Appendix: Online Resources and Sources in Microform
A. Online Databases and Scholarly Commercial Database Projects
This directory represents merely a small sample of what is now available on the Internet. We are guided here by our own research interests and a knowledge of major databases and companies that we consider important, but it should by no means be considered comprehensive. Arranged alphabetically.
American Theological Library Association (ATLA) Religion Database
http://www.atla.com/products/
Index to journal articles, book reviews, and essay collections in the field of religion. The Religion Database, along with ATLA Serials and a full-text library of major journals, is accessible only through Association libraries. See also the ATLA Catholic Periodical and Literature Index and the collection of African-American journals. The ATLA Book Series includes a series of bibliographies (40 titles) published by Scarecrow Press.
Bibliographic Information Base in Patristics
http://www4.bibl.ulaval.ca/bd/bibp/english.html
The Information Base is produced by the Faculté de théologie et de sciences religieuses at the Université Laval under the direction of Professor René-Michel Roberge. This open-access database organizes and stores information on books and articles on Patristics; to date 47,000 records from about 930 journals may be searched with the aid of indices of subjects, terms, authors, and texts. Searches in English and other languages may be requested by contacting BIBP.
Brill and Inter Documentation Company
http://www.primarysourcesonline.nl/
Many major libraries still hold at least parts of the massive microfiche collection of Inter Documentation Company, but IDC is now an imprint of Brill, and it appears that new microfiche are no longer forthcoming, nor may individual fiche be purchased. Brill has a new digital archive as selections of the former microfiche collections are being scanned and made available online, but access is only through subscribing libraries. The database includes, among other things, Reformation Sources, Early Modern Pamphlets (in Dutch, German, and Latin), records and manuscripts relating to the Church of North India, and significant archives and manuscript collections from Russia. Brill’s publishing program of secondary sources in the fields of church history and historical theology is impressive with some twenty-nine series in the area of religion generally (http://www.brill.com/).
British Newspaper Archive
http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
260 titles are fully searchable, but unlike the National Digital Newspaper Program for American newspapers (see below), a monthly or yearly subscription is required. Searches can be “filtered” by newspaper title, date, and region, country, and city of publication. The collection is strongest on nineteenth- and twentieth-century papers, and digitization is by optical character recognition with its characteristic limitations regarding searches.
Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research
http://cbsr.ucr.edu/
The North American branch of the English Short Title Catalog project is located at the University of California, Riverside. In addition to ongoing bibliographic work on the ESTC, the Center is presently cataloging early English serials (from ca. 1620) and some 5,000 records of newspapers and periodicals have already been added to the ESTC.
Clergy of the Church of England Database
http://theclergydatabase.org.uk/
The Clergy of the Church of England Database makes the records of clergy lives available for the period 1540-1835 and is fully searchable. The website supplies supporting research aids including maps and a glossary of terms. In addition to the vital and career data of individuals, there is information on parishes and schools making this open-access, regularly maintained site extremely important for research on the national church.
The Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts (formerly Ad Fontes)
http://solomon.tcpt.alexanderstreet.com/
The Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts contains Western European and British works, ca. 1500-1700, in Latin, English, French, and German, that are fully searchable as well as viewable in facsimile, but by subscription only. It currently includes a collection of 1,284 texts by some 270 authors. Biblical references have been tagged and works have been indexed topically.
The Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation
http://solomon.dlcr.alexanderstreet.com/
Slightly more limited in scope than the Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts, the number of works in this database presently extends to 845 titles. Part of the bibliography is listed on the publisher’s home page http://
alexanderstreet.com/products (search “bibliographies” under Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation), but like its Protestant counterpart, it is available by subscription only.
