Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World

I received Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron with Bret Witter as a Christmas present about six years ago, yet in spite of it being on my Christmas gift list, I hadn't read it until now. That is not unusual; all too often I buy or acquire books but don't read them until years later. And so I waited all this time to read such a touching story about the kitten who was tossed into a library dropbox in Spencer, Iowa one frigid January evening in 1988. Myron, the director of the Spencer Public Library, found the freezing kitten the following morning and nursed him back to health. I would say that most stories that are tear-jerkers open the reader's waterworks at the end, with the final pages a sobfest. While that was certainly true with Dewey, I was getting pretty misty-eyed from the very first chapter, when Myron described first seeing the kitten huddled in the dropbox. It broke my heart that someone could be so cruel to a kitten, and to hear how Dewey suffered. The dropbox wasn't even protected from the cold, as the slot had been wedged open, leaving Dewey exposed to the cold all night, as well as all the books falling through it and onto him.

After a meeting with the library board, the decision was made that Dewey could remain at the library. He would be the resident cat, which was not unheard of in libraries. A precondition of Dewey becoming the resident cat was for him to be declawed, which Myron did not write about. I only found out about it on the Spencer Library's website. I can understand how any mention of declawing could backfire on Myron's selfless benevolence. Myron wrote of Dewey's antics in the library and I laughed as I read about Dewey's fondness for empty tissue boxes, especially getting inside and wedging his head through the narrow plastic slit. Dewey loved to engage with library patrons and be petted and carried around. While there was some opposition to having a cat in a public library, the overwhelming response was positive. As a library employee myself, I took great pleasure in reading about Dewey's adventures among the stacks, riding around book carts and sitting and playing with patrons. I could picture it happening at my own library. Without anyone's foresight, Dewey ended up bringing the people of Spencer closer together. This little cat over the course of his nineteen years in the library got people talking to one another, and not just library patrons but the whole city. Dewey became the unofficial symbol of Spencer and as word spread about the friendly cat, the library received more visitors. Visitors came from across the US to see Dewey, and Myron had to cope with the ongoing demands for news stories in print and on television. Reporters and TV crews regularly ran stories on Dewey, and thankfully I was able to find many of the TV features on YouTube, including one from Japan.

In spite of the increase in local library visits that Dewey generated, this did not translate to an increase in circulation, as Myron cited the statistics that were typical of libraries in the twenty-first century:

"After the technology update of 1994, people began using the library differently. Before computers, if a student was assigned a report on monkeys, she checked out every book we had on monkeys. Now she did research online and checked out one book. Patron visits to the Spencer Library rose between 1994 and 2006, but only a third as many books were checked out. In 1987, when Dewey arrived [sic], it was common for the book drop to overflow with books. We haven't had a full drop box in a decade. Our most popular items for checkout are classic movies on DVD--the local video stores don't carry them--and video games."

Thus the library became more of a social hub with Dewey as its focus. People who had never set foot in the library started to come, and Dewey made the less frequent visitors come back more often. Dewey did not just tell the story of a library cat. Myron wrote of Spencer's economic troubles as well as her own personal and health issues which made the value Dewey provided for Spencer and its citizens all the more poignant. You felt for Myron as she battled breast cancer and you were heartbroken at the end when Dewey's health failed him at the age of nineteen. Shortly before Dewey's death, Myron described him:

"He was like a shadow moving among the guests, often unnoticed but somehow there at the end of a patron's hand each time someone reached to pet him."

A shadow that is still felt in the Spencer Library today. Dewey was a rapid read yet contained two errors, embarrassingly both on the same page: "I had sneaked a peak" and "Ten minutes late the crowd was shouting" (very easy to miss).

My heart was touched by Dewey, as well as by the life of the woman who saved him.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain and How It Changed the World

The ancient Egyptians, when preparing a body for mummification, carefully preserved the heart, liver, lungs, and other vital organs in special canisters, now known as canopic jars. The brain was yanked out and throw away as trash. A millennium or two later, human knowledge of the workings of the brain was every bit as erroneous and incomplete.

