Recently we began amalgamating our collection of books, journals, papers, and reports at BCICS with those of the Dr. Suren Saxena collection, which Mrs. Saxena donated to BCICS. We are calling BCICS' new library, the Saxena Library in honour of the late Dr. Saxena, who was a distinguished leader of the Indian and the international co-operative movement. He served as Executive Director of the International Co-operative Alliance from 1968 to 1981.

Although we had done a general sort of some of our documents in the past, we found that we had not succeeded in creating a library accessible to researchers' needs, including our own. This has led to frustration and, we suspect, missed opportunities. We came to the conclusion that we needed to assemble a more sophisticated library supported by a comprehensive, searchable database. After multiple attempts at developing a suitable system that would cater to the specific needs of a co-operative library, we have finally settled on a homemade cataloguing system devised by Anna-Marie Krahn. The library's development has truly been a co-operative effort. Kathleen Gabelmann co-ordinated the project, Robin Puga provided technical help, and over this summer, with the help of several others, Katie Tucker, a graduate of Queen's and a first year law student at McGill, created a powerful tool for the development of Co-operative Studies.

In our new Saxena Library, works are physically stored by type (for example, Book, Journal, Report, Occasional Paper Series, etc.) and each item is classified by a unique call number according to the general subject and geographical location. Keywords are also assigned to each item; this information is entered into our computer database, making it easy for researchers to both search for resources and, of course, physically locate them. Soon, the Saxena Library will be integrated with our online bibliographic database, and available to researchers around the world through our website. This, in turn, will help to stop the reinvention of the wheel and help all those wishing to find information on co-operatives and co- operative thought ... either because they want to study them or, indeed, to start one.