Culture 
  • Chinese Classics 
  • Chinese Language 

with a few split categories on the shelves themselves for ease of use. 

While the evening library staff and Duke of Edinburgh volunteers were able to help with the book labelling, covering and processing of the items (a huge task already), it was my sole responsibility to catalogue all two hundred books digitally. 

Two of our Duke of Edinburgh volunteers created these posters for the Grand Opening.

As with all items in the school library, it was very important to me that all catalogue users could immediately understand the record they were looking at without needing to go examine the physical item. This was even more important for items in a foreign language. 

While by this point (Summer 2025) I had been learning Chinese for almost a year, I was still a hopeless novice! I had to rely heavily on translation tools, and I also sometimes took questions to Sophia in the Chinese classes. 

Learning Calligraphy
Photographed by Sophia.

For example, some of the Full Chinese Readers (for older or more fluent students) had texts spanning three volumes, but Google Translate gave me the translations: upper, middle and lower. How was I to tell which meant volume one? 

Well, I asked Sophia! And she not only told me that upper (shàng) meant volume one but, when I found that counterintuitive, she even drew me a diagram to explain why. But please don’t ask me to replicate her explanation! 

Another difficulty I encountered was safeguarding items that I couldn’t read. In hindsight, I had started my cataloguing in the hardest place, with the Full Chinese Readers. These books were entirely in Chinese, with no English translation.  

One particular book gave me pause due to the images inside being potentially frightening for younger students. When I used Google translate to look over the first chapter, the text included gruesome illness, poverty deaths, a child’s coffin and possibly a racial slur. According to Wikipedia, the protagonist is also beaten by his uncle later in the book. The clunky translation changed depending on the angle I held my phone at, which didn’t help parse the actual context of the writing, in the way a language I was more familiar with might have allowed. 

Certainly, texts for older students can include difficult subject matter and even some inappropriate language. To Kill A Mockingbird (which I studied at school in Higher English) has racial slurs and 1984, studied at Chetham’s in the English A-Level, has an entire sequence where the main character is tortured. My worry here was that we have Chinese-speaking children in the school as young as eight years old, so I needed to be careful that any books within the Chinese Corner would not be unsuitable for them to pick up and browse without the staff realising what they were accessing.  

Because I was so unfamiliar with the language, I felt unplaced to make the appropriateness call myself, so my solution was to keep that particular book in the back office rather than on the shelves. It is available if explicitly requested, but there is no danger of younger or more sensitive students accidentally accessing something that might be upsetting. 

After the Full Chinese Readers were completed, the rest of the books were actually considerably easier to catalogue. From a safeguarding perspective, many were geared towards younger readers, and with others, such as the Chinese Music, it was clear what their contents were about. Some of the books I liked most (from a cataloguer and a school librarian perspective) were the ones that had side-by-side Chinese and English. 

For fun, I tried reading one of the early reader texts: The Little Mouse by Lucy Wang. After a year of studying the language, this 28-page story, about a little mouse (lǎoshǔ) who ate so many meatballs (ròuwán) he looked like a pokeball (Pokeball), was surprisingly accessible, and rather cute! 

Complete Catalogue Record for The Little Mouse by Lucy Wang

The materials were brought over in April, and the full collection was completed (sorting, processing, cataloguing and all) by the October half term break. The project was put on hold for June, July and August due to end-of-term commitments and the library being closed over the school’s Summer Holiday. So, it effectively only took me and Charlotte about six months to complete the bulk of the work. Alongside running everything else in the library too, that’s something we can be very proud of. 

The Grand Opening 

The Reading Corner’s Grand Opening event was fantastic. Two of our Duke of Edinburgh volunteers created posters for Chinese New Year, and the CMC donated a beautiful glass plaque for the Reading Corner. The three staff members from the Chinese Music Classroom set up a traditional Chinese bookmark craft station on our large table, with stickers and paints and ribbons and Chinese characters.

Chinese Reading Corner Plaque
Donated to Chetham’s School of Music Library by the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing

That break and lunchtime, students came in droves to participate. Although I had to split my focus between helping students at the library desk and the event itself, the three CMC teachers ensured the area was supervised the whole time. (Which was particularly important for keeping the energy high and the paints on the paper!)

A group of about eight juniors kicked it off, and then other students and staff took part as well. A couple of Y13 students, who had been intrigued at morning break, returned that lunchtime to ask whether it was just a Lower School event – and were delighted to be told they could join in too! 

