Databases

The ACT UP Oral History Project is a collection of interviews with surviving members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York. ACT UP, founded in March of 1987, is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals, united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis. 

The purpose of the ACT UP Oral History Project is to present comprehensive, complex, human, collective, and individual pictures of the people who have made up ACT UP/New York. These men and women of all races and classes have transformed entrenched cultural ideas about homosexuality, sexuality, illness, health care, civil rights, art, media, and the rights of patients. These interviews reveal what has motivated them to action and how they have organized complex endeavors.

The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) is an independent scholarly organization that aims to foster dialogue about researching, writing, and teaching black thought and culture. They support the research of scholars in the field through an array of fellowships, awards, and prizes, including the Pauli Murray Book Prize and the C.L.R. James Research Fellowships. They publish the popular blog Black Perspectives, the leading online platform for public scholarship on global Black thought, history, and culture.

The Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple, sponsored by the Special Collections of Library and Information Access at San Diego State University, is designed to give personal and scholarly perspectives on a major event in the history of religion in America. 

Its primary purpose is to present information about Peoples Temple as accurately and objectively as possible. Included are remembrances of those who died and those who survived the tragedy of 18 November 1978 in order to respect their lives and humanize their deaths; documentation of the numerous government investigations into Peoples Temple and Jonestown through materials released under the Freedom of Information Act; and a presentation of Peoples Temple and its members in their own words: through articles, tapes, letters, photographs and other items.

Named ASLV (American Sign Language Version), this video-accessible version offers Deaf and hard-of-hearing users the option to view the Bible, as opposed to reading it, in their own language. This not only better encourages Deaf and hard-of-hearing to engage in studying Scripture, it reduces misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

The ASLV project was created with the assistance of 53 Deaf translators over a period of thirty-eight years. Similar to the online Bible text, the ASLV video library is available online on the Deaf Mission website and via an app. 

ARDA (Association of Religion Data Archives) contains a wide variety of statistical data, historical timelines, tools for congregations, and data analysis. Supports graphing tools and mapping.

The Atla Digital Library brings together digital collections of scholarly, historical, and cultural significance that are relevant to the study, teaching, and learning of religion and theology.

Research in Ministry® (RIM®) is a thesis and dissertation abstract database where users can search for and share the outcomes of research conducted in programs of study related to ministry, theology and religion.

Barna Group provides spiritual influencers with credible knowledge and clear thinking, enabling them to navigate a complex and changing culture.

On Bible Odyssey, the world’s leading scholars share the latest historical and literary research on key people, places, and passages of the Bible.

Bible Search & Rescue, a project of the Westar Institute, makes results and tools of academic biblical scholarship available to the general public. The Search feature provides posts on basic information about the bible, while the Rescue feature responds to specific uses of Bible passages and general assumptions about what it says on various topics will be addressed.

Bible Search & Rescue also includes podcasts which offer more discussion on some post topics, interviews with Bible characters, conversations with people whose perspectives have changed based on learning more about biblical scholarship, and more. 

La Biblioteca Digital Anabautista es una initiativa de Mennonite Mission Network (la Red Menonita de Misiones), Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism (Goshen College), el Seminario Anabautista Latinoamericano (Semilla), y el Seminario Bíblio Anabautista Hispano (SeBAH).

Biblioteca Digital Anabautista is an initiative of the Mennonite Mission Network (the Mennonite Missions Network), Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism (Goshen College), the Latin American Anabaptist Seminar (Seed), and the Hispanic Anabaptist Bible Seminar (SeBAH).

The Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) has long believed that one important step toward ending racism and injustice is a better understanding of our shared history. By providing [free] resources that give context for the Black experience in Oklahoma, we hope to spark civil discourse and open dialogue about the role of race in the history of our state. While these conversations about our past may not be comfortable, they are necessary to understand where we have been and how we can best move forward together. - Description from the OHS website.

ProQuest’s openly available Black Freedom Struggle website features 2,000 expertly selected primary source documents – historical newspaper articles, pamphlets, diaries, correspondence and more – from pivotal eras in African American history.

The Black Theology Papers Project aims to preserve and promote the intellectual heritage of black theology. The journal publishes one annual issue featuring papers presented by the Black Theology Unit of the American Academy of Religion.

BlackPast.org, an online reference center makes available a wealth of materials on African American history in one central location on the Internet.

These materials include an online encyclopedia of over 4,000 entries, the complete transcript of more than 300 speeches by African Americans, other people of African ancestry, and those concerned about race, given between 1789 and 2016, over 140 full-text primary documents, bibliographies, timelines and six gateway pages with links to digital archive collections, African and African American museums and research centers, genealogical research websites, and more than 200 other website resources on African American and global African history. 

