YM Library & Resource Centre

Yearly Meeting Library and Resource Centre

The Yearly Meeting Library and Resource Centre is a collection that is only available to Friends in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The Library was formally established in 2007 as a Yearly Meeting collection and is housed at the Quaker Settlement in Whanganui.  The collection is based on publications by early Quaker writers sourced from Woodbrooke by Friends in Wellington in the late 1970s.  These are stamped as being from the Littleboy collection.  Some of these are old and fragile and housed in acid free boxes. This early collection was added to with significant donations from Friends in Aotearoa New Zealand, particularly; Dorothy Johnson, Margaret Caverhill and later Barbara and Neil Mountier.  There have been other donations over the years.  In the early years of the Settlement the library collection was looked after by Frances Menefy. The current collection contains over 3000 items: books, pamphlets, study resources, national newsletters, and copies of some oral histories of Friends in Aotearoa New Zealand (to see the oral histories held check the oral histories listing). The focus is on material about Quakers and Quakerism, or written by Quakers.  Material about Quakers or written by Quakers in Aotearoa New Zealand is actively collected.