Free Research Links

LIBRARY CATALOGS

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library’s mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.

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SEPTLA (Southeastern Outheastern Pennsylvania Theological Library Association)

This association fosters and supports cooperative endeavors among theological libraries in eastern Pennsylvania and the adjacent mid-Atlantic area. Montgomery Library is a member of this consortium of 19 seminary libraries in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey area.

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Directories of Reviewed Sites

Religion on the Web

A selective, annotated guide to a wide variety of electronic resources of interest to those who are involved in the study and practice of religion: syllabi, electronic texts, electronic journals, web sites, bibliographies, liturgies, reference resources, software, etc. The purpose of the Guide is to encourage and facilitate the incorporation of electronic resources into teaching.

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History: Presbyterian

Westminster Assembly Project

For more than 350 years most of the original manuscript minutes of the Westminster Assembly have remained unpublished. These official minutes record the debates of the English, Scottish and French theologians at plenary sessions of the Assembly as well as the Assembly’s inner workings and resolutions. The large three-volume manuscript of the minutes is housed in Dr Williams’s Library, London. These volumes contain 550,000 words and span the years 1643 to 1652. While much of the third volume was published in the late nineteenth century, it was based on an imperfect transcript. This project intends to publish all three volumes of the original manuscript minutes in Dr Williams’s Library, in addition to the recently discovered papers of the Assembly. The publication of The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly will more than triple the available sources on the Assembly and will fill a major gap in our understanding of the Assembly and its documents.

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Presbyterian Historical Society

National archives of the PCUSA, including predecessor denominations. To help patrons locate materials, the society has created several resources, which are available via our website, that describe our holdings. If you find an item of interest you will need to contact the society about the accessibility of the material as our collections do not circulate. CALVIN, the society’s electronic catalog, contains records for over 75,000 books, periodicals, and processed archival collections housed at the society’s headquarters in Philadelphia and regional office in Montreat, North Carolina. The CALVIN records for processed archival collections also contain links to the society’s finding aids. [Note, CALVIN does not include records for most materials cataloged by the Society before 1980 or unprocessed archival collections.]

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History: General

H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies

The H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies is a research center specializing in John Calvin, Calvinism, the Reformation, and Early Modern Studies.

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Post-Reformation Digital Library

The Post-Reformation Digital Library is a collection of  resources relating to the development of theology during the Post-Reformation / Early Modern era (ca. 16th-18th c.), hosted by the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies of Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary

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Billy Graham Center Archives

The Archives gathers, preserves and makes available for use unpublished documents on the history of North American nondenominational Protestant efforts to spread the Christian Gospel. Although anyone may come and use the collections, these materials are especially intended as a resource for the evangelistic mission of the church.

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Catholic Encyclopedia 1913 Edition

The Catholic Encyclopedia, as its name implies, proposes to give its readers full and authoritative information on the entire cycle of Catholic interests, action and doctrine…It differs from the general encyclopedia in omitting facts and information which have no relation to the Church. On the other hand, it is not exclusively a church encyclopedia, nor is it limited to the ecclesiastical sciences and the doings of churchmen (text selected from original preface).

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Jonathan Edwards Site at Yale University

We are happy to present, free to the public, approximately 25,000 pages of Edwards’ writings. Some of these texts, previously unpublished, represent a significant addition to the available Edwards corpus. The next 35,000 pages will go live in Spring 2007.

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Biblical Studies

Biblegateway.com

A free service for reading and researching Scripture online–all in the language or translation of your choice! We provide advanced tools you can use to search the Bible by keywords or verse, as well as other tools to enhance your study of the Bible.

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New Testament Gateway

Welcome to The New Testament Gateway, the award winning web directory of internet resources on the New Testament, currently being updated daily. Browse or search annotated links on everything from the Greek New Testament to Jesus in Film. For updates, new information, discussion, comments and assorted observations, please visit the NTGateway weblog.

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Online Critical Pseudepigrapha

The mandate of the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha is to develop and publish electronic editions of the best critical texts of the “Old Testament” Pseudepigrapha and related literature.

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Writings of Geerhardus Vos

A selection of Vos material.

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Online Book Pages

The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 1.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account.

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CCEL Christian Classics Ethereal Library

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library is a digital library of hundreds of classic Christian books selected for edification and education. The online server reaches several million different users each year. CCEL texts are stored in our own Theological Markup Language, which is an XML application. Texts are converted automatically into other formats such as HTML or PDF.