Until the 1600s, no one knew what the brain did or what function it served. Even William Harvey, the pioneering British scientist who discovered the circulatory system, believed the heart was the centre of human thought and consciousness. Less enlightened but highly influential schools of thought postulated that the human body contained four souls: animal, vegetable, rational, and material. Other theories counted up to seven souls. Descartes and Hobbes, those pillars of the Age of Reason, believed in an anatomy that contained at least a few souls.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, no one knew what the brain did, and no European had ever seen an intact human brain. By the time the century had ended, the most common conceptions of man, god, and the universe had been upended and replaced.

Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain and How It Changed the World by Carl Zimmer is the story of that scientific revolution, a fascinating, complex tale of the birth of neuroscience. The relatively unknown and unheralded Thomas Willis, part of the group of scientists and philosophers known as the Oxford circle, brought the brain and its functions into the fore, and began scientific method into the bargain. Zimmer tells the story against a historical and social backdrop of English civil war, regime change, and religious persecution.

Willis was the first person to accurately draw the brain and other organs, and the book is illustrated with reproductions of Willis' original drawings. He was the first person to draw connections between the brain and conditions such as epilepsy and migraines. He was the first person to bring scientific method to bear on human illness.

People frequently say "The more things change, the more things stay the same," expressing the belief that throughout history, the details may change, but basic humanity does not. Soul Made Flesh exposes the fallacy in this thinking. In a pre-scientific age, people interpreted their world in completely different ways than we do now. The questions they asked, and the arguments they defended, were as different from the questions of our time as those of the believers of Zeus or Quetzalcoatl.

I recommend this book with one caveat. Seventeenth century Europeans had very different ethics and mores than we do. Willis and his fellow scientists performed experiments on live animals, and more than a few humans whose lives were not thought valuable, such as condemned prisoners. I am not squeamish about medical details, but my compassion for animals made parts of this book difficult to read. (This review was originally published on wmtc.)

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's online catalogue.

H is for Hawk

H is for Hawk is a book with an ending that the reader truly regrets.

Helen Macdonald's book has a good ending, don’t get me wrong. The conclusion is well-constructed, bittersweet, and possesses a definite point of change in the perspective. The ending is perfectly satisfying, just like the book itself, and yet I am not ready.

A poetically rendered memoir of a woman whose father has died suddenly, the book documents beautifully—and I mean beautifully—her struggle with this great loss. She fails to cope, and withdraws from her job, from most of her friends and family, and gives herself a noble excuse.

She will train a hawk.

Now, for most of us, this would be an outlandish venture. Not for Macdonald, who had been interested in falconry all her life and had even owned falcons herself. Falcons are rather “friendly”, trainable birds; in fact, for Macdonald, “my books all assured me that the peregrine falcon was the finest bird on earth.” Hawks, on the other hand, are “psychopaths”, “bloodthirsty” and have a tendency to become feral even after extensive training. In other words, hawks are a true challenge.

Macdonald knew this. At eight years old, she became acquainted with T.H. White’s The Goshawk, which outlines a spectacular, solitary failure to train a hawk. Even as a child, Macdonald could see the myriad mistakes White inflicted upon his poor hawk, and the book stayed with her as a wrong to be righted. Now was the time.

The presence of White reappears frequently throughout the book, as Macdonald purchases and begins to know her hawk. She is fascinated by the language of archaic romance that historical, and particularly male, austringers (the practitioners of falconry that specialize in hawks) use when referring to hawks. Hawks must be wooed and their “sulkiness” tolerated, "requiring more the Courtship of a Mistress than the Authority of a Master."

Macdonald’s bird, Mabel, becomes an excellently trained hawk, largely due to her owner’s single-minded patience and all-consuming devotion.  While getting to know each other, Macdonald and Mabel learn to play together—an aspect of hawking that was never addressed in any of Macdonald’s books. Even her “goshawk guru” Stuart had never heard of playing with your hawk. Macdonald finds herself in her own kind of romance with her hawk, and is desperately attracted to the wildness that remains in Mabel. Their relationship is a perfect kind of solitary escape.

