Electronic Resources Listed by Topic or Function

TOC/What is included here?

The focus here is online (web accessible) databases and reference works, but we have also listed a few old-fashioned books in areas where no online resources are available. Some of the databases are full-text but most are citation databases (i.e., author, title, etc. information is provided, but not the complete books or articles themselves). Full-text databases are marked as such. Resources are listed by topic of coverage when possible. Some resources are not topical and are listed by function (e.g., book reviews indexes or biographical directories).

• Universal/omni-topic resources useful in many different subject areas, including WorldCat, NetLibrary ebooks, AcademicSearch, UMI Periodical Abstracts, etc.
• Christianity/Theology in general, including ATLA, RTA, Elenchus of ETL, etc.
• Biblical studies, including Elenchus of Biblica, OTA, NTA, IRBS, BiBIL, etc.
• Systematic theology and church history, including ETL, Philosopher's Index, BIBP, etc.
• Pastoral ministries/practical theology, including RIM, Christian Periodical Index, etc. Also AV Aids to help you create AV presentations.
• Non-Christian religions and missions, including Science of Religion, RAMBI, ALEPH, IRM, Missionalia Abstracts, etc.
• Miscellaneous religious web sites
• Ancient World/Archaeology/ANE/Greco-Roman classics , e.g., Perseus, AIGYPTOS, ABZU, Orion DSS. Please notify library staff if you have additional suggestions for this category.
• Humanities/Philosophy/Language/Literature/Arts
• Education, including ERIC, college catalogs online, etc.
• Science, social science, and counseling, including PsycINFO, MEDLINE, Anthropology Online, etc.
• Economics, business and consumer resources
• General encyclopedias
• Statistics and brief facts
• Book and Media Review indexes
• Dissertation indexes, including DAI, RIM, etc.
• Ebooks and ejournals
• Librarianship and Library catalogs
• Library ownership: which library owns this book?
• News/current events resources
• Spanish language resources

The Resources

Universal/omni-topic resources useful in many different subject areas

• Google Scholar. This well known Internet search engine attempts to retrieve only scholarly materials. (That seems to mean works that include footnotes and similar citations.) When you are off campus, use this link to search Google Scholar so that licensed (paid, commercial, restricted-access) items retrieved by Google such as JSTOR articles will be authenticated through our proxy server. You must be authenticated to view the resources the library has paid for.
• WorldCat is a key resource for almost any topic. It contains over 48 million bibliographic records for books and other media. It provides nearly exhaustive coverage of English language books and significant coverage of non-English works (but limited coverage of government documents and unpublished works like manuscripts and dissertations). For the most part WorldCat does not cite individual journal articles or book reviews or essays in books. Use LC subject headings just like you would in the library catalog, for example: "Bible N.T. Corinthians, 1st, xv" for 1 Cor 15. DTS owns only a tiny fraction of the works cited in WorldCat, but our InterLibrary Loan (ILL) department can borrow materials for you from libraries all over the United States. Allow two to four weeks delivery time.
• Books in Print via FirstSearch. Lists 4.4 million books, videos, and audio cds currently in-print and distributed in the US. Also provides full-text of 730,000 noncritical (non-scholarly) book reviews. Also lists many forthcoming (not yet published) works. Possible to search for children's literature by age and reading level. Provides cost and full ordering information.
• NetLibrary E-books. DTS has access to over 35K full-text ebooks, almost all dating from 1990 on. The collection covers a very broad range of topics including some of interest to seminarians even though most major theological publishers do not offer their books this way. You may search by author, title, subject. You may also search every word of every book. Search for a title using "and" "or" and "not". The default operator is "and". When you are reading, do not linger too long over one page. If your connection is idle for 15 minutes (for example if you do not advance to the next page in 15 minutes) then your session will be terminated and the NetLibrary home page will redisplay. In other words, they take the book away from you because you don't seem to be using it. If you are on the Dallas campus you may view books without having an account. To view books when you are off campus, you need a personal account. Follow the link above for information about personal accounts as well as information on how to connect.
• EBSCO Academic Search provides indexing and abstracting for about 4000 scholarly journals, including both articles and book reviews. This important interdisciplinary tool is worth trying for almost any information need, especially if you are an extension student, because the full-text for most articles is available online. Unfortunately, coverage begins in the mid 1990's or later for most journals. Coverage is strongest in areas that are not central to seminary curriculum: medicine, biology, engineering, and computer science. However, AcademicSearch is moderately strong in sociology and social work, education, psychology and psychiatry. Unfortunately it is weak in religion, philosophy, communication, arts.
• JSTOR includes over 700 full-text scholarly journals in the fields of history, archaeology, classics, the arts, literature, psychology and various sciences, education, language, and much more. Coverage of theology/religion is weak, but this database is a good complement to our religious resources. JSTOR provides complete retrospective access for each journal from the year of inception up to a recent cutoff date, but does NOT supply access to very most recent volumes. (Recent is defined by the publisher but usually means the five most recent years are not available. This is meant to protect income the publishers make from current subscriptions.) Includes articles and book reviews.

  Journals in JSTOR are listed in the library ejournal listing. So if you already have a journal citation, go to the ejournal list to see if that journal is included in jstor or one or our other ejournal packages.

