The online catalogue
The Vancouver Monthly Meeting Library Catalogue is now available on the LibraryThing website. Many search options are available. For example, try entering one or a few keywords in the box marked “Search this library”. Ours is the 39th Quaker library to include its catalogue on LibraryThing, so we’re in good company. No new records will be added to the card catalogue, but of course it can still be used for books already included.
Borrowing procedure
The borrowing procedure remains the same: members and attenders may sign out books from the VaMM library, located in the Vancouver Friends meeting house at 1090 West 70th Avenue, using the pocket card found inside each book on the shelf. If you are listed in the Meeting’s directory, your name is sufficient. Otherwise, you need to add a telephone number or an e-mail address. Leave the card in the box provided for this purpose, on top of the card catalogue.
Recent additions
The books shown here can be found on the “New books” shelf, unless someone has already borrowed them. Note that not all new books are recent publications, but all are new to our collection.
Book reviews
LibraryThing lets users look at reviews others have written. These are often helpful in giving readers an idea of whether they’d like to read a book or not. Many books in LibraryThing have no review at all, or only a short comment which doesn’t give much information, such as “I loved this book”. Users are invited to contribute a short review (about 10 sentences) of books they read, by submitting it to the library committee, who may edit the review, then upload it to the database.
Quaker texts online
This list contains links to collections of Quaker texts you can read online. Many other individual Quaker documents are available in library and archive collections not listed here.
- Earlham School of Religion (Richmond, IN) > Digital Quaker Collection. “DQC is a digital library containing full text and page images of over 500 individual Quaker works from the 17th and 18th centuries. The proprietary software developed for Earlham School of Religion provides multiple search functions and an interface for viewing pages.”
- Friends of Jesus Christ (Farmington Falls, ME) > Lives of Early Quakers. 11 documents.
- Guilford College (Greensboro, NC) > Friends Historical Collection > Digital collections: North Carolina Quakers and the Civil War. Page images and typescript transcript of the text.
- International Relations and Security Network (Zürich). Type in keyword “Quaker”, there are about 250 publications, many related to the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO).
- The Quaker Archives and Library of Canada. Records and documents of Canadian Yearly Meeting.
- Quaker Electronic Archive. “Quaker writings as well as documents such as minutes and resource guides and basic information about Quakerism”.
- Quaker Heritage Press (Glenside, PA) > Online texts. Includes texts by important early Quaker authors.
- Quaker Pages. “A Christian Quaker web site”.
- Street Corner Society > Historical Texts By Quakers. “This site provides original texts from times gone by, with the idea that those who produced them and managed to post them into the public view were striving to share insights and realizations that might be valid today”.
- Tract Association of Friends (Philadelphia, PA). “Tracts, calendars and books”.
- Western Friend. Western Friend (previously Friends Bulletin) has published a newsletter or magazine continually since its founding. Volumes from 1929 through 2008 are contained in this Internet Archive collection.
- Western Friend. Current content of this publication.
- Western Friend Online Library. Searchable, a variety of documents available.
Contact us
The members of the library committee are Mike Tilley, Jen Witsoe, and Fiona Kelly. Please ask any of us about the VaMM library, we’ll gladly try to answer your questions. We also welcome your suggestions for content for this page.