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Open Access Digital Library launched

The following is an announcement sent to me by Dr Thomas E. Phillips, the project’s Director.


Open Access Content Available Globally

Open Access Digitial LibraryWe at the Digital Theological Library have created a separate, fully Open Access, library in religious studies (and related disciplines) for global use.

This is OCLC’s only fully OA library.  It currently has about 100,000 ebooks and 1 million articles in it.

We encourage you to use it and to encourage others to use it. The more use it gets, the easier it will be to get external funding.

Please let us if there are important OCLC catalogued OA resources that should be added to be the collections. (We can add materials with relative ease if they are already cataloged in OCLC; otherwise it is difficult to add uncataloged content.)

The url is: http://oadtl.org/

Feel free to share this information widely.


Fact Sheet

Mission:

  • Our mission is to:
    • make all open access content
      • in religious studies (and related fields)
        • discoverable
          • by everyone,
            • everywhere in the world
              • through a single search experience
                • for free
                  • forever
                  • in a non-commercial
                • Approach: Curate OA content in religious studies in the Knowledge Base of OCLC’s WMS and make that content discoverable through a search engine powered by OCLC.
                • The OADTL (Open Access Digital Theological Library) goes live on June 15, 2018.
                • The OADTL is the world’s only fully open access library powered by the search capacity of OCLC.

Current Collections:

  • As of 6/5/18, the OADTL provides access to
    • Nearly 100,000 ebooks
      • over 17,000 from the last 25 years
      • over 11,000 from the last 10 years
      • over 5,000 from the last 5 years
    • over 150 collections
    • over 2,500 journal titles
    • over 1,000,000 full-text, peer-reviewed, articles

Ownership:

The OADTL is owned and operated by the Digital Theological Library, a non-profit corporation in support of religious studies education. Its sponsoring seminaries are (as of 5/30/18):

  • Claremont School of Theology (CA)
  • Denver Seminary (CO)
  • Evangelical Seminary (PA)
  • Lexington Theological Seminary (KY)
  • Singapore Bible College
  • International Baptist Theological Study Centre (Amsterdam)
  • Hartford Seminary (beginning 2018-19 academic year)
  • Gordon-Conwell Seminary (beginning 2018-19 academic year)

Content Selection & Curation:

  • Publisher content (e.g., Brill, de Gruyter, University of Chicago, Cambridge, Oxford, Georgias, Archeopress, various university presses)
  • Institutional Repositories (e.g., Claremont School of Theology, Liberty University, University of Glasgow, Harvard, BYU, Duke, Asbury Theological Seminary, Yale)
  • Scholarly Societies (e.g., SBL, Numismatics Society)
  • Public Domain & Creative Commons Providers (e.g., Princeton Theological Commons, Hathitrust, Globethics, Oapen.org)
  • Museums (e.g., Metropolitan)
  • Denominational Archives
  • OA journals

 

How much does it cost?

          Nada, zilch, zero. Our Pledge: “Free for everyone forever!”

 

Believe in our mission?

Help us fulfill our open access mission

  • by alerting us to high quality content,
  • by encouraging people to use the OADTL; and
  • by volunteering to help curate content.

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5 Comments

  1. My first search returned a mix of theological and non-theological articles. The mix is about 50-50. Is this intended or just a side effect of the way the new catalog was created?

    1. You would have to ask Tiom Phillips. Certainly the sources used indicate a very broad definition of the term “Theological”.

  2. Mr. Owens,
    The way that the software works, we sometimes have to activate a large collection with no ability to curate the content. At other times, we can curate content. Generally speaking, the books are more focused on religious studies than are the journal articles. However, with over 200,000 full text, peer-reviewed articles, there are still a lot of religious studies articles.
    The site has robust advanced search features.
    Thanks,
    Tom Phillips

Comments are closed.