  You can go directly to JSTOR and search for articles. Search title, author, or full-text; limit by journal or discipline. Browse by discipline, journal, and issue. Use Boolean operators and some fancier features such as synonym expansion. Sorts by relevance, journal title, or year.

  You can also use Internet search engines like Google and Yahoo and MSN Live Search to find JSTOR articles. But if you are off the Dallas campus when you search via these search engines, then you will not be able to display the actual articles unless you login to the library proxy server to authenticate your relation to DTS. See our tech note on engaging the proxy authentication mechanism to display articles. This is the most confusing aspect to using JSTOR when you are off campus. It is not an issue when you are on the Dallas campus.

• MasterFILE. Designed specifically for the Public Library user, EBSCO Masterfile covers a broad range of popular magazines and scholarly journals in many different subject areas, but it offers limited coverage of theology. Masterfile currently offers indexing and abstracts for nearly 2,830 general reference, business, consumer health, general science, and multi-cultural periodicals. The full-text of the articles is available online for nearly 1,880 of these magazines. Most full-text backfiles begin in the mid 1990s, while indexing and abstract backfiles go as far back as mid 1980s. Also included are Magill's Book Reviews, the Essential Documents in American History database, over 1.7 million company records from Dun & Bradstreet, and much more. EBSCO Academic Search is often a better resource for seminarians, but if you need access to popular magazines, try MasterFILE.
• UMI/BH Periodical Abstracts. PerAbs abstracts over 4.9 million articles from general and academic English language periodicals. Also includes book reviews. Provides full-text for some of the recent citations. Covers business, current affairs, economics, literature, psychology, and a little religion. 1987 on. Subject headings are excessively broad so search for words you would expect to find in titles or abstracts. Updated weekly. Please try Academic Search first because it costs DTS less.
• TexShare Databases The state of Texas provides this package of databases to any library in Texas for a modest fee. The package is especially helpful to K-12 schools and public libraries, but there are many good resources here for seminarians. If you don't find what you need in OCLC FirstSearch, then browse this list.
• Elibrary at BigChalk. Designed to help school kids do their homework, especially literature, history, social studies, business and health. Provides full-text of magazine articles, a few books, television shows, newspapers, maps, and photograph collections. Some Spanish language material. Researchers can type a question, phrase, or keyword using either natural language or Boolean search strategy. Results can be displayed by relevancy, date, reading level, publication, or source type.
• Ingenta. This database is available free to anyone. It cites articles from 25,000 periodicals, including popular magazines and scholarly journals on a very wide range of topics. Provides full-text to 4,500 journals, mostly scientific. Searching is free, but fee for document delivery ranges from $15 to $40 per article. Online, fax and mail delivery methods are supported. Includes old CARL Uncover database.
• FindArticle. Online access to full-text of about 300 mostly nonreligious magazines FREE with advertising. Tip: most articles are displayed one page at a time. Use the "print this article" link to display the entire article at once.

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Christianity/Theology in general

