Heythrop Library

Sorry, if this headline evoked your need to listen to a 1980s song, but we recently got the last Heythrop College Library’s card catalogue delivered to us, and that’s what the following is about.

When the Heythrop College closed in 2018, the 3 card index catalogues were sent to Peterborough, where a company called Crown Records Management scanned all the cards, and uploaded them (You can go to https://heythroplibrary.co.uk/faq/faq-for-current-members/#pre1990 for instructions how to access these). These three card catalogue furnitures were then stored at Peterborough:

Heythrop College Library card catalogue 1, as stored at Crown (Peterborough), 2018-2025.

As there was a policy to remove a card index card for books catalogued onto computers, after 1990, and as nothing was added after 1990, it was felt that keeping the cabinets was not necessary any more. Since 2019 we have advised our library users to first search our online catalogue, and if the book is not found there, then to search the digitized card catalogue (for anything published before 1990!).

You might ask why we did this. The Heythrop Library Committee agreed to remove permanently these catalogues from storage in Peterborough, but keep the actual cards in storage. This will save over £1,500 in storage costs each year! There were 3 cabinets:

• 1 for post-1801 books,
• 1 for pre-1801 books, and
• 1 with cards for printers and place names for pre-1801 books

The last two cabinets were essentially duplicating cards for the same books, printed before 1801, but giving access by author/title, or place of publication, or printer.

The 3 pieces of furniture arrived on 26 June 2025, it was a sunny day, see:

Without the help of Br Stephen, Fr Paul, Brian, Hewa, Jamie, and John Paul the Library crew would not have managed to get all these drawers and the cabinets of the pavement in just under 1 hour. Many thanks to our helpers!

We had to take the individual drawers from street-level down to the basement level where the Library is, into our reading room:

You can also watch a short video on YouTube to get an idea why we had to close the Library reading room for 3 days.

We had to keep the drawers in the order of how they had been in the cabinets, but as it turned out there were the odd misplaced drawers, i.e they were not in the right place of the cards’ sequence. At the end we found one drawer of the place name sequence (pre-1801) in the modern sequence of drawers; whilst sorting through the drawers, we found the odd one which was several drawers away from where they should have been.

The cards were then packed into storage boxes, with 2 rows separated by paper:

And then we added a custom-cut piece of card board inserted, to avoid the cards getting mixed up in transport:

On top of the card board we added 2 further rows of cards. So that each box contains 4 rows of cards. An example of one of the final boxes:

In the end 14 boxes were sent to Deepstore Storage and Records Management, and we kept the stray box of the printers, plus another one which was found completely out of order. These can be inspect in the office, if you would like to have a look.

CG