Now it is apparent to the reader, with Macdonald’s hindsight, that this is not altogether healthy. But this is where the relationship between the reader and the writer tightens. Macdonald is fiercely solitary but we are at her side for the journey. We are her solace, we hear her loneliness. We become the family and friends to whom she is having difficulty reaching out.

This is why it is hard to let her go at the end of the book. She has shared so much with us and with such eloquence that it is almost like shutting a door on a friend. And it is Macdonald that shuts it, not us. Wistfully, I hope to read more by Helen Macdonald.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System catalogue

Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland

Sarah Moss and her family moved to Reykjavík when she got a job teaching at the University of Iceland. Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland is her memoir during her family's year on the island shortly after the country's economic collapse in 2009. I chose to read this book shortly after my own trip to Iceland, and chuckled over similar reminiscences about shopping and the peculiar ways stores position their goods. Where else but in Iceland do you step into a store like Hagkaup, and find not bread and vegetables near the entrance, but cosmetics and children's toys? Moss and I embarked on similar adventures across the country and our experiences differed as often as they were the same. Moss taught in English and communicated with her students outside the classroom in her native tongue. Even so, she was exposed to the Icelandic language everywhere, yet was terrified of ever using it for fear of being misunderstood or ridiculed:

"On bad days, I still choose to go hungry rather than go into a shop and have to talk to Icelanders. I am ashamed to require Icelanders to speak English and too embarrassed to try to speak Icelandic, even though I know the words. I am afraid I can't pronounce them properly, afraid people will laugh at me, afraid of the paralysing horror of standing there in a shop making incomprehensible noises."

That was a perfect example where our two experiences differed. Where Moss avoided speaking in Icelandic at all costs--except in one brave interaction upon a later visit--I never shied away from trying out the language (although I probably annoyed everyone with my inevitable question "Did I say it correctly?" afterward).

Moss's two young sons picked up the language and she joked about sending her three-year-old to act as her interpreter on occasion. These boys, Max and Tobias, had the kind of fun in Iceland that seems to have disappeared for North American or British children. There is too much regulation here, where everyone from babies to adults has to be protected from the unexpected. In Canada--less so than in the US, I believe--warning signs are everywhere, protecting the populace from anything and everything: traffic, falling rocks, surges of waves, errant deer and so on. You name it: if you can sue Mother Nature over it, there's gonna be a sign warning you about it. Visitors to Iceland will see how brave the authorities expect their citizens to be. Moss points out with incredulity that in Iceland, you can walk right up to the edges of waterfalls without a warning sign or even a symbolic rope barrier. Children play in the lava rocks, around the glacial edges and next to the seething sea, all oblivious to any harm that might come their way. Moss learns to relax and let her children play without hovering over their every move. Her children, and she herself, are happier and healthier for letting her kids be kids. 

In an attempt to learn more about Icelandic culture, Moss embarked on an ambitious project to read as much fiction and see as many Icelandic movies as she could (albeit in English translation or with subtitles). She was confounded by what she read:

"I simply don't understand why the characters do what they do, can't see the connection between speech and action. In apparently gentle novels of bourgeois life, characters rape and kill with no warning, no reflection and little reaction from anyone else. I find the violent episodes entirely unpredictable, never know at the beginning of a paragraph if the person coming through the door is bringing coffee or a crowbar to the person sitting at the table. I wonder why a society distinctive for its low crime rate should produce novels and films in which ordinary family life is invariably punctuated by bloodletting."

and felt the same after seeing many films:

"Two or three times in each film, one of the men says something like 'the folk over the fells are fleet of foot' and then stabs his brother or son with a butcher's knife or clubs him with an agricultural implement."

In spite of my multiple trips to the Nordic countries, even to the high Arctic in January, I have never seen the northern lights. The people must hear that I'm coming and switch them off. Moss stood in awe as she watched these lights, and her descriptions of them made my mouth water, waiting for the day when I see them for myself:

"The bath was hot and I am able to stand there for nearly half an hour, watching the green curtain reach across the sky and contract, like the convulsive grasping of a palsied hand."

and:

"The northern sky, dark over the sea, is mottled with green that spreads like spilt paint, disappears and spreads again."

