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Catholic Resources in Digital Form: Home

Catholic Resources in Digital Form

  • Catholic Open Access Religion Journals                     

    • The list of 146 journals was compiled by Barnaby Hughes, CLA member and metadata editor for Catholic serials at Atla. His criteria for inclusion are: open access (OA), Catholic publisher/Catholic content, peer-reviewed, and focused on religion.  Of the 146 journals, 24 are published in the U.S., 94 are indexed in Atla, and 46 are listed in DOAJ. Most have MARC records in WorldCat. Contact Barnaby Hughes with questions or updates.

  • American Catholic History Classroom                                   
    • A resource for educators and researchers from the Catholic University of America. The American Catholic History Classroom is a free primary-source site featuring a range of materials related to the American Catholic experience.  Site materials focus on historical topics such as race, living wage and industrialization issues, education, and Catholic-Jewish relations.
  • The Archivist's Nook
    • This blog covers materials in the Catholic University of America's Archives. Posts are authored by Catholic University staff (three per month) and they will provide history on the university, the archives, and archival holdings. The blog started in March 2015.
  • The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA)                                               
    • The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) strives to democratize access to the best data on religion. ARDA includes American and international collections and develops features for educators, journalists, religious congregations, and researchers. Pieces included in ARDA are submitted by the religion scholars and research centers from around the world.
  • Brick and Mortar: Pieces of Catholic Chicago
    • This exhibit, the final project of Christopher Cantwell's Fall 2012 course "Catholicism in U.S. History" at the University of Illinois at Chicago, provides snapshots of the shared and divergent strains of Chicago’s Catholic history. It uses Chicago as a window through which to explore some of the major themes of American Catholic history while using the city’s vitality to underscore that there are in fact many Catholic histories. Rooted in the collections from the Special Collections and University Archives of the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the exhibit is broken into two sections of interpretive essays: Immigration and Politicization.
  • Catholic Hierarchy
    • Current and historical information about the bishops and the dioceses of the Catholic Church.
  • The Catholic Periodical Index
    • The entire index is 13 volumes spanning the years 1930-1966. This digitized version includes volume 1 (1930-1933).
  • Catholic Reference Resources: Updated McCabe
    • This site seeks to update James McCabe's A Critical Guide to Catholic Reference Books (1989).  McCabe provided a critical introduction to over 900 of the most important reference books in English and foreign languages whose contents or point of view relate in some way to Catholicism.  The books listed in McCabe’s guide either deal with topics particular to the Church, such as liturgy and other theological disciplines or they deal with the social sciences, literature, the arts, and similar subjects to which Catholics have traditionally contributed a unique perspective.
  • Catholics & Cultures
    • This is a new global initiative sponsored by the Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J. Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross to explore the religious lives and practices of Catholics around the world. The website is a growing, changing chronicle of what it means to be Catholic in a particular culture and context today. It features scholarly articles, videos, slideshows, audio clips, demographic data and bibliographic resources. Viewers may browse by country or by themes such as "Family, Marriage & Gender Roles," "Shrines and Pilgrimage," "Home Practice," and "Worship." The site also begins to explore the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches. 
  • Convocate
    • This database created at the University of Notre Dame is a research tool for investigating the connections between international human rights and Catholic social teaching. It searches theological and legal documents simultaneously, returning results in such a way that users are able to compare these bodies of thought side by side. While the main focus is comparative research, the database also serves as an unparalleled resources for those interested more generally in documents one or the other domain. 
  • Crowdmap the Crusades
    • A proof-of-concept transcription and mapping project, Crowdmap the Crusades generates and publishes maps of the place names mentioned in "The Song of the First Crusade," an Old French text attributed to Baudri of Bourgueil. It helps to establish interdisciplinary collaboration between literary scholars and historians, particularly in areas where the exact locations of places are most difficult to determine with certainty.
  • Dead Man Walking Teaching Kit
    • This teaching kit, made available by the DePaul University Library Special Collections and Archives, which includes primary sources available for viewing or download and curricular materials for teachers, is meant to complement, enhance, deepen, and challenge the experience for those reading, performing, or viewing Dead Man Walking. These digitized primary sources are but a sampling of the Sr. Helen Prejean papers, which provide a unique and intimate perspective on the death penalty and intersecting social justice issues, the development of Sr. Helen’s activism, and the creative and practical processes of writing and publishing books and bringing the story to screen and stage.
       
