2017 American Theological Library Association Annual Conference

The presentation discusses a plan of creating a database of the historical registers in the Library of the Forty Martyrs in Mardin/Turkey, dated between the 15th century and the 19th century. These records relate to ecclesiastic aspects which include: birth, baptism, marriage, and death records. In addition, there are biographies of clergies, saints, notables, writers, and copyists. Furthermore, the lists of ecclesiastic ordinations such as deacons, monks, nuns, priests, bishops, and patriarchs are included. The last major category present in Mardin’s archives is documents relating to endowments and donations.

These archives are important sources for the social religious history in Near East during the Ottoman period. The database would offer direct access to scholars and students of Ottoman history to the sources and the possibility to examine the duplicates of original documents as well as the possibility to search a particular word in the documents. This topic relates also to the area of librarianship, the use of technology, scholarly communications, and programs that apply to religious studies bibliographers working in university settings. In short, the extracted social, cultural, religious, and geographic information in these archives will be stored in a database system and made of use to scholarly research by schema program.

Inviting best-selling author Max Lucado to deposit his personal papers at Abilene Christian University led both the author and the archivist into new territory. The success of the conversation depended on building a mutual understanding of what the collection could mean to students and researchers, and what the library would do to make success possible. More broadly, the paper will highlight principles for dealing with gifted collections and the unique rewards and challenges that come with these type of collections.