• BIBLOS, the catalog of Turpin Library, Dallas Theological Seminary. BIBLOS provides information about most (but not all) items owned by Turpin library, including nearly all print books, print journals, microforms, and AV materials. It lists over 10,000 ebooks and a few ejournals. BIBLOS does not include records for individual essays in books, individual articles in journals, individual slides in slide sets, individual e-texts in big digital collections (like the TLG collection), or individual archival manuscripts.
• Rare books at DTS. Over 290 items from Turpin Library's Special Collections are now available online! Dates of publication span five centuries, from the 1500s through the 1900s. Browse them at http://rarebooks.dts.edu. All of these books also have clickable links in BIBLOS.
• SeminaryLibrary.com is the result of an ongoing effort by Logos software to digitize older theological books. The database includes reference works, commentaries, biographies, sermon collections, hymnals, and monographs in Bible, theology, church history, pastoral ministries, and a wide range of other topics of interest to seminary students. Only public domain (i.e., pre-1923, copyright expired) items are included. At present (Aug 2006) over 8000 titles are available, and several hundred titles are added each month. Quite a few important older works are already included. This could become a very important database. Search author, title, or subject. Search the full text of any single book and display all matching pages as graphic images. Logical operators and most phrase-searching not supported in version one of software. Images may take a long time to download. Personal login allows some additional customization.
• ATLA Religion database. The American Theological Library Association Religion database is the key database for seminarians. ATLA provides good coverage of Christianity and selective but still substantial coverage of other religions, especially Islam, Hinduism and Judaism. It indexes articles and book reviews from most major English language theological journals and from some especially important non-English journals. It also indexes essays/chapters from selected festschriften, conference proceedings and other multi-author books. ATLA covers literature on Bible, theology, church history, pastoral ministries, Christian education, and world missions. ATLA focuses on scholarly theological literature but includes a significant sampling of non-scholarly publications about popular Christian culture and church life especially from the mainline Protestant viewpoint. (For additional coverage of popular evangelical magazines, see Christian Periodical Index.) It provides very limited and incomplete coverage of denominationally specific matters like canon law, and it tries not to duplicate PM and denominational indexes. (For example, ATLA has an agreement with Catholic Periodical and Literature Index not to duplicate coverage of the many popular RC magazines CPLI covers.) As of late 2005, about 150,000 journal articles and book reviews are available online (but this is less than 20% of the 850,000 articles and reviews cited in the database). ATLAS delivers some articles as graphic images, not as text, and it takes a long time to download graphic files.
• Religious and Theological Abstracts focuses on Christian theology (biblical studies, dogmatics, church history, pastoral ministries, Christian education, missions, etc.) but covers other religions, too. It provides informative abstracts for over 140,000 scholarly journal articles. Reading the abstracts is an extremely useful way to identify relevant literature and to overview a topic. RTA citations do not contain subject headings, and author names are entered in inconsistent ways, but all abstract and title words are searchable, including scripture passages in the abstracts. Although most articles in RTA are also in ATLA, RTA has many more search terms per article than ATLA (because of the abstracts). In other words, RTA gives you more opportunities to find a given article than ATLA does. RTA appears to be updated only once per year and may be as much as two years behind the journals it covers. Turpin Library owns most of the articles cited in RTA.
• GCS: Theological Journals Search. A Google custom search which covers about 250 open access (free) religious magazines and journals.
• Index theologicus (IxTheo) encompases the older Zeitschrifteninhaltsdienst Theologie (ZID) current contents service. It indexes articles in theological journals and essays in selected books from 1984 to date. Journals are indexed within 24 hours of the time they are received at the Tübingen university library, so this is by far the most current theological database. Alas, citations do NOT link to full-text online articles. See our tutorial.
• Since 1920 the print volumes of the "Elenchus" section of the journal Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses have been an important bibliography for Christian theology in the broad sense. A small portion of this bibliography covering vol. 74 (1998) to date has recently become available as Elenchus ETL Online. As this database grows it will be an increasingly important resource. For now you must still consult the print vols of ETL for retrospective coverage. Print vols continue to be shelved at the index table.
  Elenchus ETL covers church history, biblical studies, dogmatics, ethics, pastoral theology, church education, and Roman Catholic canon law. It is valued especially for systematic theology. Don't confuse it with Elenchus of Biblica which focuses on biblical studies. ETL indexes books, articles, essays, and dissertations mostly in European languages (including English, of course). Emphasis is on scholarly literature. Roman Catholic sources are covered especially well. Each year about 12,000 new items are indexed.
  ETL uses a subject hierarchical classified arrangement (outline) which requires you to browse broad subject categories although there are separate indexes for authors, and names of people as subjects. In the database, the "thesaurus" index searches these broad subject categories. If you don't find a match in the thesaurus index, do a keyword search (of title words), view records in detail (not the abridged display), and identify the subject categories used for those records. Then execute a second search using those codes to retrieve additional potentially relevant citations.

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Biblical studies

• BILDI portion of THEOLDI. BILDI (Documentation for Biblical Literature, Innsbruck) cites scholarly journal articles, essays, books and book reviews in several languages on a variety of biblical and theological topics from 1985 to date. Most items in BILDI are also in ATLA, but BILDI provides more thorough coverage of European literature. There is both a German and an English Interface. Online help is available. BILDI is hosted by the University of Innsbruck and is available to everyone at no cost. Some tips:
  • Books of the Bible are abbreviated. Consult "Search for biblical passages" in Help at the top of the screen and click the listing of books for a list of abbreviations used.
  • Bible chapters are designated with two digits, but Psalms are designated with three digits. For example, write Luke 2 as LK 02.
  • Change the Max. field so that you can see more than 50 records. A search will retrieve up to 500 results.
  • Best practice is to search for chapters, not verses, and to terminate search terms with the asterisk (wildcard). For example: LK 02*
  • Best practice is to search for books of the Bible in the BI (basic index) field, not in the subject field since the subject field misses many results.
  • "?" is a wildcard that matches any single character. Use it to search for diacritics and special characters. For example, M?LLER will match Müller (note u umlat) or Miller, etc.
  • "*" matches zero or more following characters.
  • You may use the logical operators "AND", "OR", "NOT" within any field except year.
• BiBIL BiBIL (Bibliographie Biblique Informatisée de Lausanne=Biblical Bibliography of Lausanne) cites scholarly journal articles, essays, and monographs in several languages primarily on biblical topics but also on theology in general. Coverage from 1950-1985 is very incomplete, but from 1986 to date a significant number of important journals are included. As of Sept 2003 there is now an English interface. Most works cited in BiBIL are also in ATLA, but BiBIL records are cataloged in distinctive ways, so it is a nice supplement to ATLA, particularly if you need to be thorough. BiBIL is hosted by the University of Lausanne and is available to everyone at no cost.
• iTanakh indexes many useful Internet resources for the academic study and teaching of the Hebrew Bible. It includes links to ful-text articles, book reviews, and a few online primary sources. Covers biblical and related texts, languages, methods, geographic areas, and other topics. Alas, not annotated.
• Old Testament Gateway is a substantial, annotated, academic listing of Internet sites, articles, and other resources. Covers OT, archaeology, commentaries, DSS, apocrypha, etc. Links to Hebrew Bible.
• Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (CAL). A lexicon in progress that will eventually contain all Aramaic words from 900 BCE until the Early Middle Ages. Website supports lemma searching, browsing text, creating concordances, searching for English glosses. Texts include targums, inscriptions, legal texts, ostraca, letters, manuscripts, religious texts, Peshitta, and much more. Hosted by the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and available free to everyone.
• Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway is probably the best gateway to NT Internet resources. It has annotated links to mostly scholarly materials about the NT, Greek language, hermeneutics, textual criticism, Judaica, Patristics, and modern culture. See also Torrey Seland's resources pages for biblical studies which is especially strong in NT backgrounds, customs and manners.