EBSCO Publishing
http://www.ebscohost.com/public/
The online source is available only in libraries for the former ABC-Clio databases, including America: History and Life (which includes Canada) and Historical Abstracts (which excludes North America). Both databases are vast; the former draws upon some 1800 journals, the latter 2600 journals. Historical Abstracts is international in scope with intellectual and social history subtopics from the fifteenth century forward, and it offers abstracts of journal articles published in some 40 languages. America: History and Life concentrates on abstracts of journal articles and dissertations; religious history is a subtopic. The retrospective coverage of both is only to the mid-1950s. Both databases have expanded versions entitled “With Full Text” that offer full texts of articles since 1990 (though these full-text subsets are far more limited in the number of journals covered).
The English Short Title Catalogue
http://estc.bl.uk/
The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) is an open-access catalogue hosted by the British Library. It offers full bibliographic information and library holdings for all printed sources in the British Isles and North America between 1473 and 1800. Information about ESTC acquisitions is constantly updated on the web page. Microfilmed items and those that are available through Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online are noted in the bibliographic record. Much of the project for the period 1701-1800 was done at the University of California, Riverside, for which see the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research above. For the Universal Short Title Catalogue and other Western-language STCs, see Bibliography II.C.1 above.
Gale Cengage Learning
http://www.gale.cengage.com/
First introduced in 2005, Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is the most important primary-source database for historians of English-language texts in the period 1701-1800. Fully searchable, the collection since 2010 embraces approximately 180,000 titles (over 205,000 vols.), mainly in English, but available only through institutional subscription. Gale Cengage also provides a vast database in its Nineteenth Century Collections Online, and offers access to a large library of digitized British newspapers and periodicals. For additional content, one should consult the Database Title List.
InteLex Past Masters
http://www.nlx.com/home
Access to this series is limited to institutional, mainly university subscriptions. It provides full critical texts of the works of such leading figures as St. Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, John Locke, Martin Luther, George Berkeley, René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and Søren Kierkegaard, to name a few. InteLex has produced electronic copies of Augustine’s Opera Omnia, Anselm’s major works, and Aquinas’s Summa Theologica in English and Latin. Recent areas of text conversion focus on the correspondence of significant figures and women writers.
Internet Ancient History Sourcebook
http://legacy.fordham.edu/Halsall/ancient/asbook.asp
Paul Halsall created and maintains three well-known, open-access sites of primary-source materials that are copy-permitted, but not in every case copyright-free. Materials located at Fordham are supplemented by a large number of links to other sites, and some general guidance is provided for historical research on the Internet. Links to images and maps enhance the overall value of this project. Church history is represented in the Ancient Sourcebook under the heading “Christian Origins.” A supplemental series includes an “Internet Women’s History Sourcebook.”
Internet Medieval Sourcebook
http://legacy.fordham.edu/Halsall/sbook.asp
Of Halsall’s three main sourcebooks, the Medieval Sourcebook has the most extensive collection of texts and links. The pertinent sections for our purposes are those found under “Medieval Church” and “Byzantium.” On Byzantine sources researchers should also visit the site that represents Halsall’s own specialization (http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/byzantium/index.asp). The list of topics for the Medieval Sourcebook concludes chronologically with the Renaissance and Reformation so that both the Medieval Sourcebook and the Modern Sourcebook should be searched for the Reformation.
Internet Modern Sourcebook
http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.asp
This Sourcebook begins with the Reformation and a serviceable number of standard sources and links to other sites. Documents on religious groups are scattered throughout the remaining, well-organized outline of history, with one section dedicated to “19th Century Religion” and another to “Religion since 1945.”
Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
http://www.itergateway.org/
With the goal of developing and distributing online resources for the period 400-1700, Iter’s ten partners and associates include such distinguished centers and societies as The Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, and the Medieval Academy of America. In collaboration with these and other organizations it publishes six journals, several monograph series, a Bibliography of English Women Writers, 1500-1640, and the massive, regularly updated Iter Bibliography of secondary sources, all by subscription.
