Creating an Online

Making a digital catalogue for

the Peterborough Historical
Society Reference Library

Digital Library Erin Murphy

2021
PHS Library

The PHS owns and operates the

Hutchison House Museum, which
is a valuable resource used by the
community of Peterborough and
by students and staff to research
the history of the
Peterborough/Nogojiwanong area.
The collection and space needed
modernization to reflect its
importance in an accessible and
dignified presentation.
Choosing the platform
I discovered there were a few options out there to start
this project and I used a couple of them to see the
differences and compare the benefits of one vs. the other.
LibraryThing makes it possible to use the Tiny Cat (Tiny
Catalogue https://www.librarycat.org/) as per their
description: “TinyCat transforms your collection in
LibraryThing into a simple and attractive small library
catalogue”.
Library
Thing
Tools
There is a smartphone/tablet app
for LibraryThing one can also use,
which conveniently scans any book
UPC barcode and automatically
adds it into the library. If the cover
isn’t automatically added, it allows
you to quickly capture it within the
camera in the app, and it will add
it.

Screen shot examples of adding via

scan or manually adding by ISBN
etc.

The LibraryThing widget for

embedding.

Collection view by book cover

 TinyCat is their sister organization which allows free
personal library catalogues, or there is a $3 month option
for non-profits. I have set up TinyCat as a personal library
in order to start building the initial catalogue and it’s
named “Dr Hutchison’s Library” to maintain the ‘personal’
LibraryThing’s status.

colleague
The website’s ‘add books’ feature lets you choose from
millions of shared cataloguing records searchable by ISBN,
author name, title etc. Books can be entered manually as
TinyCat well (most older books need to be entered manually
unless another library catalogue shares it and they have
already created a record.)
• https://www.librarycat.org/
A view of the landing page
Advanced search and tags
Standard catalogue page view MARC record view