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Systematic theology and church history

• "Elenchus Bibliographicus" of the journal Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses is usually considered the most comprehensive source for systematic theology. See description above.
• See Philosopher's Index for technical philosophical literature, including topics like theism, ethics, epistemology, and some aspects of apologetics.
• Calvinism Resources Database includes about 10,000 citations for journal articles, book essays, book reviews, and lectures. The list of journals indexed is unavailable but extensive. Browse by subject or author. Search by keyword, title, subject, author, journal, year, or abstract with Boolean AND and OR but no wildcard. Search and mark records. Save or print a bibliography from the marked records. Marks are deleted with a new search. As of Sept 2007, sorting works imperfectly, and records contain some typos. In some cases you must click a title to go to the fuller record for publication information, but these records cannot be added to a bibliography list. Maintained by the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies and available free to all.

• BIBP Patristics database BIBP (Base d'Information Bibliographique en Patristique) lists citations from major scholarly periodicals in the field of early and medieval church history. The native interface is in French, but you can use this database even if you don't know French. Subject headings usually appear in the records in both English and French, but you must use French words to search the subject headings ("descripteurs"). Ability to search English subjects is promised for the future. So you may wish to do an initial search for English title or abstract words, retrieve some records, discover the French subject headings, then execute a second much more complete search. You may use logical operators ET (and), OU (or) and the proximity operator ADJ (adjacent). To execute a search, click "Lancer la requete." BIBP is hosted by the University of Laval and is available to everyone free of charge.
• The Ecole Initiative is primarily a finding aid for pre-reformation church history and historical theology on the web. It includes links to many primary source documents in English translation, a glossary, some original articles, many images, and a brief chronology. The section on chronology and some links within other sections were not working as of 10/2004.

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Pastoral ministries/practical theology/denominational resources

• Christian Periodical Index indexes articles and book reviews from over 100 evangelical periodicals. Includes both popular and scholarly titles. Some overlap with ATLA, but many unique titles. CPI is a good guide to popular evangelical culture and religious life. Subject, author, and book review indexes. Online coverage begins in 1975; print vols begin coverage in 1956. For full bibliographic information, location, and call numbers of print volumes, click CPI paper.
• RIM. The Research in Ministry database lists and abstracts most but not all North American DMin dissertations (over 9,000 as of Feb 2005). You may search by author, title, subject, keyword, etc. Keyword includes words from titles, subjects, abstracts. ATLA provides free access to this resource, but the number of simultaneous users is limited because ATLA has to pay a license fee for each user. So when you try to use RIM you may get a message that all sessions are in use. If so, try later.
• ResearchBase provides access to the full-text of a few thousand popular and scholarly articles on contemporary theological and cultural topics, especially issues of interest to college students. Works from a socially, politically, theologically, and culturally conservative viewpoint predominate. LeadershipU ResearchBase is hosted by Campus Crusade for Christ and is available to everyone at no cost.
• Biblical Studies Foundation (aka bible.org) provides access to the full-text of many sermons and expositional works from an evangelical viewpoint. This is also the home of the NET Bible translation.
• Christian Reformed Church Periodical Index Contains over 100,000 citations to publications of institutions of the Christian Reformed Church or to related publications, 1866 to date. Includes Banner and Banner of Truth. For a complete list of periodicals indexed click About. To search, click Advanced Search and enter search terms. Boolean AND and OR supported within and between fields. Choose the field: options include subject or author browse as well as standard fields. Sort by author, title, date, etc. Specify the publication if you wish and click Search. Mark citations of interest and click Print Bib to see the list of marked records. From here you can sort, print, or copy. Marks are cleared after each new search. For detailed information about this resource, see Greg Sennema's "The Christian Reformed Church Periodical Index: A Local Solution to Indexing Periodicals," Journal of Religious and Theological Information 5 (2003): 119-34. CRCPI is maintained by Hekman Library staff of Calvin College and volunteers from around North America. It is freely available to all.
• The Seventh-day Adventist Periodical Index, produced at Andrews University, provides indexing for about 40 SDA periodicals covering 1977 to present. Retrospective indexing continues to push the date back. Most are popular/nonscholarly, and apparently not indexed elsewhere. Many of the articles cited are available online. Search by subject, author, article title, or journal title.
• Restoration Serials Index indexes articles from about 80 periodicals produced within the restoration movement (Church of Christ). Most are popular/nonscholarly, and apparently not indexed elsewhere. Many are very hard to find. Search by keyword, subject, author, or title. Search engine allows one word per field with logical operators between fields. Available free to anyone courtesy of the Jessie C. Eury Library at Lincoln Christian College and Seminary.
• The Vick Library Index lists some conservative, fundamentalist, and Baptist literature which is not indexed elsewhere. Includes citations to over 42,000 periodical articles, encyclopedia articles, book reviews, and theses from 1951 to present. Mostly popular, nonscholarly literature. Search engine does not support logical operators but retrieves records containing all terms entered. Search by keyword in author, title, subject, or summary. Limit by year, item type, or publication title. Browse by subject or author. Available free to anyone courtesy of Baptist Bible College.