What vivid descriptions! As Moss travelled around the island she met various experts in all things Icelandica: troll experts, knitters and storytellers, and was transfixed by the views of the northern lights from their rural homes. In Iceland, anyone not living in Reykjavík is rural, yet some of the homes she visited were indeed as isolated as you can be. 

The narrative progressed like an oral travel story and not like a clinical work diary. It was fun to travel with Moss and make discoveries with her, whether they were about the banal or the general psyche of the Icelandic population:

"Nevertheless, it has been clear to me from the beginning that Iceland is a place where the most intricate and important things are unarticulated, partly because intricacy doesn't need to be spelt out in a place where everyone has always known how things are done, and partly because it is unIcelandic to explain yourself."

Explaining yourself--as when signalling or indicating when driving. Moss could never steel herself when behind the wheel on Icelandic roads. 

I looked forward to the chapter entitled Eyjafjallajökull, the name of the volcano that erupted in 2010. Its ash cloud spread all over northern Europe, disrupting air traffic for six days. Moss talked about the initial rumblings of the volcano and her and Max's visit to it, half-ashamedly to a "tourist eruption". Native Icelanders feel trembles and even eruptions as a regular part of life. They would never trek out to see a live volcano; only tourists would do such a thing. The chapter however ended with a longer yet far more interesting first-person account of the evacuation of Heimaey during its overnight eruption in 1973. Thus the title of the chapter was inappropriate. She wrote more about the consequences of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption later in the story when she applied for a teaching job in Singapore yet couldn't leave Iceland to fly there. She settled for a job in Cornwall instead. 

Names for the Sea was full of observations that I myself could have made (and certainly did make, in my own travel blog) about Icelandic scenery, weather, culture and people. I took many notes of passages from the text that were exactly my own experiences as well. Moss kept her diary humorous yet most of all it was real. This was not a comic tale of a bumbling Brit feeling out of her depth clumsily plodding along the lava landscape. You can tell that she would love to come back. Her final line was "I'm still not ready to leave Iceland." and I know she means it.

I shall be giving a photo presentation documenting my sixteen-day tour around Iceland at the Mississauga Central Library on Tuesday, September 29 from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. in meeting room CL3. Please call 905.615.3500 extension 3589 to register. Admission is free but registration is required. Come see my photos of volcanoes, waterfalls, glaciers and the most beautiful green scenery on this remarkable island. 

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

All Monsters Must Die: An Excursion to North Korea

All Monsters Must Die: An Excursion to North Korea by Magnus Bärtås and Fredrik Ekman (translated by Saskia Vogel) is about two Swedes' visit to the DPRK in 2008. Bärtås and Ekman spent eight days in the North and this is their brief travel diary. I recalled everything about their trip from my own time there. Since I spent eighteen days in the North I feel spoiled by the things I got to see that the authors didn't, and while I certainly shared laughs over the same experiences (and I am convinced the authors and I encountered some of the same officials and tour guides on our respective trips) I felt I could have done a better job writing a travel story. An eight-day trip was too short to get into because it's over before you know it.

Bärtås and Ekman and I shared the same experiences with disobedient fellow travellers threatening the travel plans for the entire group. In my small group of sixteen, there were four who were under the watchful eye of the guides for taking unauthorized photos. Most of us, however, had proved our obedience to the rules, and were able to photograph whatever we wanted. However, when Bärtås and Ekman's group left the DPRK:

"The agents rummage through our luggage. Our camera is inspected. The customs officers look at all the pictures on the digital cameras. Pictures that are not suitable are deleted, but it happens randomly. No one gets to keep pictures of ox-drawn carts--that might imply the country is behind in its development."

So I suppose no one got to keep a picture such as this one that I took:

The authors raved about Guy Delisle's graphic novel Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and I'm glad they gave a plug for his book. It is a must for anyone interested in the DPRK, and especially for anyone planning a trip there.

The authors and I visited Mount Paektu, the ancestral home of the Korean people. It is a beautiful mountain with a blue crater lake. Bärtås and Ekman must have seen it on a cloudless day. I thought the reference to Iceland was quite striking, seeing as I have just returned from there:

"Baekdu is the highest point on the entire Korean peninsula. The rusty red and orange streaks of lava on the volcanic rock remind us of Iceland's landscape. The haze between the distant, bluish ridges of Manchuria creates a depth of field like stained glass."