Additionally, 100 major African American museums and research centers and over 400 other website resources on black history are also linked to the website, as are nine bibliographies listing more than 5,000 major books categorized by author, title, subject, and date of publication. 

Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages.

These original photographs document the involvement of Queens College students and other Northerners in the Civil Rights Movement of the early to mid-1960s, including Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Virginia Student Help Project, the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project, and the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR).

The Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, collects publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States, including marches, protests, strikes, demonstrations, riots, and other actions.

Database of Religious History is designed to serve as a centralized clearinghouse for scholarly knowledge of the historical record, bringing together a core of quantified, standardized data with qualitative comments, references to crucial resources, and links to on-line text and image databases.

For scholars, researchers, teachers and the general public, the DRH functions as a gateway to reliable, comprehensive knowledge concerning the history of religions around the world, and cultural history more generally.

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection contains more than 150,000 maps dating from 1500 to the present. The collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps.

The Digital Public Library of American Exhibitions showcases stories of national significance drawn from source materials in libraries, archives, and museums across the United States.

The Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Collections explore topics in history, literature, and culture developed by educators — complete with teaching guides for class use.

The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world.

Based in Worcester, Massachusetts at the College of the Holy Cross, the DTA is an international collaboration among more than fifty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, public libraries, and private collections. By digitally localizing a wide range of trans-related materials, the DTA expands access to trans history for academics and independent researchers alike in order to foster education and dialog concerning trans history.

The DTA uses the term transgender to refer to a broad and inclusive range of non-normative gender practices. The DTA treats transgender as a practice rather than an identity category in order to bring together a trans-historical and trans-cultural collection of materials related to trans-ing gender. They collect materials from anywhere in the world with a focus on materials created before the year 2000.

Disability Belongs is a diverse, disability-led nonprofit that works to create systemic change in how society views and values people with disabilities, and that advances policies and practices that empower people with disabilities to have a better future.

Disability Belongs shifts narratives and creates progress by centering people with lived disability experience in leadership roles, ensuring authentic representation in entertainment and news media, advancing successful public policy, and pushing for faith-based and other inclusion.

Disciples of Christ Historical Society has preserved the many documents, books, periodicals, audio and visual materials, and precious artifacts that tell the story of the Stone-Campbell heritage. Disciples History provides a history of the Stone-Campbell Tradition, biographies of notable people, and a list of Disciples of Christ periodicals.

This online collection presents newspapers edited by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the African American abolitionist who escaped slavery and became one of the most famous orators, authors, and journalists of the 19th century.

The Frederick Douglass Newspapers collection contains more than 565 issues of three weekly newspaper titles, which have been digitally scanned from the Library of Congress collection of original paper issues and master negative microfilm.

Founded in 1985, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society is recognized internationally as a leader in the field of LGBTQ public history. The GLBT Historical Society collects, preserves, exhibits and makes accessible to the public materials and knowledge to support and promote understanding of LGBTQ history, culture and arts in all their diversity.

A discontinued project by Google to scan and index historic newspapers. The Google News Archive is still available and a great resource that makes many difficult to find newspapers available freely online.

For more than 40 years, the Hartford Institute for Religion Research has a record of rigorous, applied research on religious organizations, including the study of churches, denominations, seminaries, and other religious communities. Their work is guided by a disciplined understanding of the interrelationship between the life and resources of American religious institutions and the possibilities and limits placed on those institutions by the social and cultural context in which they work.

The HathiTrust Digital Library is home to millions of digitized books and publications. HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 19+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. They offer reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. and international copyright law, text and data mining tools for the entire corpus, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.

The HathiTrust Digital Library is home to millions of digitized books and publications. HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 19+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. They offer reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. and international copyright law, text and data mining tools for the entire corpus, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.

Historic U.S. Free Online Protestant Newspapers is a list of free online historic Protestant newspapers from across the Unites States. The list is broken down by state and dates range from the early 1800s to today.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia is the most visited and comprehensive Holocaust resource online today. It provides the public, educators, faculty, students, and scholars with hundreds of articles, access to digitized collections, critical thinking and discussion questions, lesson plans, oral histories, videos, and much more.

Hymnary.org is an online hymn and worship music database for worship leaders, hymnologists, and amateur hymn lovers alike. At Hymnary.org you can search or browse hymns by title, tune, meter, key, scripture reference, and more.  

Independent Voices is an open-access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries.

These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.

**Please note that the ICTG shutdown in June 2022. Their website is no longer being updated, and the resources and links may become outdated for any reason at any point.

