Student volunteers catalogue the entire VANISH library

VANISH’s specialised adoption-related library is currently going through a remarkable transformation, thanks to a dedicated team of volunteers from Charles Sturt University’s Master of Information Studies program.

A sandpit for learning

The project began when Daryl Watson, who has a personal connection to VANISH, reached out to explore volunteering opportunities. Having visited VANISH in 2013 to connect with his father, Daryl remembered the library and saw an opportunity to combine his studies with meaningful volunteer work. He brought fellow student Rayne Shield on board, and together they’ve created a project that benefits both VANISH and their professional development.

“It’s been a bit of a sandpit for us to explore and learn about cataloguing, organising a library, and setting up an online catalogue for the users,” Daryl explains. A few months later they were joined by Katie Cham, Emma Denman, Evangela Lines-Morison, Anna Parlane, and Stephanie Tamburrino to form a dedicated team of seven volunteers who have been working consistently on the project since May.

Understanding our unique collection

The library houses approximately 1,200 items—a specialised collection that reflects the diverse experiences and perspectives within the post-adoption community, built over 35 years. Rayne was struck by the range of materials: “I was expecting mostly government documents and research reports, but you have memoirs, fiction based on adoption themes, books for children, and self-help resources.”

This diversity presented both an opportunity and a challenge. The volunteers inherited an existing organisational system but needed to create something more accessible and user-friendly for both staff and service users.

Creating an accessible system

Working within a modest budget, the team selected affordable cataloguing software and began the painstaking work of creating detailed records for each item. They developed a customised tagging system tailored specifically to VANISH’s needs—something rarely done in traditional libraries.

“We created our own tags because we wanted them to be highly specialised,” Rayne notes. “For example, we can filter by author perspective—whether they’re an adoptee, natural parent, or adoptive parent. If someone comes in and says, ‘I want to read something written by somebody with a perspective like mine,’ they can filter by that.”

The team also implemented a warning tag system to identify materials that may contain outdated or potentially traumatic content, particularly important for books from the 1950s and 60s that reflect the moralistic attitudes of that era.

Making the library work better

The new system includes two components: a searchable online catalogue where users can browse and filter the collection, and a circulation system that tracks loans. Staff have been trained to access the backend to add notes or warnings as needed, while service users can use the public-facing catalogue to find exactly what they need.

The volunteers have also created how-to guides stored on SharePoint, ensuring the system remains accessible even after they complete their studies and move on in their careers.

A mutually beneficial partnership

For the students, VANISH has provided invaluable real-world experience. “If we were to get a job in a library at this point, we wouldn’t be doing very complicated work,” Rayne reflects. “This has been a really great opportunity to set something up almost from scratch and figure out how to solve all the problems that come up.”

Daryl adds: “We feel very welcome here. Everyone’s really nice, we’ve got our little zone where we can kind of hang out and Michelle’s just next door if we ever need anything.

And the engagement amongst the volunteers has been a really great experience because we’re all involved in a course which is online—it gives us an opportunity to have a bit of a community [in-person], kind of grafted onto VANISH itself.”

Looking forward

The library project has also revealed exciting possibilities for the future. As Daryl notes, smaller areas of the collection, such as donor conception, intercountry adoption, and institutional care, could be expanded. There’s also potential for the library to connect with similar organisations through digital networks and social media.

“Libraries themselves are less and less about the physical repository,” Daryl observes. “It’s increasingly about interconnectedness with other organisations—how a collection like this can network and interact with other collections.”

The team is currently about halfway through cataloguing the collection. Thanks to Daryl, Rayne and the team, the VANISH library will ultimately become what all libraries are intended to be—an accessible, user-friendly resource to serve the community for years to come.

Browse the VANISH Library collection online at www.librarycat.org/lib/VANISH-Library or contact us to learn more about accessing our specialised resources.