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AV Production aids

• BarnaFilms. Online database of video clips and photos designed for church ministry. You can see a description here, but to use it, you must go to the media center and ask staff to logon for you.
• Clipart.com from Jupiter Images. Online database of photos, clipart, webart and fonts. Not specifically religious. You can see a description here, but to use it, you must go to the media center and ask staff to logon for you.
• Sound Recordings from Network Music. Mostly instrumental. Many styles. Not specifically religious. Large cdrom collection in the Media Center. Ask staff.
• Pictorial Library of Bible Lands. 4500 high resolution photographs of important places in the biblical regions including Galilee, Samaria, Jerusalem, Judah, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Greece and Rome. Available on cdroms in media center.
• CDRI Image Database. Images of theological import. Woodcuts, photographs, slides, papyri, coins, maps, postcards, manuscripts, lithographs, sermons, shape-note tune books, Christian art, architecture, and iconography. Warning: the default search operator is AND, but logical operators (AND, OR, and NOT) are among the stopwords ignored by this search engine.

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Non-Christian religions and missions

• Internet Sacred Text Archive Largest full-text archive of "holy books" on the net. Covers religion, mythology, legend, folk-lore, occult, and sacred books or canonical texts in many religious traditions (Koran, Bible, Gita, etc.)
• RAMBI/Index of Articles on Jewish Studies lists citations from scholarly periodicals on all aspects of Judaica, modern and ancient, (including biblical studies and rabbinics), and area studies of the land of Israel. Coverage begins with 1985. The database includes some English records and some Hebrew records. There is an English interface. If you search in English, then you retrieve English records. If you search in Hebrew, you retrieve the Hebrew records. So you must do two searches to retrieve everything. You may use the usual logical operators (and, or, not), the * (asterisk) symbol as a wildcard, and the % (percent) symbol followed by a number as a proximity operator to indicate you want two words within a particular number of words of each other. Subject headings for books of the Bible look like this: "Genesis (Book of): 14". RAMBI is hosted by the Jewish National Library at Hebrew University and is available to everyone free of charge.
• ALEPH is the catalog of the Jewish National Library and Hebrew University. The library collects all material published in Israel or published about Israel anywhere in the world. Its collections of Hebraica and Judaica are the largest in the world. Also available is the Union List of Serials in Israel. Both English and Hebrew interface. Hebrew fonts required to search in Hebrew. For older works you may still need to consult the printed catalog, Kiryat Sepher (shelved in periodical stacks).

• IRM/International Review of Mission Online database cumulates bibliographies from the well known journal. This database cites both scholarly journal articles and books in several languages from 1912 to present. All aspects of missions and evangelism are covered. The BRS character interface is no longer available. IRM is hosted by the Edinburgh University and is available at no cost to everyone via the Internet.

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Miscellaneous religious web sites

• Wabash Center Gateway Provides links to religious and especially Christian Internet resources. Aims to serve needs of clergy and seminary faculty and students. Sometimes difficult to use because of the organizational structure. May be the biggest gateway to high quality theological Internet sites.
• Yale's Research Guide for Christianity. Excellent annotated guide to library and Internet resources selected to meet the needs of the average seminarian. Links to library catalogs, key theological reference books, journals, internet sites, primary sources. Includes many books and resources not available over the Internet.
• Finding God in Cyberspace provides links to a broad range of religious and Christian resources, scholarly and popular. Annotated.
• Christian Classics Ethereal Library is a collection of free full-text documents. Mostly book length classics including the Bible, commentaries, hymns, sermons, many texts from the history of Christianity and some fiction. This is one of the largest sites for public domain religious books.

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Ancient world/Archaeology/ANE/Greco-Roman classics resources

• BAR Online includes the full-text of Biblical Archaeology Review, Bible Review, and a few other BAS published magazines and books, all of which focus on biblical archaeology. Articles include clickable photos and illustrations, Bible citations, and footnotes. Page numbers and page breaks are not included in articles, so it is better to use the paper copies for exact bibliographic citations. In Browse mode select a magazine issue by title of magazine, volume, number, or date. In search mode lookup articles by Any Word, Title, Author, or Subject. If you type multiple words in Any Word, it will search the full text of the articles and retrieve articles which contain all the words. It will not highlight hit words in the article; you can use Find in your browser for that.
• ABZU is probably the biggest and best listing of mostly scholarly works (books, articles and websites) on the ancient Near East. There is no topical organization for browsing, and entries are not annotated. Records do have subject headings and the site is searchable.
• AIGYPTOS aims to provide full coverage of publications in the field of Egyptology from 1978 to date. Currently adds three to five thousand records annually. Lists books, dissertations, articles, and reviews. No full-text, but includes publication information, ISBN, subjects, and keywords in British English even for non-English titles. Click the flag for an English interface and follow instructions for entering the database. The Search page describes use of Boolean operators. Over a dozen searchable fields with a browse index available for any field. Click on a title in the results list for more detail. See Help for instructions on searching. Aigyptos is a joint project of the Institute of Egyptology of the University of Munich and the Department of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg and is available to all at no cost.

