Cataloging Project In 1994, the 230th anniversary of the founding of the Society, the project to modernize and improve the Joseph Horner Memorial Library began. The goals of the project were to catalog the bulk of the important holdings of the library in modern, machine-readable form, to preserve the materials in the German American Collection in its entirety, and to begin the process of establishing a center for research into the history of German-America. The Library Project has been made possible thanks to generous contributions from the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation in Cologne and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany. Administrative support for the project is provided by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. In February 1998, the library was closed in order to begin renovation of the library, which included removal of the drop ceiling and replacement of the original plaster ceiling, opening of the original skylight, new wiring and installation of a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. The refurbished library was reopened to the public in October 1999. Cataloging of the German Society's library into the RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network) database began in October of 1994. To date, the Library Project's librarians have cataloged over 24,000 of the library's oldest volumes. Catalogers began with the oldest materials: those collected in roughly the first one hundred years of the library's existence, and which are housed in the original glass cases on the balcony and floor level of the library. Electronic catalog records are being entered into RLIN, a database into which many of the large university and research libraries enter their libraries' holdings. In the process of cataloging, catalogers have found that fully 57% of the books cataloged are new to the database, and close to 20% represent unique titles in U.S. libraries! The library project recently set up a web-based catalog through which the public can access the electronically cataloged records. The German Society's library has always been a "Volksbibliothek," evidenced by the many popular subjects covered in the collection. The library has books on all topics, from history to religion, travel, music, art history and literature. Many of the types of books in the German Society's library would not have been collected by university libraries, which focused on more traditional scholarly materials. For just this reason, the library today has many unique books not represented in research libraries in the U.S., and possibly even in Germany. Today, historians will find many areas of potential research interest in our collection. Some of the interesting subject areas already cataloged include: a large collection of childrens' books; a section of books on parapsychology, including mesmerism, phrenology, somnambulism, animal magnetism and spirit posession; a large collection of travel literature, with many first-hand accounts of eighteenth and nineteenth century explorers on all continents; and a collection of German cookbooks. The library also contains a large collection of 19th and 20th century popular literarure. These are just a few examples of the wonderful books in the collection. Probably the most unique and interesting collection for historical research, however, is the German-American Collection, put together by Oswald Seidensticker, a prominent professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1800s. This collection of over 9000 items contains pamphlets, books, broadsides, and manuscripts on every aspect of German life in the United States, beginning with the first settlers in Germantown in 1683. The entire collection was sent to the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass. for conservation treatment in the summer of 1994. The collection has been treated and returned to the German Society and is now being cataloged. The German Society is continuing to raise funds for the purchase of new materials for the library. For information about how you can help the Society achieve its goals, please contact the Executive Director of the Society at 215-627-2332. Mary Jane Bright Star