One highlight of All Monsters Must Die was the authors' interview with Choi Eun-hee, a South Korean actress who was kidnapped under the orders of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. Her former husband, film director Shin Sang-ok was also kidnapped and they were held captive for eight years, undergoing indoctrination and imprisonment, all for the sake of producing movies for the Dear Leader and the DPRK regime.

The translation was fine yet there were numerous instances where the English definite article was missing. Such is the case with Swedish definite articles: they get tagged on at the end of the noun and thus might be missed in translation. Vogel made one translating error, calling a man's wife's father his stepfather instead of his father-in-law. The authors made references to several books about North Korea that I had never heard of before, especially memoirs, so I will investigate these.

For the link to my own North Korean travel blog, which also includes reviews of the books I bought while over there, go here (travel blog and book reviews) and here (for more recent book reviews only).

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Few books cover such a vast sweep of time. Harari in his book Sapiens begins at the very beginning, the coming into being of our universe, and moves along at a brisk pace all the way to the future, that is, approximately 200 years into our future.

Harari comes from the Jared Diamond school of big history (for example, see Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel). Harari doesn’t shy away from the truly large, meaningful questions that non-specialist and popular readers of history and philosophy often criticize academic professionals for ignoring, question such as does history have any overall meaning? What is so special about human beings? What is the same and what is different about us compared to other biological organisms? Are we humans becoming happier with the passage of historical time? Any one of these questions could easily fill several monster thick volumes of deep and erudite analysis. Harari addresses all of them in a mere 400 pages.

And there are heaps of topics addressed—many with refreshing novelty.  For example, most people think the agricultural revolution that turned our ancestors from hunter gatherers into farmers was a great boon for civilization. Harari argues otherwise suggesting that people became less happy when they exchanged the bow and arrow for the plow; in fact he calls this transformation history’s biggest fraud. Harari makes equally compelling observations about the forces at work unifying sapiens around the world: money, imperialism, and religion. Sociology aside, Harari hits his stride in shocking the reader with his take on how evolutionary processes shape history. He very startlingly and accurately reminds us that if you turn the clocks back 100,000 years (give or take a year) you would encounter not one but many different species of humans. That’s right, homo sapiens were just one of several humanoid creatures (the Neanderthals being another famous example—but there were others!). We eventually squeezed out our cousins and became the only remaining sapiens. The distant past is not the only place full of surprises. When Harari turns to the future things get really weird. Homo sapiens have only another 200 years left of existence. Yep, 200 short years. What is going to happen to us? Well, in a word, evolution. Science and technology are advancing so rapidly that within a few centuries we will have the power to essentially design the universe. It turns out that religious types were right about the universe being designed—only they thought it happened in the past and by the hand of God. In fact the designing of the universe is something our descendants will do in the future. Let that thought sink in. What it means is the end of evolution because we will take hold of the process rather than allow blind genetic/quantum processes to rule.

I find this book totally fascinating even though I disagree with many of the premises advanced. Let me explain.

Sapiens is a grand narrative of the universe looked at through the lens of science. When the analysis turns to our species the lens comes from the evolutionary biology tool kit. I read the book cover to cover and when I was done I reread certain sections of it, and all the while I felt something was missing. That something, I realized later, was ethics or perhaps a better way to describe it is the moral paint that colours all of our experiences. How do you write a book about sapiens (us) and mention, only in passing, a facet of life that every person who has ever lived has grappled with and confronted at every turn? No one to my knowledge has ever escaped the all-embracing nature of ethical demands. The answer, of course, is that from the standpoint of evolutionary biology morality equals brain chemistry. Homo Sapiens it turns out are not special in any way from anything else in the universe and chemistry (not to mention physics and mathematics) can prove it. So it must be asked, is morality simply a human brain quirk? Is it something we can alter at our whim? Can we—indeed should we—create a pill to become better people? Whether you answer yes or no to these questions, think about what it suggests about the objective (i.e. independent of biology and brain chemistry) nature of ethics. 

