Heythrop Library

First officer’s log #2. 31 July 2026. The LJC teaching year has finally drawn to a close earlier this month, and with it, the regular classes that take place at the Centre have taken a break for the summer. This means that with slightly fewer in-person visitors to the library to deal with, July and August are ideal months for getting on with some investigative work on our holdings.

In the offsite stores there are many boxes of historic journals, which have been neither catalogued on our system properly or even indexed onto the Crown or DeepStore platforms! This makes it impossible for both the library staff and our users to see what journals we have in some cases. I and the rest of the team have been ordering boxes from offsite and working hard to write up the necessary information onto both systems.

Each box we’ve received so far has had some surprises inside; it is a little like signing up to a mystery gift box service! With many thousands of boxes, it will take us a very long time to complete this work, but we hope that by chipping away at it when our workloads allow, we are gradually making our journal holdings less mysterious for the benefit of our users.