In May 2011 we had a visit to the Saison Poetry Library in London, which uses Inmagic Genie.
The Poetry Library is a fascinating place and unusual in that it is a specialist subject library yet also a public lending library. A diverse user group of poets, critics, students and poetry fans use the library. Four books can be borrowed for a month at a time.
It is extremely popular, receiving phone/e-mail enquiries from around the world, many of which are people searching for lost quotations. Only 3 or 4 others like it exist and it is probably the biggest poetry library in the world.
As well as books, 172 poetry magazines are available to read, of which a few issues a year, containing a mixture of old and new poems, are picked to digitise using OCR technology. It is a time consuming process as permission must be sought from each poet or their estate. Digitisation has the big advantage of making each poem fully text searchable, so people searching for poetry quotes online can come across the Poetry Library site that way.
Indexing magazines is also a particular challenge for the library due to time constraint, so less than a handful of their magazines are indexed. They copy and collect together reviews about particular poets in files. They don’t worry about collecting poet biographies as they are large (taking up a lot of space) and tend to be provided by public libraries.
We learnt more about the various ways the Poetry Library uses Inmagic Genie and were given an excellent demonstration of cataloguing in Genie by UKIUG member Lorraine Mariner.
