Co-operative history

The Rochdale area is famous for its historic links with the co-operative movement, including the Rochdale Pioneers and the formation of the Co-operative Wholesale Society.

We put a lot of material on the Co-operative Movement onto the old version of the Rochdale Council web site as part of our New Opportunities Fund funded digitisation project.

That material has now been successfully migrated to the Leisure Trust's Link4Life web site, which houses Rochdale's Local Studies pages.

The Local Studies Portal now includes a section providing detailed links to these pages as well as preset searches of the Library Catalogue for materials in the Co-operative Collection and the Local Studies collections and a selection of preset searches of the Newspaper Index.

Newspaper Index update

The Newspaper Index is a catalogue of newspaper cuttings and articles held on microfilm in our local studies collections. The Index started as a project in Middleton Library in the 1980s; in the late 1990s we started transferring the data in the old card index to the searchable database that's part of the Community Resources Module of our Dynix library management system. As part of the NOF-funded digitisation project we worked on with Local Studies a few years ago we expanded the remit of the Index to include material from across the Borough and to make a special effort to get most of the original work online. At the moment there are just over eighty thousand entries. There is still a considerable way to go (especially as more articles are being added to the Local Studies collections every week).

The Newspaper Index is available online as part of our Web Catalogue. We've just updated some of the pre-set searches on the "Themes" page. This includes a new list of locality-based searches. These are searches for articles about places around the Borough (as opposed to articles that just mention locations in their text). It's early days yet for parts of the Borough as we're still catching up with 150 years or more of material.

If you're interested in seeing some of the other material derived from the digitisation project, have a look at the Link4Life web site.

Our Library Catalogue

Rochdale Library Service uses its web catalogue to act as a portal: as well as providing access to records on the Library Catalogue it also links to resources on the web that might be useful to our customers. Very generally speaking we do this three ways:

• Library Catalogue searches -- you choose the type of search you want, enter the search term(s) and get a result. The Library Catalogue includes books; cassettes; CDs; videos; pamphlets; local studies ephemera; newspaper index records; and web documents.


• Pre-set searches -- search routines performed as hyperlinks -- a selection of the more popular searches done on our in-library OPACs plus a few examples of the more unusual items we have in stock to give you an idea of the wide range of materials we have in our libraries.


• Links to resources elsewhere on the web -- reading resources; authors' web sites; and other useful services.

We are also using the web catalogue to provide interactive services for our customers:

• You can build and print out reading lists.
• If you are registered as a borrower in our libraries you can reserve titles online.
• You can renew your loans online.
• You can let us know if your borrower details are wrong.

All of these services are available online day or night at http://libraries.rochdale.gov.uk.

We have published four "editions" of the Library Catalogue:

The "general" Library Catalogue, including everything except newspaper index records.

"Kids' Portal" -- a version of the Library Catalogue aimed at children, with some searches confined to stock in our Children's Library collections.

The Local Studies Catalogue -- a version of the Library Catalogue aimed at people interested in local studies and geneaology with some search results confined to Local Studies collections.

The Newspaper Index -- a searchable catalogue of newspaper articles held in our Local Studies collections.

The Library Catalogue is a work in progress; at the moment we are literally adding new functions and features every other day. Please feel free to have a look around.