A Basic Booklist for Church Libraries: An Annotated Bibliography (6th rev. ed.)

Citation

Osorio, M.A. (2003), "A Basic Booklist for Church Libraries: An Annotated Bibliography (6th rev. ed.)", Collection Building, Vol. 22 No. 3, pp. 148-149. https://doi.org/10.1108/cb.2003.22.3.148.2

Bernard Deitrick has been the librarian at the Neshaminy‐Warwick Presbyterian Church in Warminster, Pennsylvania, since 1969 and has served as a book review editor of Church and Synagogue Libraries.

It is exciting to read this booklist in an area that has been greatly overlooked. Being able to find penetrating and accurate information about different faiths is important in today’s world as a necessary tool for the promotion of peace and harmony. One can find nothing negative here, and at the same time one desires that this format be greatly expanded in future editions.

This bibliography is divided into 20 sections: Library Resources, Bible Versions, Bible Study, Christian Faith and Doctrine, Christian Living, Prayer and Devotional Life, Devotional Classics, The Nature of the Church, Christian Education, Church History, World Religions, Christian Ethics, Marriage and Family Life, Aging, Death and Dying, Religious Psychology, Religious Sociology, Holidays, Biography, and Children’s Books. The work includes an author index and a title index. A total of 18 guides are presented that cover different aspects of building a library, and five bibliographies are recommended at the end.

Deitrick’s work is meant to help people who set up church or synagogue libraries, those working in religious libraries who are interested in enlarging their collections and those religious libraries interested in measuring their church or synagogue library against a norm. At the same time it is a valuable addition to those sectarian libraries that wish to broaden their horizons with regard to knowledge that will prove key in the building of consensus and positive community interactions.