Duke Divinity School Library » Library resources

Learn a New Language with Byki

Hannah Rozear — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:25:12 +0000

Would you like to improve your Spanish or brush up on your Luxembourgish this summer? You are in luck…because the library subscribes to Byki Online, an online language learning system that provides instructional materials for 70+ languages. The first time you use Byki will you need to create a new user account with a username and password. You can access Byki here. Byki is just one of many language-learning resources you can find in the library. Discover many others by checking out this comprehensive Foreign Language Learning guide.

Class of 2012: Take the library with you!

Andrew Keck — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:52:44 +0000

The Duke University Libraries and the Duke University Alumni Association have worked together to provide access to a set of online resources available to all registered Duke alumni including the full ATLA Religion Database. Also, the Duke Alumni Card (mailed to you after graduation) allows the cardholder book check out privileges at Perkins System Libraries and the Divinity School Library as well as a number of other discounts and benefits. Finally, your Duke email will continue to be active for a year past graduation during which time, we encourage you to establish a Duke alumni forwarding address.

Religion Data and Statistics – New Research Guide

Hannah Rozear — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:20:42 +0000

How many United Methodist congregations are there in Durham county? What does survey data reveal about the American public’s view of life after death? What are the major religious groups in Bahrain, how do these numbers compare to Qatar? Data and statistics can provide valuable insight into research questions on a wide variety of topics in religion. The Divinity School Library is pleased to promote a new guide on religion data and statistics to help you discover the major resources that collect and publish data on religion. The guide includes resources categorized by: congregation, denomination, international data & statistics, public opinion/poll data, and tools for mapping and GIS. Want to learn more about these resources? Ask a librarian for help!

Update: The new Religious Congregations & Membership Study 2010 was released on May 1, 2012. The study is a county-by-county enumeration of religious bodies in the United States. You can explore the reports by region through the ARDA. A quick overview of the study can be found here.

RIP Encyclopædia Britannica

Hannah Rozear — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:14:28 +0000

Encyclopædia Britannica announced last week that it will no longer publish printed volumes of its 244-year-old encyclopedia. The encyclopedia will continue its publication online with the goal of “delivering the most accurate content available to a broad range of users around the world” (explains Dale Hoiberg, Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopædia Britannica). Some have hailed this news as evidence that online nemesis, Wikipedia, has slain the encyclopedia Goliath.

Wikipedia’s crowd-sourced model of publication makes it an innovative, unpretentious¹, expansive, and up-to-date reference source (watch real-time Wikipedia edits here). At the same time, however, the anonymity of article authorship raises red flags–as evidenced by the frequent warning messages in Wikipedia: “this article needs additional citations for verification” or “the examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.”² In academia, authority still matters. The EB article on “Christianity” lists its contributors along with their credentials (e.g. Duke Professor Geoffrey Wainwright is a contributor to the Ecumenism section of the article), while Wikipedia’s editors are listed only by their IP addresses or usernames. Pastorwayne or Funion987 may well be world-renowned biblical scholars, but there’s just no way to know.

As general encyclopedias, Wikipedia and EB face the daunting challenge of organizing the world’s knowledge in its entirety. More specialized encyclopedias abound in the Duke libraries, focusing on religion-related topics that range from the Dead Sea Scrolls to hair to UFO-based religions.³ A few encyclopedia classics in the Divinity Library include the Encyclopedia of Religion, the Encyclopædia of Islam, the New Catholic Encyclopedia, and Religion Past & Present: Encyclopedia of Theology and Religion (RPP) (a translation of a classic German work, RGG) … the list goes on. Want to find out about other fun or interesting reference books? Ask a librarian for help!

¹Speaking of pretensions, someone needs to tell EB that using the ligature “æ” in Encyclopædia Britannica is just a tad pretentious.
²The former appearing on the Ecumenism Wikipedia article, the latter appearing on the article for the Catholic Church.
³See: Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Divinity); article on “religion and hair” in the Encyclopedia of Hair (Lilly); Encyclopedic Sourcebook of UFO Religions (Divinity).

Jewish Annotated NT

Hannah Rozear — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 19:41:47 +0000

*NEW* addition to the reference collection: the first-ever complete version of the New Testament edited and annotated by Jewish scholars. Co-editors Amy-Jill Levine (Vanderbilt Univ.) and Marc Zvi Brettler (Brandeis Univ.) describe the work as: “designed to allow all readers to understand what the texts of the New Testament meant within their social, historical, and religious context,” (xii). The annotations also serve to bridge connections between the New Testament and later Jewish (especially rabbinic) literature. Contributing Jewish scholars also set out to contextualize some of the difficult and controversial passages that may have prevented some Jewish readers from approaching the text. In addition to in-text annotations, this work features explanatory essays, such as ““The Concept of Neighbor in Jewish and Christian Ethics” and “Paul in Jewish Thought”. Related articles about the publication can be found here: New York Times and Washington Times.

Brettler, Marc Zvi, and Amy-Jill Levine, eds. The Jewish Annotated New Testament : New Revised Standard Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Call Number: Ref. BS2091.5.A1 2011 O8

Biblical Commentary from Historic Sources – New Research Guide

Andrew Keck — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:55:22 +0000

The Divinity School Library is pleased to promote a new research guide devoted to Biblical Commentary from Historic Sources. The guide includes historic commentaries, historical works with scriptural indexes, and scriptural indexes to the Patristics.

Four of the Top Ten Reasons to come to the Divinity School Library

Andrew Keck — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 23:27:51 +0000

It’s on! The Library staff hopes to inspire your creativity by posting our own video. Come on, give it your best shot. Give us another reason to come to the Divinity School Library by entering our contest.

Digital Dead Sea Scrolls

Andrew Keck — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:49:52 +0000

The first fruits of a partnership between the Israel Museum and Google are now available as the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls. Five complete scrolls from the Israel Museum have been digitized for the project at this stage including the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Community Rule Scroll, the Commentary on Habakkuk Scroll, the Temple Scroll, and the War Scroll. In addition to the high-resolution images for each scroll, the Great Isaiah Scroll is can be viewed by chapter and verse with English translation.

Library catalog and QuickSearch

Andrew Keck — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:20:27 +0000

As of July 5th, the library catalog will add some new features and improvements. The new interface includes the display of related subject searches, a “shopping cart” feature for adding multiple citations, a new view of holdings at other area research libraries, and a significant improvement in speed. In addition to the updated library catalog, the Duke University Libraries have implemented a new tool called QuickSearch which searches our library catalog, a broad selection of journal articles, our research guides, and material in our DukeSpace repository. Quicksearch may be particularly helpful for interdisciplinary searching.

Duke Digital Collections reborn

Andrew Keck — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 20:01:37 +0000

If you haven’t looked at the Duke Digital Collections in a while (or ever!), check out their new website where you can search among the digitized books, sheet music, advertisements, photographs, and more. Our digital collections provide you with digital versions of library materials as well as tools to browse, search, and analyze these materials online. The collection includes construction photographs of the Divinity School, songs about preaching, photographs of churches, and the Images of mainline Protestant children and Families in the U.S. collection. If you are looking for a good image or primary resource for your research, be sure to check this out.