• Orion Dead Sea Scrolls database. Covers articles, essays, and books on scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls from 1995 to the present. Updated weekly. Search by author, language (non-English), date of publication, or keyword. Results display as a list of citations except for a keyword search. A keyword search brings up date and author, but click any result for the complete citation. Tips for keyword searching at end of page. Greek and Hebrew letters may not display properly. This bibliography is a joint project with the journal, Revue de Qumran, and appears in that journal twice a year. You must check the pre-1995 vols of RQ for older material. Provided by the Orion Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Free to all.
• Perseus. Search and display full-text of ancient Greek and Latin primary source documents. Links to lexicons and sometimes to English translations. Extremely useful site for NT studies (but TLG has far more ancient Greek text). If you have never used Perseus, see our one page intro to Perseus.
• Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) includes nearly all surviving Greek texts dating from 8th century B.C. to A.D. 600, and the majority of surviving works up the fall of Byzantium in A.D. 1453. It does not include "non-literary" documents like business records, general correspondence, inscriptions, etc. Find information about the authors and works included in the TLG Library in the Canon of Greek Authors and Works at the TLG website. See our Introduction to Searching TLG, especially the information about use of fonts and the warnings about the new lemma search feature (still quite buggy/unreliable).
• The Searchable Greek Inscriptions database currently (May 2007) contains Greek inscriptions from Greece (including Crete, Cyprus, Thrace), the north coast of the Black Sea, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Germany, and unknown provenances organized by period and corpora just like the IG outline. Browse by geographic area or search for words and phrases. Includes all Greek inscriptions formerly on the PHI cdrom, and PHI plans to expand the database. These inscriptions are NOT included in TLG (which consists of literary texts only). This website requires a Java enabled browser. Available free from Packard Humanities Institute. See our SGI tutorial for a brief intro to searching this database.
• The Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB) lists sources for images, facsimiles, transcriptions and related information about ancient texts. Over 8000 Greek MSS. Uses phrase searching. Boolean operators not supported, but wildcarding is automatic. Use New Testament as author name. For book name, use book of the Bible; e.g., Hebrews, Romans, but Mt for Matthew, and Joh for John. Try abbreviations to bring up the correct form. To search include necessary information only. For example, to investigate Heb 3:13 in P13, type P13 in the Repertories field and type Hebrews in the Book field. Specifying chapter and verse will miss the record for "Hebrews 2.14-5.5; 10-12". Sort by author, date, etc., as desired. This database is a free public Internet resource.
• Electronic Resources for Classicists is one of the most comprehensive sites on the web for this narrow topic. It includes annotated links to all sorts of resources.

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Humanities/Philosophy/Language/Literature/Arts

• Arts and Humanities [citation index]. Over 2.7 million records from over 1000 journals. Coverage from 1980 to present. Indexing for many arts and humanities journals in a broad range of disciplines. Includes cited references. That means you can see find articles based on what sources they cite in their footnotes. This is the only index in the humanities that will let you determine if the article you are interested in has been cited in some other source. Very difficult to search well. Every search costs the seminary money. So please ask reference staff for help before you search. Updated weekly.
• Philosopher's Index cites scholarly journal articles, essays, books, and book reviews, published from 1940 to the present in English and major European languages. Most articles and essays are abstracted. PI focuses on aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, logic, and metaphysics, but also includes literature on philosophy of education, history, science, religion and other fields. Try sample searches for religion, faith, free will, theism, interpretation (= hermeneutics), philosophical anthropology (= nature of man), soul and resurrection to get a feel for the range of useful topics covered.
• Linguisitic Bibliography cites scholarly books and journal articles on linguistics and all the languages of the world, including linguistic aspects of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and computer science. Missiologists should note it is weak in applied linguistics. The database covers only 1993 to date, so it is still small. It is based on print vols of UNESCO Bibliographie Linguistique (which begins in 1950 and is much more complete). So-called subjects are really 100 possible classification codes. Unsure which class code to use? Do a keyword search (of title words), view records in detail (not the abridged display), and identify the class codes used for those records. Then execute a second search using those codes. Available free to anyone courtesy of the National Library of the Netherlands.
• Twentieth Century Poetry. Full-text of over 1000 volumes of English and American 20th century poetry. Useful for sermon illustrations.
• Gale Literature Databases and Literature Resource Center. Full-text information about important works of fiction, including biographies of authors, plot summaries, critical essays and journal articles. Includes Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Scribners Writers series, and Twayne's Authors series. Search by author, title, keyword, genre, time period, etc.