Library of Congress: American Memory
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html
The digitized materials in the “American Memory” project of the Library of Congress are important for American church history. The open-access resource has “Nineteenth-Century Books,” mainly for the period 1850-80 (10,000 volumes produced in collaboration with Michigan State University Libraries). It also has collections of Sunday School Books, “The Church in the Southern Black Community, 1780-1924,” and a collection of materials on “American Women,” all with open access. These primary sources are supported by authoritative articles arranged by topic.
Medieval and Early Modern Data Bank
http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/memdb/
This effort, though not directly related to church history as such, may have some applications related to the contexts of the Church and should be applauded as an open-access site. It is sponsored jointly by Rutgers University and by the Research Libraries Group, Inc. and concentrates on quantifiable data such as monetary records, currency exchange rates, and prices of commodities and wages. MEMDB is co-directed by Prof. Rudolph M. Bell of Rutgers University and Prof. Martha C. Howell of Columbia University.
H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies
http://www.calvin.edu/meeter/
The center at Calvin College and Seminary is a resource for early modern studies housing a significant collection of rare books by sixteenth-century Reformers, including a major collection of first editions and early printings of Calvin’s works, a vast collection of microform materials on all aspects of the sixteenth-century Reformed tradition, and a complete, searchable database of articles, essays, and lectures on Calvin and Calvinism. Links to the major scholarly databases such as EEBO, ECCO, JSTOR, ATLA, and Project Muse are available through the adjoining Hekman Library. The Meeter Center also offers fellowships for scholars and graduate students.
Monumenta Germaniae Historica
http://www.mgh.de/
The classic resource of critical editions of primary texts in Latin and German is in process of digitization and online at the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek: now includes the Diplomata, Epistolae, and the Scriptores sections, with large portions of the Leges and Antiquitates now completed.
National Digital Newspaper Program
http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/
Americanists who use any form of newsprint in their research should now begin with this massive searchable database maintained and regularly expanded by the Library of Congress with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A guide for early colonial newspapers dating from 1690 is available, but the holdings for full-text newspapers concentrate on the period 1836-1922, all open access. See also the entry for Readex below.
Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)
http://www.oclc.org/en-us/home.html
OCLC offers its own massive database of hundreds of linked libraries, nationwide and foreign, through ArticleFirst, FirstSearch, and WorldCat. Guidance for such things as manuscript and newspaper collections is found by limiting the type of resource to “Archival Materials,” but OCLC services are available only by logging into libraries. FirstSearch and WorldCat are vast, but have at times the disadvantage of abundance and ought to be used with carefully designed Boolean searches.
Persée
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home
Persée is an open-access database that includes a vast array of French journals, proceedings, and series in the humanities and history. It includes entire printed runs of journals extending back into the nineteenth century.
Perseus Digital Library
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collections
The collection at Tufts University is well known for its contribution to research on the Greco-Roman world and the Greek and Latin classics, and this brief note will hardly do justice to the wealth of research tools and support that are offered at this open-access site. The purview of the project, however, reaches well beyond the classics: Perseus has also seriously invested in nineteenth-century American collections, particularly the era of the Civil War, and it has a smaller collection of texts from the period of the Renaissance.
Philosopher’s Information Center
http://philinfo.org/
Publishes the annual Philosopher’s Index. The cumulative Index, dating back to 1940, includes some 1500 journals from more than 139 countries. Available by subscription on CD-ROM, online, and in print.
Philosophy Documentation Center
http://www.pdcnet.org/
The Philosophy Documentation Center offers a vast, full range of services to support teaching and research in philosophy and the humanities more broadly conceived. It publishes journals and bibliographies and provides open-access searching of the titles of all indexed articles in series and journals. The Center is constantly expanding its program of digitizing the full texts of philosophy journals; for example, the titles and abstracts of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Augustinian Studies, and Philosophy & Theology are open access with full text by subscription. The publication of important bibliographies includes Thomas Aquinas: International Bibliography, 1977-1990.