It was also interesting to chat to some Y9s, who I had taught Literacy to when they were in Y7, about all the languages they spoke. One little girl told me that she spoke Cantonese and Spanish at home, alongside knowing English and Mandarin from living in England and China, and now she was also learning French and German in school. And – on top of that – she reads music! 

I even got to know the Chinese teachers better. I knew Sophia, of course, from the Chinese classes, but I hadn’t really spoken to either of the other two. One of them mentioned that, while the others came from Beijing, she was from a small town in China. Sophia hastened to let me know (so I didn’t get the wrong idea) that the “small town” was actually a little larger than Manchester! 

Final Chinese Reading Corner

Projects like this can fly under the radar once they are complete. The year of learning a foreign language, planning, cataloguing, processing, agonising(!) disappears into the shelves and looks like it has always been there. So, it was really gratifying that the final Grand Opening was such an engaging event, and it looked great on social media.

While framing the project through only the final event risks reducing over a year’s work into a single activity day, the effects of the project will hopefully have a long-lasting positive impact in the school library. Already, Chinese students and some students who are learning it in the school, are excited to have a bookshelf of brand-new books in their language.

As an example, even before the Grand Opening, one of the Y7 Literacy students pleaded with me to let her take out the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Although I was initially reluctant (I hadn’t yet added its record), I relented and created a quick placeholder record that I completed when she returned the book!

Beyond this, the Reading Corner can serve as a future template to upgrade the rest of the language areas of the school library. I’d love to just dive in with an entirely similar scale project for the French and German materials, but unless Chetham’s wants to twin with a Francophone or Germanic donor, we’ll need to be a little more realistic. That being said, while the process will take longer due to budgeting restrictions, I’ve made a start by ordering the French text versions of some popular kids’ novels, in imitation of the Full Chinese Reader section of the Chinese Reading Corner. 

And just this past week, I was told that the school is planning to use the library classroom for some of the Chinese lessons. Having the Chinese Reading Corner just outside the door feels almost perfect. 

Raising the Bar[tók] in Catalogue Retrieval Systems

Kirsty MorganLeave a comment

Recently I’ve been thinking about all the parts of librarianship that often go unnoticed by the staff within my school. There’s a pressure, I think, to engage in the student-facing, ‘flashy’ side of school librarianship. Library displays draw eyes; bookmark competitions engage students creatively; library lessons are obvious student engagement; the zine collection is an archive of student work.

Even properly labelling and covering the physical library items is something I can point to and say, “this keeps the item from being damaged, and the label tells you where to put it”.

However, when it comes to the cataloguing side of librarianship, the work largely flies under the radar – despite being integral to ensuring the library runs smoothly.

Since I arrived at Chetham’s just over five years ago, one of my biggest projects (read: bugbears) has been mitigating the user-unfriendliness of the school catalogue.

The school library uses Reading Cloud software: a cataloguing software designed for schools and easily accessible for non-librarians to catalogue with. (Not a MARC record in sight!) It is functional for most school library collections, but it is not (and does not claim to be) designed for music libraries in the slightest.

Our school library has just over 36,000 items, which is quite small for an academic library, but rather large for a school one. Since Chetham’s is a specialist music school and the library is a combined school and music library, over 20,500 of these records are sheet music (including almost 10,000 chamber music sets). I’m putting this into perspective to demonstrate that it is feasible to work with all of the items in our collection (no awful surprises), but impossible to hold the collection in one head.

The catalogue is necessary for telling me what is in the three libraries (and where it is located), however, the Reading Cloud Software is not ideal for sheet music retrieval.

While library staff have access to a more advanced management system, the main difficulty is that Reading Cloud’s student interface has a slow and buggy Advanced Search. This is not such a problem for a regular school library, where most books have a single title, but music is far more complicated. It is frequently necessary to be able to specify the title and the composer of a piece before anything can be located.

Reading Cloud also allows users to easily sort their search by author, but not composer. It is possible to use the sidebar facets to remove CDs from a search (thank goodness). But music searchers must still attempt to navigate a janky Advanced Search that does not effectively filter by field, meaning that it is unrealistic to expect children or even staff to necessarily find what they are looking for – particularly with popular composers like Mozart or Beethoven, or any composers who don’t use opus numbers.

