About 10 days ago we had an enquiry arrive in our inbox, which almost made my heart stop. Well, not really, but I know if someone asks about a serial in our collection (whether a scholarly journal or a magazine) this could spell trouble, or at least some cumbersome detective work. Indeed, we recently have applied for external funding to obtain money to finance a part-time project staff member for 5 years to rectify things.
On the face of things the enquiry was straightforward:
From: [name not shown] <firstname.surname@gmail.com>
Sent: 14 March 2026 10:41
To: London Jesuit Centre <ljc@jesuit.org.uk>
Subject: The Teilhard ReviewHello, i wonder if you can help me. I am searching for two issues of The Teilhard Review, which, in the 1960s, published two of my papers.
Do you happen to have any back copies of this publication? Would i be able to access them? Thank you in advance for your help!
[First name] [surname].
I had not come across this journal since starting to work here in September 2021, but of course Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (SJ) is a well-known twentieth-century Jesuit. So I was relatively confident that the Heythrop Library’s collection would have had the Teilhard Review. In which of the two off-site stores would these volumes be? We always start our search with our cataloguing; searching that tool was underwhelming:
Teilhard review : a journal bridging science and religion.
Contributor(s):
Material type: Journal
Continuing resource
Publication details: London :Teilhard Centre for the Future of Man.
ISSN: 0040-2184
No holdings were shown – which is not completely unusual for pre-1990 journals in our collection.
After some searching in the databases of our two off-site stores, I could add the following holdings for the Teilhard Review:
Holdings: HEYTHROP PERIODICALS AP1 Vol. 1, 1966-Vol. 29, no. 3, 1994 (At Crown: 1987-1993, Vol. 22-29, no. 3).
| Item type | Current library | Class number | Vol info | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Journal | Heythrop Library Crown Offsite Store [up to 2 working days] | TREV 1994 29 3 (Browse shelf (Opens below)) | 1994 29 3 | Available |
| Journal | Heythrop Library Crown Offsite Store [up to 2 working days] | TREV 1994 29 2 (Browse shelf (Opens below)) | 1994 29 2 | Available |
| Journal | Heythrop Library Crown Offsite Store [up to 2 working days] | TREV 1993 28 3 (Browse shelf (Opens below)) | 1993 28 3 | Available |
| Journal | Heythrop Library Crown Offsite Store [up to 2 working days] | TREV 1993 28 2 (Browse shelf (Opens below)) | 1993 28 2 | Available |
| Journal | Heythrop Library Crown Offsite Store [up to 2 working days] | TREV 1993 (Browse shelf (Opens below)) | 1993 28 1 | Available |
| Journal | Heythrop Library Crown Offsite Store [up to 2 working days] | TREV 1987-88 (Browse shelf (Opens below)) | 1987-88 22-23 | Available |
As you can see the earliest 1960s volumes had not been captured on our online catalogue, and the following is how one of the two off-site stores’ platforms shows results when one searches for “Teilhard Review”:
If you look closely at the “Barcode Numbers” (in the fourth column above), these barcodes are not consecutive. When the physical volumes were removed from the previous storage location (at Kensington High Street), then packed into boxes, then indexed by agency staff it soon became clear to us: the order of volumes on our shelves was lost “in transit”!
Knowing this lack of the historic shelf-order of journal volumes, I then started looking around “neighbouring” barcodes on the database, by requesting these volumes; the following shows you the result for one search around 707538, which might help you to see that such searches can be like a “needle in a haystack” endeavour:
After 4 requests and ca. 40-60 “stabs in the dark”, I have been lucky to find what we were hoping to find (by the way, the existence of a Heythrop “Book” Barcode on the storage company’s database does not necessarily mean that we have a record on our current library management system of what this volume is – such information seems, sadly, to have been lost in the last 2 moves from one to the next library management system. The Library being an early adopter of cataloguing materials on a computer, from 1990, I believe that we have had at least 3 systems before Koha, the current one!):
Most importantly, we have just found all issues of The Teilhard Review, from vol. 1 (1966) to vol. 27 (1992), and I will gradually add more, when I find more, but for now this looks already much more helpful:
But as you hopefully see, or can now imagine, this is a very time-intensive approach to finding things, whilst I also need to manage a library, order and catalogue books, deal with invoices, approve bank transfers, … , and help with some journal subscriptions and journal issues! If you would like to follow our progress on finding issues from this journal, please keep checking-in, and view our catalogue record for The Teilhard Review, at https://hey.koha.openfifth.net/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=43137.
Let’s hope that we will be able to obtain external funding to find more journal issues soon! Some of our journal or serials holdings are at least unique to the UK! And as the above examples shows there are people who are interested in our serials, and the more our serials holdings will be clear from our catalogue the better!
CG