Post-Reformation Digital Library
http://www.prdl.org/
This open-access site embraces early modern printed sources of the Reformation and post-Reformation eras (1475-1800), including materials from the church fathers and medievals accessible in the early modern era. Subjects included are theology, philosophy, law, medicine, and arts. The site, developed as a project of the Junius Institute for Digital Research, organizes works alphabetically by authors, can be searched topically, and includes a feature, “Scholastica,” that permits searching authors and their works by university faculty. The library references and links to nearly thirty North American and European digitization projects and includes over 5,000 authors and over 102,000 volumes to date.
ProQuest and Chadwyck-Healey
http://www.proquest.com/en-US/
University Microfilms International is the parent company of ProQuest, a leading vendor of online databases including the now well-established ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Database. Chadwyck-Healey, the humanities publishing imprint of ProQuest since 1999, has recently introduced the Early European Books Collection (pre-1700 continental books) and the Periodicals Index Online (PIO) (1665-1995), all available only through library subscriptions. Chadwyck-Healey is the source for such important full-text databases as Early English Books Online (EEBO), the Patrologia Latina, the Acta Sanctorum (68 vols. of the work of the Society of Bollandists from 1643 to 1940 at http://acta.chadwyck.co.uk/), and the African American Biographical Database, as well as crucial guides such as the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalog, and C19: The Nineteenth Century Index. In light of the commercial nature of ProQuest, it is worth noting that Google’s digitization project has made some of these sources available without cost. For example, the Patrologia Latina and the Patrologia Graeca have been organized by volume at http://patristica.net/, though these resources lack the searching software provided with the commercial versions.
Readex
http://www.readex.com/
A division of NewsBank, Readex is responsible for the Early American Imprint Series in microform and is the major supplier of Early American Newspapers (1690–1922). The web-based Archive of Americana now makes both series available online, including the Shaw-Shoemaker imprints through 1819. Readex also offers African American Periodicals and a World Newspaper Archive in full text, all by library subscription.
Text Creation Partnership
http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/
The Text Creation Partnership is currently keyboarding (as opposed to using Optical Character Recognition) all first editions of texts in the English language from the beginning of printing in England through 1800 and moving these books by degrees into the public domain. The consortium of 150 libraries began the project with the oldest texts that are the greatest challenge for accurate rendering through OCR. Currently, only a limited number of texts are open access, including the Eighteenth Century Collections and Early English Books Online, first phase, while EEBO, second phase, and the Evans Early American Imprints can presently be viewed only through institutional memberships. Because of the use of Standard Markup Language, all individual texts will be linked allowing key-word, phrase, and proximity searches on the entire body of literature at one time.
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/
The Thesaurus includes virtually all Greek texts from Homer through the Greek church fathers down to A.D. 1453. The Online Canon of Greek Authors and Works and the Abridged TLG are open-access databases; the first reveals the contents of the entire TLG, and the second, while abbreviated, contains a large number of patristic texts. From the beginning of the project, the method of digitizing texts was by keyboarding rather than scanning. Some research libraries retain the older CD-ROM version of the TLG, but the online subscription-based version alone will be regularly updated.
Thomson Reuters
http://thomsonreuters.com/
Databases include the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Note that this is a database of the citation of scholarly articles by other scholars in yet other articles. Thomson Reuters also publishes Current Contents / Arts & Humanities, which reproduces the tables of contents of journals. These services are typically available only through major research libraries.
B. Societies, Institutes, and Useful Web Pages (arranged chronologically and geographically)
With a few exceptions, this section of the appendix is comprised of web pages with links to other sites, including links to databases, rather than the databases themselves. The sample of university and research library web pages noted here is merely suggestive of the emphases and guidance one may find in major libraries.
