The Catholic Research Resources Portal, or "Catholic Portal," is the "online catalog" of CRRA and provides global, freely available access to rare, unique and/or uncommon materials in libraries, seminaries, special collections and archives. By electronically bringing together resources in many formats from many collections, the Portal enables easy, effective and global discovery of Catholic research resources.
The Portal is a core component of the CRRA's mission and presently contains records to rare and unique member-held resources in all formats, and a growing number of resources available in digital form, or, "full text items."
The Portal uses the open source application VuFind to index and search the metadata records describing members' rare, unique, and uncommon materials. The process begins with the acquisition of MARC and/or EAD files from participating institutions. VuFind's underlying indexer, Solr/Lucene, is then used to index all records. Once indexed, the system supports free text and field-specific searches. Results are displayed with cover art, when available, and provide a number of Web 2.0 features such as facet browse, "Add to my favorites," and "Make a comment."
Three Minute Video Introduction to the Portal
"The Catholic Portal: What It Is and How to Use It" Research Guide