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Education resources

• ERIC (direct) and also ERIC (via EBSCO). ERIC cites and abstracts over 1.1 million items in the field of [secular] education, of which about 50% are journal articles and 50% are unpublished ERIC documents, plus a few books and theses. Covers all educational levels. Does not cover religious education per se. 1966 to the present. Utilizes ERIC thesaurus for subject headings. ERIC Direct is beginning to link the citations to the full-text of articles on the publisher's web sites, and some of the federally funded studies are now becoming available free. However, the EBSCO version links to thousands of full-text eduction journal articles not available in the ERIC direct version.
• CollegeSource. College Source Online enables you to search, download, and read the full-text of catalogs from many US schools. This includes the DTS catalog. You need Adobe Acrobat to read the files.

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Science, social science, health, and counseling resources

• HighWire Press. Archives and distributes full-text scholarly science articles at no cost. Over 200,000 articles in all areas of science.
• Internet PC Abstracts. More than 200,000 records from 250 sources. 1989 to present. Updated monthly.
• Agricola. Articles on every major agricultural subject. Over 3.6 million records consisting of journal articles, monographs, book chapters, technical reports, etc., from 1970 to present. Updated monthly during academic year.
• Biology Digest. Covers all life sciences on a high school and college undergraduate level. Over 35,000 records from 300 sources with comprehensive abstracts. 1989 to present. Updated nine times per year.
• MEDLINE via EBSCO. Medline provides very full international coverage of scholarly literature in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care systems, 1950 to date. Full coverage of psychiatry, limited coverage of clinical psychology and practitioner counseling literature. Over 15 million articles indexed and abstracted from over 10,000 sources. The EBSCO version of MEDLINE includes links to full-text articles for about 350 journals from the past few years. This is just a tiny percentage of MEDLINE. Nearly all of MEDLINE is also available at a free government website called PubMed and you may decide you like the PubMed interface better than the EBSCO interface. Citations to many of the journals are linked to the full-text on the publisher's web sites, and many of the federally funded studies are now becoming available free, but in most cases there is a fee or subscription required to display the articles. Provided by the National Library of Medicine.
• MDX Health. Provides health, fitness, and medical information. More than 550,000 articles from 500 journals, many with full-text. 1995 to present. Updated weekly.
• Health Reference Center Academic. Indexing for 600 health and medical journals. Full-text for most of these. Also Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, and PDR Family Guide to Health and Nutrition. Links to health web sites. Many book reviews. Of course MEDLINE is far more comprehensive for scholarly articles. In contrast see Health and Wellness Resources for a resource that is easier for non-medical professionals to use and understand.
• Clinical Pharmacology. Provides concise discussions for all US prescription drugs, many herbal and nutritional supplements, and many over-the-counter health products.
• PsycINFO lists 1.9 million citations to technical scientific literature in the field of psychology and psychological aspects of related disciplines including anthropology, business, medicine, education, law, linguistics, and sociology. Thorough coverage of clinical psychology and counseling. It includes citations to journal articles in 30 languages from 1887 to date and citations to books and dissertations in English from 1987 to present. It is updated weekly. Remember to use the MEDLINE database if you need access to psychiatric literature and the ATLA database if you need to find literature about counseling from a religious perspective or in a religious context.
• Anthropology Index Online. AIO database, based on the print Anthropological Index to Current Periodicals in the Museum of Mankind, lists citations from 700 scholarly periodicals in the field of anthropology from 1970 to present. Focus is on less technologically developed cultures. AIO includes much material on people groups and culture of interest to world missions. Search operators are very limited. Logical "and" is assumed if you type a phrase. You may use a single logical "or" within a field. You may not combine terms such as "yoruba and (religion or divination or shaman)". Truncation is automatic in the "match anywhere" field. Copies of articles are available at cost from the British Library. AIO is hosted by the (British) Museum of Mankind and is available at no cost to non-commercial users via the Internet. BM will mail photocopies of most articles for a fee.
• PAIS/Public Affairs Information Service. Abstracts over 500K articles, books, and government documents from 120 countries on public policy matters in government, politics, criminal justice, economics, education, law, human rights, military, social conditions, culture, etc. Useful for world missions country profiles.
• Population Index On the Web. 1986 - present. Updated annually. Covers all fields of interest to demographers. Contains selective indexing with abstracts from journals, books, working papers, doctoral dissertations and other sources. Citations are not written in standard form. The first title is in italics whether it is a book, essay, or article. Read citations carefully to avoid confusion. May be helpful for missions. Free.
• Communication Abstracts covers approximately 130 of the most important scholarly journals about communication. Coverage of mass communication topics (journalism, broadcasting, advertising, plus technological, legal and business aspects of mass communication) predominates but you will also find material about interpersonal communication in various social and cultural settings, and material about rhetoric and oratory. Coverage of all kinds of religious communication is rather limited. In most cases coverage begins with vol. 1 of the journal, so some articles cited are as much as 100 years old. ComAbs does not index book reviews. Intro/Tutorial to ComAbs.