Art History Resources on the Web
http://arthistoryresources.net/ARTHLinks.html
Created and maintained by art historian Christopher Whitcombe, the site organizes the vast resources of the web in a compelling and accessible way ranging from the earliest prehistoric art to the modern period. The sections on Early Christian Art and Early Medieval Art include architecture and are especially valuable because of the number and diversity of the illustrations. Renaissance Art and Renaissance Art outside of Italy for the sixteenth century along with the Baroque section are finely done and can be used to provide illustrations of all forms of art from these periods. An excellent resource.
The North American Patristics Society
http://patristics.org/
The Society provides a comprehensive listing of online resources for the study of the early church and offers a wide selection of annotated web resources with links (see web page under Resources, Early Christian Texts, Early Christian Authors, among others).
Franz Joseph Dölger–Institut
http://www.antike-und-christentum.de/
Key-word searches at the Franz Joseph Dölger–Institut web page will indicate volume number and page of key word use in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum: Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der antiken Welt (11 vols.). The Institute supports the interdisciplinary study of Christian, Jewish, and Pagan culture to the seventh century. An annotated collection of Internet addresses to late antiquity is especially valuable with links to ancient texts, translations, institutes and centers, bibliographies, and secondary literature.
The Labyrinth
http://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/
The Georgetown University resource center for medieval studies. With its focus on open-access resources, this is a valuable site for the early church and medieval studies. See the annotated guide to resources on the web under “Church History” and “Theology.”
The Orb: On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies
http://the-orb.net/
The section on religion in the Orb Encyclopedia is valuable for church history and theology, as is the entry under Medieval Music. The articles with links are written and selected by medieval scholars. The heading designated “External Links” is quite limited, but the “Reference Shelf” is more extensive and includes links to sources in early church history. Evidently the site has not been updated since 2004, and there are numerous dead links.
University of Illinois Library
http://www.library.illinois.edu/clx/medieval.html
The Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a nicely organized page of tools for research in the medieval period and resources with links. Charles Wright’s Bibliography on Medieval Latin Literature is especially valuable.
University of Warwick Library
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/subjects/arts
The Library of the University of Warwick, Coventry, UK provides excellent guidance to web resources in history. For example, the library supports two well-maintained pages under the heading “Renaissance Studies.” “Key Electronic Resources” annotates some 20 projects, and “Useful Websites” provides about 37 links, all listed with brief descriptions and links to resources, some of them major, and many of which are pertinent for research in church history.
The Center for Renaissance Studies
http://www.newberry.org/center-renaissance-studies
The Center for Renaissance Studies, the Newberry Library Chicago. Programs, resources, and tools at this site promote the library’s holdings in the late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods.
The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies
http://www.crrs.ca/
A working academic center at Victoria University in the University of Toronto that lists its own publications, fellowships, lectureships, and conferences, plus a vast number of well-chosen links for online research in all areas of medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation studies (http://crrs.ca/library/resources/). The Centre publishes three main series (two on texts and one on monographs) and a fourth on texts by women in collaboration with Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
The Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
http://www.qmul.ac.uk/renaissance/
The Centre is hosted by Queen Mary University of London and it is characterized by its collaboration with continental European universities on various projects. For example, currently the Centre is engaged in projects on pan-European news and newspapers, in addition to the historiographical problems of the so-called “long Renaissance.” The site provides links to the British Society for Renaissance Studies and numerous related societies in Europe and America.
European History Online
http://ieg-ego.eu/
EGO: European History Online. Edited by the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG). The purview of this site is European history from the Renaissance with the emphasis on transnational networks and communication, richly illustrated with multimedia sources. Under the heading “religion” one finds more than 100 authoritative articles with such themes as “Orthodox Theology in Western Europe in the 20th Century,” “Wittenberg Influences on the Reformation in Scandinavia,” and the “Suppression of the Society of Jesus, 1758-1773,” all with impressive bibliographies.
British History Online
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/
British History Online was created by the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and the History of Parliament Trust. The site has a section on Ecclesiastical and Religious history that offers open access to full-text, published resources, such as biographical information on the higher clergy of the Church of England and monastic and cathedral records. Local history sources can be found through the site’s interactive map. For guidance with research in the UK in more general terms, see the Institute’s web page (http://www.history.ac.uk/), and in particular, the Bibliography of British and Irish History, which is the most extensive single bibliography, updated three times a year (available only by subscription).
The National Archives, United Kingdom
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
The National Archives of Britain (which assumed the work of the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 2003) is the key point of entry for researchers who need to examine materials held by the more than 2,500 local record repositories in Great Britain. The site also includes listings of overseas repositories with collections of manuscripts indexed by the National Archives. The section entitled “Religious Archives” is particularly pertinent. An alphabetical list for the contact information of all local repositories is found at http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse.
National Humanities Center: Diving America
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/divam.htm
The National Humanities Center’s project “Diving America” provides essays by leading authorities on themes in American church history, and while it is principally intended to support the teaching of American religious history, the extensive links to online resources make it a valuable site for researchers as well as teachers.
Yale University Library on US History
http://guides.library.yale.edu/ushistory
Yale University Library provides an elaborate, beautifully organized and annotated research guide for US history with many sections that are pertinent to American religious history. The digitized primary source collections that Yale subscribes to are extensive, and while “church history,” as such, is not prominently displayed, almost all the resources for the history of the United States will have significant religious content. Primary-source databases are organized under “Colonial America,” “The Nineteenth Century,” and “The Twentieth Century,” and indices and guides for secondary sources are also arranged well and in some cases reach to the level of individual states.
ATLA World Christianity Interest Group
http://www.atla.com/members/divisions/interest/pages/world-christianity.aspx
The ATLA World Christianity website serves as the key portal to existing collections for the study of World Christianity at ATLA libraries. It offers contact information regarding materials in foreign countries and it has extensive links to other, relevant websites.
Korean Christianity
http://koreanchristianity.humnet.ucla.edu/
Professor Sung Deuk Oak of UCLA has produced a stunningly beautiful web page for the study of Korean Christianity in all of its facets, including art and portraiture. It provides guides to extensive original resources including newspapers and diaries.
The following directory of companies and organizations is not intended to provide an exhaustive survey of all the relevant publishers of research materials in microform. It does, however, offer the student some sense of the variety of documents now available and the changes that are taking place in the preferred types of media. Similarly, the descriptions of collections will not include every group of documents that are important to the study of church history and theology, though the annotations are designed to generally reflect the company’s strengths in these specific fields. For companies that have moved their resources largely to the Internet, please see the preceding sections of the appendix.
Center for British and Irish Studies
http://www.colorado.edu/ArtsSciences/british/
The Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder constitutes one of the strongest collections of British and Irish primary sources in microfiche/microfilm in the United States. Starting with a good reference library, the directors have assiduously collected many of the major microform collections mentioned in this appendix, as well as many others that do not bear on topics related to church history. One of the noteworthy strengths of the center is the vast collection of historical materials on sacred music. Finding guides are online, but the use of materials is on site only.
Center for Reformation Research
http://www.csl.edu/library/
In addition to its own substantial rare book collection on the Lutheran Reformation, the library of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, hosts the Center for Reformation Research with one of the strongest microform collections in the field. The microfilm collection alone includes about 12,000 books and the Archives of Philip of Hesse number some 500,000 manuscripts. Significantly, Concordia also retains many of the fiche collections of the former Inter Documentation Company. Besides the Magisterial Reformers, these collections include the works of some Catholic theologians and leaders of the Radical Reformation. The finding guide that describes these materials is found in the Sixteenth Century Bibliography series (vols. 12-19) published by the Center.
European Register of Microform and Digital Masters (EROMM)
http://www.eromm.org/
Registers such as EROMM are designed primarily to avoid duplication in the production of surrogate forms of written records. They are of significant use to researchers for determining whether a microform or digital copy exists and where it is physically located, but they do not provide digital copies, though it is noteworthy that EROMM will redirect the search to the digital copy if available. The European Register is not strictly limited to sources in European countries (compare the National Register of Microform Masters below) and unlike the NRMM, it includes digital forms of material as well as microforms and is open access and fully searchable. WorldCat also lists some 400,000 records that are found in EROMM. When used in conjunction with OCLC’s WorldCat, it is presently a preferred online source for searching for microform records.
Family Search (formerly the Genealogical Society of Utah)
http://familysearch.org/archives/
Family Search possesses one of the largest collections of filmed manuscripts in the world, and some 2.4 million reels of microfilm have now been digitized. The holdings are especially valuable for local history, since Family Search is oriented around vital records organized primarily with the needs of the genealogist in mind. Many denominations beyond the Latter Day Saints are represented, including the Society of Friends, Presbyterian, Congregational, Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic. Some states, for example, New York, are particularly well represented in their local church history collections. Some English non-parochial birth and baptismal registers of the Nonconformists, and many Anglican vital records as well, are digitized and viewable online, but virtually all such registers have been filmed. The acquisitions and digital conversion policies of Family Search is aggressive. The now dated but essential hard-copy guide is Arlene H. Eakle, Arvilla Outsen, and Richard S. Tomson, comps. Descriptive Inventory of the English Collection. Finding Aids to the Microfilmed Manuscript Collection of the Genealogical Society of Utah 3 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1979). Transcriptions of other parish and non-parochial registers are available at http://www.freereg.org.uk/, an unrelated site.
Microform Academic Publishers
http://www.microform.co.uk/academic/index.php
Microform Academic Publishers has launched British Online Archives, but is notable for maintaining its commitment to microform and publishing new series in that medium. It has a strong collection of missionary society records and Anglican parish registers, particularly for London and the southeast, and for Yorkshire. The company has both printed and manuscript materials on British and American history, including, for example, the Holkham illuminated manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many English newspapers, West Indies Mission Records of the Church Missionary Society, and the records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The company possesses a wide variety of miscellaneous documents that bear upon the history of the church, such as diaries of clergy, sermons, registers, monumental inscriptions, catalogs, and a few more well-known medieval manuscripts. A new series that runs to over one hundred reels of film was completed on “Religion, Radicalism and Freethought in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.”
National Register of Microform Masters (NRMM)
http://www.arl.org/
The National Register of Microform Masters began as an annual hard-copy register in 1965 with retrospective conversion to digital form commencing in 1987, supported by the Association of Research Libraries, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1997 nearly 600,000 records from the NRMM were made available through OCLC, and the NRMM as a separate entity effectively ceased to exist. Presently, the best approach for locating items in microform is through OCLC’s WorldCat, but WorldCat should be used in conjunction with the European Register of Microform and Digital Masters, for which see above. For the history of the NRMM and reports on other preservation efforts, go to the Association of Research Libraries web page.
Primary Source Media (formerly Research Publications)
http://www.gale.cengage.com/psm/
An imprint of Gale Cengage Learning, Primary Source Media has built one of the world’s largest microform archives of source materials in subject areas that include church history and theology. The online guides to the collections reveal the vastness of the collections (http://microformguides.gale.com/GuideLst.html), and the company has maintained and expanded its microform sources, such as the Eighteenth Century Collection, while at the same time it is rendering older materials in digital form. PSM has assimilated the microform collections of Harvester Press, Lost Cause Press, Scholarly Resources, Inc., and K. G. Saur (and doubtless others), so that the items pertinent to church history formerly held by those companies now appear here. In addition to its substantial collection of microfilmed medieval manuscripts, PSM has “Incunabula: The Printing Revolution in Europe, 1455-1500” (Bibles and commentaries, theology, and sermons alone run to 5,000 fiche), and a major collection entitled “British Culture: Series Two, British Theology” with more than 12,000 fiche. The church court records of Ely and Chichester (1400-1660) and the most important items from the Tanner Collection in the Bodleian Library on church and state from 1550 to 1700 are available. The company has also filmed Charles Burney’s and John Nichols’s large collections of English newspapers (1662–1820) in their Early English Newspapers series. Searching guides for both the Eighteenth Century Collection and Early English Newspapers are available online with reel and item number. (See both “Primary Source Media Online Guides” and “Scholarly Resources Online Guides.”) Joseph Sabin’s Bibliotheca Americana is on microfiche (representing some 100,000 titles). A collection on Social Problems and the American Churches, and the missionary files of the Methodist Episcopal Church, along with many volumes of the papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and guides are available (for example, in the last case alone for 858 reels of film) that describe the nature of the materials. PSM’s History of Women collection includes a massive array of pamphlets, periodicals, books, and manuscripts. Since many major research libraries subscribe to some of these collections, reels and fiche may often be obtained through interlibrary loan.
ProQuest Research Collections in Microform
http://www.proquest.com/en-US/
ProQuest, formerly University Microfilms International, claims that its “Research Collections in Microform” constitutes the largest available body of microform materials in the world. The collection is based upon UMI’s microfilm holdings including its vast library of microfilmed dissertations and theses and its literary, cultural, and periodical series, and the microfilm series of Early English Books (1473-1700). The latter series alone runs to some 4,900 reels of film and is still being expanded in small ways. The African American Collection with 3,600 fiche and reels of film is notable. The Research Collections in Microform includes Chadwyck-Healey’s Microform Library with strengths in literature. “Christianity” may be searched in the Research Collections Online Catalog. Individual reels and fiche may be purchased.
Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives
http://www.sbhla.org/
The Historical Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention has maintained their microfilm collections but have just begun to digitize a limited number of resources such as the Southern Baptist Convention Annuals. The Commission has taken a very aggressive approach to preserving Baptist materials on an international scale. Many dissertations as well as primary sources are available, and individual items are priced separately and very reasonably. The collections range widely in the type of document, from church minutes, to archival items, to associational and convention annuals, to rare books and pamphlets. The collections are not narrowly limited to the Southern Baptist Convention; rare books by and about Baptists of all branches have been copied from major depositories in both the UK and the US, and these collections range chronologically from the sixteenth-century Anabaptists to the modern period, including, most recently, the addition of materials from Soviet and other Eastern European countries. A vast array of Baptist periodicals, including Black Baptist and non-English periodicals, are available on film. The Commission actually invites requests for the filming of specific documents that have not been filmed before.
World Microfilms
http://www.microworld.uk.com/
This company is probably the largest publisher of medieval manuscripts in the world. Their considerable collections include the manuscripts of Trinity College, Cambridge (413 reels), Queens’ College, Cambridge, Lincoln Cathedral Library (one of the most important manuscript collections in western Europe), and Lambeth Palace Library, including many biblical, patristic, and theological studies. Medieval and Renaissance manuscript collections at six Oxford colleges (the theology collection from Balliol alone runs to 55 reels) and at Trinity College Dublin, and the early manuscript collection of the Westminster Abbey Library have been filmed. The illuminated manuscripts in the Victorian and Albert Museum are published. These projects are ongoing, so that new titles are added at regular intervals. The Archives of the Huguenot Community in London are available, as are the Society of Friends’s “Digest of Registers of Births, Marriages and Burials,” and “The Great Book of Sufferings” from the Friends House Library in London. In the Quaker collection one will find diaries of Quaker women. In addition, a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Baptist, Quaker, and Methodist periodicals are available. But World Microfilms has not limited its reach to nonconformist and dissenting denominations; it has also filmed many Anglican records as well. There are available many seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Anglican materials, for example, bishops’ visitation returns, and the archives of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The company has also filmed the Fulham Papers of the Lambeth Palace Library and the Tractarian pamphlets at Pusey House. Partial sets on individual reels may be purchased.