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Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Online: Abridged Version

This particular site provides access to a number of works from authors such as Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, the Greek tragedians and orators that have traditionally been used in college level instruction of Greek.  The Abridged version also includes a large number of patristic texts (over 600) from Migne’s Patrologia Graeca.

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Liddell Scott Jones Greek-English Lexicon

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University of Pennsylvania Digital Library

Our local index includes more than 25,000 English works in various formats that meet these criteria. All should be free for personal, noncommercial use.

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Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. There are over 20,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog. A grand total of over 100,000 titles is available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources.

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Church & Worship service aids

The Cyberhymnal

This site has over 6,500 Christ­ian hymns & Gos­pel songs from ma­ny de­nom­in­a­tions. You’ll find lyr­ics, scores, MI­DI files, pic­tures, his­to­ry, & more. To use the site ef­fect­ive­ly, you’ll need speak­ers, a sound card & a brows­er that sup­ports Ja­va­Script & XHTML, & can play MI­DI files.

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Free online journals & indexes

Directory of Open Access Journals

This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 2897 journals in the directory. Currently 933 journals are searchable at article level.

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Journal of Contemporary Ministry

Sponsored by Harvest Bible College (Australia). The Journal of Contemporary Ministry reports research and discusses issues related to contemporary ministry, including related theological and biblical questions.

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Kerux: A Journal of Biblical Theology

This journal publishes biblical-theological articles in the tradition of Vos. Many articles published more than three years ago are archived at the site.

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Reformed Faith and Practice

Reformed Faith & Practice: The Journal of Reformed Theological Seminary is edited by members of the faculty of the Seminary, and it seeks to further the mission of the Seminary, which is to “serve the church by preparing its leaders, through a program of theological education, based on the authority of the inerrant Word of God, and committed to the Reformed faith.”

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Religion Online

More than 6,000 articles and chapters. Topics include Old and New Testament, Theology, Ethics, History and Sociology of Religion, Communication and Cultural Studies, Pastoral Care, Counseling, Homiletics, Worship, Missions and Religious Education.

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Review of Biblical Literature

The Review of Biblical Literature (RBL), founded by the Society of Biblical Literature, presents reviews of books in biblical studies and related fields. Appearing in this digital form and in print, RBL is comprehensive, international, and timely. Free, online book reviews of scholarly literature in biblical studies. About 400 reviews per year.

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The Theologian: Internet Journal for Integrated Theology

The Theologian is dedicated to presenting theological and pastoral resources of the highest quality to the wider church over the internet.

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Manuscript collections

St. Gallen Monastery (Switzerland) Manuscripts Online

The purpose of the “Codices Electronici Sangallenses” (Digital Abbey Library of St. Gallen) is to provide access to the medieval codices in the Abbey Library of St. Gallen by creating a virtual library. At the moment, the virtual library contains 383 manuscripts. The virtual library will be continuously updated and extended.

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Greek Manuscript Collection From the British Library

The British Library holds a collection of approximately 1,000 manuscripts in Greek.  These will become available free online over the next few years for the use of historians, biblical scholars and classicists.

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Codex Sinaiticus

Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament.

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Other Resources: Scholarly Literature & Statistics

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Welcome to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public. Consequently, our dynamic reference work maintains academic standards while evolving and adapting in response to new research. You can cite fixed editions that are created on a quarterly basis and stored in our Archives (every entry contains a link to its complete archival history, identifying the fixed edition the reader should cite). The Table of Contents lists entries that are published or assigned. The Projected Table of Contents also lists entries which are currently unassigned but nevertheless projected.

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Google Scholar

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

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ARDA: Association of Religion Data Archive

The ARDA allows you to interactively explore the highest quality data on American and international religion using online features for generating national profiles, maps, church membership overviews, denominational heritage trees, tables, charts, and other summary reports. Over 350 data files are available for online preview and most can be downloaded for additional research.

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Perseus Digital Library

Perseus is a non-profit enterprise, located in the Department of the Classics, Tufts University. The collection contains extensive and diverse resources including primary and secondary texts, site plans, digital images, and maps. Art and archaeology catalogs document a wide range of objects: over 1,500 vases, over 1,800 sculptures and sculptural groups, over 1,200 coins, hundreds of buildings from nearly 100 sites and over 100 gems. Catalog entries are linked to tens of thousands of images, many in high resolution, and have been produced in collaboration with many museums, institutions and scholars.

In addition to art and archaeology sources, essays, and tools, the classics collection features several hundred works of classical Greek and Roman authors, both in the original language and in translation. Moreover, Perseus has created a suite of powerful linguistic tools, all extensively linked to lexica, which permit the careful study of Greek and Latin.

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