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Economics, business and consumer resources

• Economics Literature. Contains citations with abstracts to economics articles. Includes subject indexing of books and dissertations. About 600,000 records from over 700 sources. 1969 to present. Updated monthly.
• Business Source. Provides full coverage of business in the US, including management, leadership, economics, finance, accounting, international business and current business news. Indexing and abstracting for 2,680 periodicals, of which 2,260 are available in full-text. Dun & Bradstreet's Company Directory is also included. Book reviews.
• Business and Management Practices. This Gale database from OCLC focuses on practical aspects of business management and leadership, including planning, best practices, quality control, change, decision making, human and capital resources. Cites over 270K articles from 1000 magazines, 1995 to date. 60% full-text. EBSCO Business Source is more complete.
• Business Industry. Over 2.5 million records from over 1500 sources on industry, market, and product information. Covers mid-1994 to present. Updated daily.
• Business Dateline. Full-text articles from newspapers, business magazines, and wire services on trends in industry, health, education, etc. Over 1.4 million records from over 500 sources. 1985 to present. Updated weekly.
• Disclosure. Contains directory information on U.S. companies. Over 13,000 records. Current file only. Updated weekly.

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General encyclopedias

• Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia. Full-text general reference encyclopedia containing 25,000 articles designed to match curricular needs of elementary, middle, and high school students. Updated annually.

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Biographical indexes and dictionaries

• Sorry, Biography and Genealogy Master Index and Biography Index are no longer available

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Statistics and brief facts

• ARDA/American Religion Data Archive preserves quantitative data on American Religion. the ARDA collection includes data on churches and church membership, religious professionals, and religious groups. It offers general statistics on religion in the US and stats on denominational membership at the state and county level.
• FactSearch. More than 134,000 records from over 1000 sources. Each record consists of an abstract containing facts and statistics with a reference to the original source. Information comes from newspapers, periodicals, the Congressional Record, and congressional hearings. Some full-text. 1984 to present. Updated quarterly.
• Fedstats provides access to a wealth of US government statistics on demographics, crime, economics, education, environment, health, etc. Includes full-text of the paper edition of the Statistical Abstract of the US, long considered the best one volume compendium of statistics. This is a great resource.

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Book and media review indexes

• ATLA Religion database cites 350K book reviews from theological journals, some in full-text. It is the biggest database of theological book review citations (but of course Elenchus is more comprehensive for biblical studies). ATLA excludes brief book notes.
• Review of Biblical Literature provides full-text of substantive reviews of scholarly literature in biblical studies. Updated weekly but the books tend to be about two years old before they are reviewed. About 400 reviews per year. Sponsored by Society for Biblical Literature. Free to anyone.
• Gale Literature Databases and Literature Resource Center contain many book reviews and author critiques of famous works of fiction.

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News/Current events resources

• InfoTrac Custom Newspapers. Full-text cover-to-cover coverage of over 100 newspapers, most from 1996, including New York Times, Washington Post, The Financial Times and The Times (London). Does not include Dallas Morning News. Search articles by title, headline, date, author, section or other assigned fields. Some book reviews.
• Newspaper Source. Full-text of 30 national newspapers including the Christian Science Monitor from 1995 and the Los Angeles Times from 2000 to the present. Also selected business and news related articles from 200 regional U.S. newspapers. No longer includes Dallas Morning News. Some book reviews.
• Internet news archives, SLA. "Special Library Association news archive lists hundreds of newspapers that provide the full-text of the papers, often free of charge. Emphasis is on U.S. papers."

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Dissertation indexes

• Dissertation Abstracts International. Cites nearly every US PhD/ThD dissertation accepted by an accredited school since 1861. Includes some dissertations outside the US. Long abstracts since about 1980. Records do NOT have subject headings. The so-called descriptor field is a list of relevant disciplines (e.g. physics or religion). Title and abstract words are searchable. It costs the seminary about one dollar every time you click search. Think before you search. If you are retrieving too many irrelevant citations, then just search the title field. If you are retrieving too few, 'OR' many synonyms together since the topic you want is probably expressed in many different ways with many different words in this database. Most DMin dissertations are NOT in the Dissertation Abstracts database.
• Dissertation Express. This is the companion order service for DAI (above). Search by author, title, or order number. Cannot search or display abstracts. Use DAI (above) for subject searching. Use Dissertation Express to purchase copies of dissertations with your credit card. Includes DTS dissertations. Older dissertations are available only in paper or microform; more recent ones (generally from 1997 to date) are also available as digital images. A typical dissertation download is 12 to 14 megabytes. If you want a DTS dissertation, try DTS PhD dissertations free online. This is just a subset of Dissertation Express, limited to DTS dissertations only. It enables you to download free copies of DTS dissertations, 1997 to date, and to purchase copies of older dissertations.
• No doubt you are already familiar with WorldCat. Remember this database includes a fairly large number of published and unpublished dissertations on all topics and in many languages, but US coverage is far more extensive than other countries. On the advanced search screen, select "subtype limit" and you will have the option of limiting search results to theses and dissertations. This option seems to yield mostly unpublished dissertations.
• RIM. The Research in Ministry database lists and abstracts most but not all North American DMin dissertations. You may search by author, title, subject, keyword, etc. Keyword includes words from titles, subjects, abstracts. ATLA provides free access to this resource, but the number of simultaneous users is limited because ATLA has to pay a license fee for each user. So when you try to use RIM you may get a message that all sessions are in use. If so, try later.
• Search the TREN database for masters theses and some scholarly conference papers. Over 13,000 items. Search by title, author, institution, degree, subject, year, or conference. Search options include a drop-down list of schools and conferences. Items are available in paper, fiche, and some as pdf downloads. Pay by credit card over a secure website.