The book, which you can surmise from this brief critique, is packed with lots of thought provoking ideas. This observation extends all the way to the final few paragraphs of the book. I have read few works with a more harrowing end than the one presented there. I’ll let you judge for yourself.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's online catalogue.

Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World

I process the new books in my department at the library and just days before I left for Iceland we received Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World by Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe. The volcano in question is Laki, which erupted in Iceland in 1783. Since I was leaving on vacation in a matter of days I did not want to read it then, but started it the day after I got back. I saw Island on Fire for sale in Iceland's bookstores, and knew it would be waiting for me when I got back. Now with the closing of all Black's photography stores in a couple of weeks, I have worked like a maniac processing all of my, and Mark's, photos before the company's on-line photo processing website is shut down. All Black's stores are closing on August 8 yet their photo processing website is scheduled to close two weeks before that, on July 24. I thus had only twelve days to edit close to two thousand photos, and have done nothing but editing since I got back. No gym, no Scrabble Club, no catching up on "Coronation Street". With my photo processing preoccupying all my free time, I could only read during my lunch or dinner hours at work. Island on Fire was a fascinating book and I could have finished it in four days. Instead, it took me ten days to read it. I looked forward so much to my hour of reading each day at work. 

Laki, unlike Krakatoa, seems to be, as the authors claim, a forgotten volcano. Laki erupted exactly one hundred years before Krakatoa, and a century can make a world of difference in the development of technology and the diffusion of news via transportation and media outlets. Iceland was still a sparsely inhabited island in the late eighteenth century and the eruption's effects on the island may have gone unnoticed in the rest of the world, however, the effects on the European mainland were profound. When Laki erupted it blew a cloud of thick, dry fog all over Europe that obscured the sun and moon. The fog lingered for months, and rain could not dissipate it. The result was that in Europe in 1783, it was known as the summer without sun. While the sun shone like a dull rayless orb behind the dense haze, it still produced soaring temperatures:

"The heat blanketed northern, western and part of central Europe. A letter from Vienna, published in London's Morning Herald in September, claimed that 'we have experienced here the greatest heat ever remembered in this country'--as high as 31 degrees Celsius."

The winter that followed produced its own extreme temperatures:

"In Vienna, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who had just completed his Piano Concerto no. 14 in E-flat major, found himself distracted by the bitter cold. In a letter to his father dated 10 February 1784, he writes: 'I have just one more question to ask, and this is, whether you are now having in Salzburg such unbearably cold weather as we are having here?'"

But that is nothing when compared to the effects the eruption suffered at home. Census figures show Iceland's population in 1783 at 48.884, yet three years later this figure fell to 38.363, a loss of 22%. What killed ten thousand people? It was certainly not by the immediate consequences of the eruption. Lava flows, landslides and earthquakes did not kill so many people at once. What the authors claim is that the official cause of death--famine--may only be partially to blame. Fluorine poisoning, or fluorosis, may have been responsible for more human and animal deaths. The symptoms of fluorosis are haunting: weakening teeth and bones, bone deformities, inflamed and putrefied organs, gaping open sores, even the loss of the tongue. Animals grazed and ingested fluorine particles. No one could avoid fluorine getting into the water. The low dry haze was poison in the air and it was poisoning the population; 

The authors devoted chapters to discussing the overall Icelandic volcanic record, including more famous (or notorious) volcanoes such as Hekla and Eyjafjallajökull. They also branched out and discussed other volcanoes that had cataclysmic effects throughout world history. They did not rely on eruptions that shook the earth only in the last two thousand years, but used the earth's geological record to write about eruptions from millennia ago to show how the most violent volcanoes have rocked the world. Island on Fire also looked at the science of predicting volcanic activity and what we can do in advance of an eruption. 

I shall be giving a photo presentation documenting my sixteen-day tour around Iceland at the Mississauga Central Library on Tuesday, September 29 from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. in meeting room CL3. Please call 905.615.3500 extension 3589 to register. Admission is free but registration is required. Come see my photos of volcanoes, waterfalls, glaciers and the most beautiful green scenery on this remarkable island. 

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue