Quaker Meeting House Library

The main Library at the Meeting House is housed on shelves in the Foyer, but in 2006 a new Research Collection was established in a closed access cupboard on the first floor. This collection serves not only the members and attenders of Colchester Meeting, but also Quakers from our Area Meeting. The Research Collection contains books which are often older than the books in the Foyer, and of more esoteric interest, and are intended to provide useful resource material for study projects on Quaker history and practice, Bible study etc. For times of access to this collection please consult the Warden, as the room may be in use by hirers.

Both collections use the same subject categorization system. The categories are:

1) The Bible, including concordances and books on textual study (B)
2) Elders and Overseers (E)
3) Great Quakers – biographies of notable Quakers (GQ)
4) Green matters – books on environmental matters and Green living (GR)
5) Light reading, including fiction of Quaker interest (LR)
6) Mysticism (M)
7) Problems of today – including peace studies, ageing and death, gambling, etc. (PT)
8) Quakerism – Quaker faith, practice and organisation (Q)
9) Quaker history (QH)
10) Quaker thought – which includes the Swarthmore lectures (QT)
11) Theology – not only Christian but also books on world religions such as Buddhism (T)
12) Unclassified – a category for anything that doesn't seem to fit into the subjects, such as psychology (B)

There is a further collection of books for our Young Friends, mostly housed in the Children's room. (Y)

As is Quaker practice, the composition of the Library Committee changes frequently, so classification decisions are not always consistent. The catalogue is therefore presented in three ways, each as Acrobat PDF files: Author catalogue, Title catalogue, and Subject catalogue.  Almost all modern computers have a reader for Acrobat files installed, otherwise one can be downloaded free at the Adobe Acrobat website.  In the Subject catalogue scroll through the collection to find the grouped entries of the categories as above, but as there are inconsistencies it is more reliable to search by Author or Title if you know them.

Some books have a code of (R), which denotes that it is housed in the Research Collection. Other books are listed as Missing. Each summer a stock check is carried out and any book not found on that day is posted “Missing”, but is only deleted from the catalogue if it is again not found the following summer. In practice books may be misplaced and reappear after the stock-check day, so it is still worth looking for a book that is noted as Missing in the catalogue.