The Institute for Collective Trauma and Growth (ICTG) provided leaders with restorative strategies for personal and group growth after collective loss. They provided training, coaching, and therapeutic services for organization and community leaders to address long-term emotional and spiritual care needs, build trauma-informed programs and ministries, and partner across professional sectors for whole community care.

Open Library is an initiative of the Internet Archive, and contains contains information about books. Internet Archive hosts a collection of digitized books. Open Library’s universal catalog provides links to discover, borrow, and read from the Internet Archive’s collections.

IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) provides free census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS integration and documentation makes it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community contexts.

The Jesuit Online Bibliography is a free, collaborative, multilingual, and fully searchable database of bibliographic records for scholarship in Jesuit Studies produced in the 21st century.

This project provides the citations, abstracts, subject categories, and direct links to books, book chapters, journal articles, book reviews, and other works related to the study of Jesuit history, spirituality, educational heritage, and pedagogy.

The Jewish Virtual Library (JVL) is the most comprehensive online encyclopedia of Jewish history, politics and culture. With nearly 25,000 entries, the JVL is a one-stop shop for students of all ages interested in anything from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

The Jewish Women’s Archive is a national organization dedicated to collecting and promoting the extraordinary stories of Jewish women. JWA explores the past as a framework for understanding the issues important to women today; inspires young people with remarkable role models; and uses Jewish women’s stories to excite people to see themselves as agents of change.

JSTOR’s open content program continues to grow rapidly—expanding access to journals, books, primary sources, images, and research reports.

With new open collections contributed by libraries, archives, museums, and publishers, JSTOR now offers one of the broadest and most diverse sets of openly accessible scholarly materials available. This growth strengthens research, supports teaching, and expands equitable access to scholarship worldwide.

Lake Institute’s Resource Library collects and curates a wide range of resources that can help deepen understanding and practice at the intersection of faith and giving. Search by keywords or browse by themes to find current research, leadership insights, inspiring stories, discernment guides, theological reflection, and more.

The Latin America Collection at Princeton Theological Seminary, enhanced by the donated library of President Emeritus John A. Mackay in 1983, comprises over 28,000 books in Spanish and Portuguese and 1,300 periodicals supporting instruction and research in Latin American religious culture. The Library’s collecting concentration on religion and theology in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and South America is closely interwoven with Latin American collecting at Princeton University.

La Colección Latinoamericana en el Seminario Teológico de Princeton, renovada por la biblioteca donada por el presidente emérito John A. Mackay en 1983, cuenta con más de 28,000 libros en publicaciones periódicas españolas y portuguesas y 1,300 publicaciones periódicas apoyan la enseñanza y la investigación en la cultura religiosa de América Latina. La colección de la Biblioteca sobre religión y la teología ubicada en México, América Central, el Caribe y América del Sur está estrechamente entrelazada con la colección Latinoamericana de la Universidad de Princeton.

This is a project in the form of a LibGuide by librarians Jesse Silva at the University of California-Berkeley and Kelly L. Smith of the University of California-San Diego. Using research tools such as CQ and Lexis-Nexis Academic, they have brought together U.S. government documents that trace the history of rights for LGBTQ+ Americans into one resource.

LGBTQ Religious Archives Network (LGBTQ-RAN) is an innovative venture in preserving history and encouraging scholarly study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) religious movements around the world.

The LGBTQ+ Studies Web Archive collects and preserves online content which documents LGBTQ+ history, scholarship, and culture in the United States and around the world.

Sites include domestic and international non-profit organizations, journalism and news external link, creative works and expressions, historical records, and more. Collection priorities include primary sources, first-hand accounts, coverage of significant events, and essential artifacts of cultural memory. This collection seeks to illuminate LBGTQ+ voices, from margin to center. The sites curated here preserve subjects and perspectives which have been historically underrepresented in Library holdings, are ephemeral in nature, and those which have proven difficult to collect via traditional or print resources.

ListenOK is a guide to oral history collections in Oklahoma. Notable collections include the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School Alumni Oral History Project, Phillips University Collection, and the Attucks School in Vinita collection.

The Phillips University Collection contains a collection of 239 interviews collected between 1951 and 1980. They were conducted, largely by students of Professor William Snodgrass, a former History Professor at Phillips University. They focused on interviewing people in the local community, and throughout the Cherokee Outlet, and include some interview with individuals that made the 1893 Land Run themselves.

Loebolus contains the works in the Loeb Classical Library of Greek and Roman writings which have entered the public domain. Works may be downloaded as PDFs.

Logeion aims to provide access to Greek and Latin resources for everyone everywhere. Logeion provides simultaneous lookup of entries in the numerous reference works that make up the Perseus Classical collection and many others.