Coptic Orthodox Church Library Inventory: Managing Patristic and Theological Books in English

When Nobody Knows Where Fr. Matta Is

Every church bookshop reaches the same breaking point. Someone asks for Fr. Matta El Meskeen's commentary on the Psalms. The deacon behind the counter checks Zone B, doesn't find it, checks the warehouse room off the corridor, can't remember if they ordered more in November. The parishioner leaves empty-handed. Nobody writes anything down. The copy surfaces three weeks later wedged behind a stack of Bishop Mousa's youth titles in Zone D, which means it was never in the system to begin with.

This is not a management failure. It is a cataloguing failure — and the two things are not the same. Church bookshops run on goodwill and memory, and memory degrades the moment the same deacon is also serving coffee after liturgy and answering questions about the Agpeya.

The Memento template built for St. Mary and St. Merkorious Coptic Orthodox Church in Sydney takes the problem seriously. It does not just list books. It models the complete lifecycle of a physical item through two distinct stock environments, a procurement pipeline, and an audience-routing system that most secular libraries would find enviable.

What Makes a Complete Record in Patristic Inventory

The Source Category field is the first thing worth examining in depth, because it does work that a simple genre tag cannot. The four options — Coptic Orthodox Christian, Other Orthodox Christian, Non Orthodox Christian, Secular/Non Christian — are not just theological classifications. They function as acquisition filters, audience routing logic, and shelf placement guidance simultaneously. A title from the Coptic Orthodox Centre sits in a different purchasing relationship than one from Oxford Publishing House, which itself requires a different reorder channel than anything sourced from St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Monastery Australia. The publisher field, with its fourteen options spanning Alexandria, Bexley, the Wollongong monastery, and USA church presses, makes that sourcing relationship explicit at the record level.

The Target Audience multichoice field — Mature Christian, Youth, Children, New to Christianity, Teen, Teacher/Instructor — sounds like a basic library convenience until you consider the actual collection shape. H.H. Pope Shenouda III's works skew heavily toward Mature Christian and Teacher/Instructor. Bishop Mousa's output covers Youth and Teen with near-total commitment. Gladys Hunt sits in the Children and New to Christianity intersection. The field lets a deacon setting up a Sunday school resource table filter the database in thirty seconds rather than walking every zone.

The dual stock model is the structural centrepiece. Church Bookshop and Church Warehouse are separate integer fields, and Stock is a calculated field that sums them: #{church bookshop}+#{church wearhouse}. The spelling error in the field name is preserved in the calculation — which is worth noting only because it tells you this was built by someone who needed it working, not someone who needed it pretty. The boolean Out of Stock flag fires independently of the calculated total, allowing manual override when a book is technically present but not available for sale (damaged, reserved, awaiting re-cover).

Zones Under Pressure on a Sunday Morning

The five bookshop zones — A through E — combine with the procurement pipeline to handle the one scenario that exposes every church library system: post-liturgy sales during feast days.

On the Sunday of the Coptic New Year, the bookshop at St. Mary and St. Merkorious will see three months of normal traffic in ninety minutes. Someone will want the illustrated Coptic calendar for children. Someone else wants Fr. Tadros Malaty's commentary on the Gospel of John, which appears in the database attributed to two slightly different author entries (the template carries two distinct records for Fr. Tadros Malaty, numeric IDs 2 and 10, which suggests an import artifact rather than a deliberate split). A third person asks about something that was On Order as of last Sunday — Order Date logged, Expected Delivery two weeks out, Received Date still blank.

The barcode scan field handles physical identification without ambiguity when a book's cover is worn enough that the title is illegible. Scan the spine, pull the record, check Zone assignment and current Bookshop count. The Cover image field provides a visual cross-reference for the same worn-spine problem, assuming the record was photographed at intake.

That last clause matters more than it appears. Records without cover images and without ISBNs — and a significant portion of Coptic patristic material published by small church presses in Alexandria or Sydney has no ISBN at all — depend entirely on the Title and Author fields for identification. The template accommodates this: ISBN is a free-text field, not a validated field, which means you can enter "No ISBN — C.O.P.T Publications, 1998 edition" and the record still functions.

Received Quantity Closes the Loop

When a reorder finally arrives — the expected delivery from St. Shenouda Monastery, say, of a title that has been sitting at Shelf Stock 0 for six weeks — the Received Qty field closes the procurement record. It does not automatically update Church Warehouse. That step is manual. But having Received Qty as a discrete field means the receiving deacon logs what actually arrived against what was ordered, and the discrepancy lives in the record permanently. Suppliers for small theological presses sometimes ship short. Knowing that a monastery press consistently delivers 8 when you order 10 is the kind of institutional knowledge that church libraries lose entirely when the coordinator changes.

The Publication Year integer field becomes quietly significant across a collection that spans Coptic patristic texts from the 1970s through contemporary Sydney publications. A title from the St. George Church Sporting Alexandria press dated 1983 occupies a different conservation priority than a 2019 reprint. It also helps locate the correct edition when two versions of the same commentary exist at different price points — AUD pricing being the final field that determines what goes on the shelf label.