2017 American Theological Library Association Annual Conference

The Library of Congress uses volunteer Name Authority-trained librarians to create cataloging records for their Electronic Cataloging in Publication (E-CIP) program. This session will describe the details, process, expectations, drawbacks and rewards of participation in the project.

When the Franciscan School of Theology (FST) relocated the school to Oceanside, CA, the American Academy of Franciscan History (AAFH) and two containers of books that belonged to the organization relocated as well. Over the next two summers the librarian organized and managed an inventory project to weed these 13,000 books. The goal was to catalog and integrate retainable material into the new FST Library. During the inventorying we came across several boxes of extremely rare ephemeral material from South America, originally collected and bound by Antonine Tibesar, long-time director of the AAFH. Ultimately, the librarian and the AAFH agreed that these roughly 600 objects should be preserved digitally and made available to potential users.

This presentation will discuss this digitization project from inventory to access. It will cover the finer points of the inventory process and procedure, the history and condition of the material that was recovered from the containers, how and why we digitized it, how we acquired grant funding for the project, and how we plan to make the digitized collection accessible.

Dr. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law school. He is an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights and human rights in cross-cultural perspectives. He has been invited to speak by the Diversity Committee to help broaden understanding of Islam, human rights, and their part in our current culture.

Sebastian Castellio (1515-1563) was a largely forgotten but a very interesting reformer who worked with Jéan Calvin but got into a fierce conflict with him about persecution of heretics. As one of the first theologians to propose a freedom of conscience in the matters of doctrine, Castellio placed ethics above dogmatics, foreshadowing the Enlightenment and even liberal theology.