The Quick Search does not, automatically, search across multiple fields – and strict cataloguing standards assume users can use an Advanced Search if necessary. Reading Cloud, however, seems to expect students to get by with only the Quick Search function, the high-functioning Advanced Search being exclusively accessible to the library staff accounts (i.e. accounts with catalogue-editing permissions).

Which means, really, if I want the students to be able to use the library catalogue to suit their musical needs (and I do: the Year 7 literacy class receives a whole lesson on the library catalogue each year), the school catalogue must be adjusted to work as much like a Google search as possible. This means adapting my cataloguing to allow a Quick Search to retrieve the items requested.

Librarianship teaches that a good search system has two goals that it must strive for: Recall and Precision.

Assuming the library has the required item in stock, Recall describes whether the search returns the required item at all, and Precision describes how many unrelated items it also displays alongside the required item.

Enter my system. Since I started working at the school, I have been adding a line, purely for retrieval purposes, to the top of the summary field in each record:

Firstname Surname – Title [Classification or Location].

Although this line does not follow any orthodox cataloguing practice, these combined descriptors all have identical punctuation formats and allow the searcher to effectively apply a filter (or expander) to their queries without resorting to the Advanced Search (which, even for library staff, is slower than the Quick Search). This speeds up the time devoted to finding items, and makes it easier for students, school staff, and the library assistants (and me!) to check for items on the catalogue.

Children (at least the children in my school) have the tendency to assume that if something goes wrong they are at fault or have messed up. And it is both undermining to their confidence to be confronted with a rickety system, and embarrassing for me to have to explain that something should have been brought back but just wasn’t – often not through any fault of their own.

Bartók Case Study: This is what I’m Bar-Talking About

As an example of further back-end work that will never be noticed, last week I spent a sizeable amount of time working on the Bartók sheet music. It started because I wanted to add catalogue numbers to the records to make it clear in the catalogue exactly which Bartók sonata (for example) a particular record, described only as ‘sonata for piano’ was referring to. (If composers would just opus all of their compositions, my work as a music librarian would be much easier!)

First, I did a little research into Sz vs BB numbers, deciding which catalogue number system I wanted to use. I chose Sz because it seemed to be the more common system to be used these days, including by the Petrucci Music Library (IMSLP) of online scores, frequently used by the students and staff to supplement the school’s physical sheet music library. Even if that choice proves over time to be the wrong one, the Sz numbers are still useful for identifying items now and will help future cataloguers change the system over later if necessary without needing to consult the physical music.

After settling on using Sz, I then printed off a list of all 133 records of Bartók sheet music that we currently have in the school library. I went through each item in turn and worked out each item’s Sz number.

Some of the music was badly described, so I standardised how they were described in the title field a little more, then each item was given a summary entry:

Béla Bartók – Title [Classification or Location].

If the item required a contents list, this was also added, alongside any additional tags and missing information that was easily accessed from the original record (but I did not allow this to slow down or side-track the main project). Fortunately, most of the time, I was able to exclusively work from the existing record, which saved a lot of time. However, occasionally a record had been poorly catalogued to begin with, and in those instances I did return to the physical item and overhaul the full record.

Example catalogue record as the user now sees it

Since completing this project, every piece of Bartók music we have in the school library is now retrievable searching (in the Quick Search):

  • just the Sz number (e.g. Sz80)
  • Bartók or Bartok and a title (e.g. Bartok sonata)
  • Bartók or Bartok and the location (e.g. Bartok piano music).

Or any combination thereof (e.g. Bartok sonata Sz80 piano music). None of this was possible before this project, and the addition of Sz catalogue numbers for the title fields means the pre-existing Advanced Search option is more useful for library staff as well.

Incidentally, during this process I discovered that Bartók actually only wrote one piano sonata important enough to justify its own Wikipedia page, which is why it was listed in the catalogue as merely “Sonata for piano” to begin with. But having the full record and retrievability still ensures the music will now be retrieved if a kid searches for “piano sonata Sz80” or “Bartok piano sonata”.

I find it harder to advocate for this kind of invisible work because, if a student or staff member is looking for Bartók in the catalogue now, all they will discover is a lack of friction finding it. They will not notice the ease, and it is not as attention-grabbing as a new library display or bookmark competition. But long after the display comes down, and the bookmarks have been replaced, this string of text in the summary field will still be helping Chetham’s students and staff to navigate the catalogue independently without being punished for a catalogue system that wasn’t designed for them.