Library's online resources for Religions and Theology

Boosting the Library's online resources for Religions and Theology in the time of COVID. Many of you will have been made aware of the Library’s efforts to assess and flag up additional electronic resources made freely available by publishers in an effort to shore up scholarly activity during the early months of the pandemic through the April 27th posting. Publishers have now significantly scaled back on such offers of support for teaching and research despite continued pressure on them to do so from HE networks such as JISC. Unsurprisingly, demand for access to electronic resources has of course continued to increase and certainly at a rate greater than that which libraries have been able to facilitate easy access to physical book stock and archives. (The current levels of access to physical holdings offered by our University Library, site libraries and Special Collections are of course detailed on our service availability page).

To alleviate this unprecedented call on resources the Library has been actively seeking to complement our existing and extensive electronic holdings and where possible increase access to specialist materials in disciplines that have been particularly hard-hit. The latest news in this regard is the ready online availability for the remainder of the academic year, ie until the end of July 2021, of an additional suite of primary source materials in the Humanities from ProQuest and its Alexander St. Press ‘imprint.’ Of particular interest to the department is the Twentieth Century Religious Thought Library which grants immediate access to virtual collections addressing Christianity; Islam; Judaism and Eastern Religions, incorporating some 400,000 pages, 900 monographs, and 10,000 archival items, which will hopefully benefit those undertaking independent study and dissertation work in particular. A cross-searchable Religious Magazine Archive (1845-2015) is also now available and the more populist leanings of this repository offers a useful and eclectic source for those looking at comparative religion across this period. You can explore the complete portfolio of these new supplementary resources here.