  • Digital Catholica Subject Guide: Selected collections of digitized Catholic materials from the libraries of CRRA institutions
    • This research guide was created especially to link you to a selection of digitized materials on many aspects of Catholicism in the United States. All of these collections are owned by libraries of member institutions of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA), and have been digitized so that these materials can be easily accessed by researchers around the world.
  • French and Spanish Missions in North America                             
    • This resource describes Spanish and French missionizing in North America.  This site contains historic, primary source maps and includes a Dynamic TimeMap of Mission History, along with descriptive text and narratives.
  • Guide to Catholic Literature
    • This guide to Catholic literature is an 8 volume collection with all volumes complete except for volume 5. Date ranges for the collection span from 1888 to 1967.
  • International Mission Photography Archive (IMPA)
    • The International Mission Photography Archive (IMPA) offers historical images from Protestant and Catholic missionary collections in Britain, Norway, Germany, and the United States. The photographs offer a visual record of missionary activities and experiences in Africa, China, Madagascar, India, Papua-New Guinea, and the Caribbean.
  • Jesuit Libraries Project
    •  An online reconstruction of Loyola's first library catalogue, c. 1878, which listed approximately 5,100 titles encompassing over 8,000 volumes. It is arranged in six sections – Pantology, Theology, Legislation, Philosophy, Literature, and History – that reflect the way in which Jesuits taught and gave order to the world of knowledge. These divisions raise important questions about late nineteenth-century urban Jesuit and Catholic education, intellectual life, and identity.
  • The Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project
    • The goal of the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project is to uncover the history of the acquisition and use of Loyola's original library books. It grew out of an initiative to reconstruct the earliest surviving library catalogue of St. Ignatius College (founded 1870), the forerunner to Loyola University Chicago. In the course of this work, it was discovered that over 1,750 original books still survive in the Loyola university libraries today -- in Special Collections, in the Library Storage Facility, even still circulating in the main stacks of the Cudahy Library.
  • The Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project Flikr
    • The purpose of the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project is to reveal the history of the Catholic intellectual heritage at Loyola. This Flickr site will create a participatory community of bibliographers, academics, private collectors, alumni, and students interested in the origins of Jesuit-held books. Our hope is that this undertaking will serve to reconstruct important aspects of the Catholic intellectual tradition by identifying past donors and virtually reuniting dispersed collections. Commenting and tagging functions within the site give users the opportunity to contribute their own knowledge. Not only will this site provide a visual index of the rich variety of works in a late nineteenth-century Jesuit Library, but it will also become a site for conversations about the importance of print to the Catholic intellectual heritage.
  • Journal of Global Catholicism
    • The recently launched Journal of Global Catholicism is an online, open access, international, interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal. Its purpose is to foster the understanding of diverse forms of lived Catholicism with attention to their significance for theoretical approaches in anthropology, history, sociology, media studies, psychology, theology, and philosophy. 
  • The National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS)
    • The National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS) is creating a nexus where faith and culture, conflict and reconciliation, diversity and unity, can meet and discover new intellectual and religious insights based upon the life, work, and influence of John Henry Newman. NINS provides access to the Newman Reader (NR). The purpose of NR is to make the written works of Cardinal Newman available in as complete and accessible a manner as resources allow.
  • The Official Catholic Directory
    • This collection, coordinated and hosted by Villanova University Falvey Memorial Library, collects together the "Official Catholic Directory", likely started in 1822 for the first North American publication. Included are the preceding names of this serial including but not limited to: "The Official Catholic directory and clergy list", "The Catholic directory, almanac and clergy list", "Hoffmans' Catholic directory, almanac and clergy list quarterly". Volumes are being contributed from Villanova University collections as well as from Digital Library partners including: Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historical Research Center; the American Catholic Historical Society; and others. Digitization status: ongoing.
  • The Portal to Jesuit Studies
    • A free service provided by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, the Portal offers informed direction to some of the richest materials associated with the Society of Jesus located at a variety of websites. The Portal grants online access to a curated and fully searchable collection of important primary sources and some of the latest secondary scholarship related to the history, spirituality, educational heritage, and pedagogy approach of the Society of Jesus. The Portal also hosts online resources, such as key documents in Jesuit history and a forthcoming lexicon of Jesuit terminology–both of which will receive regular updating.
  • Religion Commons

    • The Religion Commons is one part of the much wider Digital Commons Network, an open access institutional repository. The site contains a host of scholarly sources on several disciplines. The Religion Commons is broken down for researchers into sub-disciplines ranging from “Liturgy and Worship” to “Ethics in Religion.” Of the 173 participating institutions, top contributors include Pepperdine University, Asbury Theological Seminary, George Fox University, University of Dayton, and Liberty University.

  • Religion in American History
    • This link navigates to a specific post, A more catholic American Catholic Historical Association: Recapping the Annual Meeting of the ACHA, which overviews the central message and events at the the annual ACHA meeting in New York. The post was produced by Pete Cajka and the Cushwa Center at the University of Notre Dame. The site itself is a group blog dedicated to a scholarly articles on topics relating to religion and the US history.
  • Treasures of the CRRA: Women Religious
    • This digital exhibit began with the idea of highlighting some of the rare and unique resources that are available as bibliographic citations and finding aids through the Catholic Resource Research Alliance (CRRA)’s consortial database, the Catholic Portal. Women religious is one of the major collection themes of the Alliance; however, unlike other kinds of materials, many of these resources have not been fully documented or cataloged and it is often frustrating for researchers to locate them. The exhibit's creators hoped that the exhibit would highlight the spirituality and courage of these women who serve as health and educational professionals, as missionaries and social workers, and who live their lives as part of a community of faith.
  • The Vatican Library
    • Holdings include the Vatican’s 8,900 incunabula (books printed before 1501): the Sifra, a Hebrew manuscript written a millennia ago, a 4th century manuscript of the Greek Bible and the De Europa of Pope Pius II, printed around 1491.
  • Who were the Nuns? A Prosopographical Study of the English Convents in exile 1600-1800
    • Since 2008, the "Who were the nuns?" project team has been investigating the membership of the English convents in exile, from the opening of the first institution in Brussels to the nuns’ return to England as a result of the French Revolution and associated violence. Most were enclosed convents, in theory cut off from the outside world. However in practice the nuns were not isolated and their contacts and networks spread widely. On this website you will find a database of the membership, family trees, edited documents, maps, and analysis of the nuns’ experiences.
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