Divinity Library Mission: Goals and Objectives
As part of the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries, the Divinity Library endeavors to advance learning, teaching, and research in religious and theological scholarship for the Vanderbilt community and beyond through developing, preserving, and furnishing equitable access to its collections, services, and spaces.
In its collecting, the Divinity Library embraces an inclusive approach to reflect the diversity of religious traditions and expression, and promotes greater attention to voices and communities underrepresented within and outside those traditions. Informed by the Divinity School’s Purposes and Commitments, the Divinity Library’s work supports theological inquiry, spiritual formation, hospitality, and the social justice mission that animates the Divinity School, and complements the Heard Libraries’ overall mission. The Divinity Library seeks to innovate in digital scholarship in the humanities and digital resource collection and management by expanding its scope of projects and initiatives, as it also keeps pace with and produces new developments in research, learning, and outreach. And to keep pace and continue producing, the Divinity Library empowers staff to learn and leverage that knowledge for contributing to the scholarship in our profession, our library work, and for communities beyond campus.
The Divinity Library supports the students, faculty, and staff of the Divinity School, the wider university, and the local community by:
Advancing scholarship, teaching, and learning in religion/theological studies:
- Directly supporting degree programs for the Divinity School, Graduate Department of Religion (GDR), and undergraduate major in Religious Studies
- Offering instruction (information literacy, thesis writing workshop course for the Divinity School)
- Providing consults (resources, teaching, technology)
- Participating actively in development and support of Divinity School curriculum
Furnishing access to resources in religion:
- Community lending (Kesler Lending Library, local clergy/Jewish community privileges)
- Unique publicly accessible online collections (Lectionary/Art in the Christian Tradition/ETANA databases)
- Physical and electronic collections for Divinity School/GDR
Providing stewardship for scholarship and historical materials in religion through collection and preservation:
- Contributing to Vanderbilt’s scholarly repositories
- Special collections and digitization/digital preservation efforts
- Research data management
Helping to inform and instruct scholars and citizens:
- Divinity Library exhibits and other public events
- Workshops (citation management, data visualization, and digital humanities)
- Campus and community outreach initiatives
Deliberately responding to changing technology to support existing and future services and resources:
- Contributing to library-wide digital asset management projects and initiatives
- Consulting, collaborating, leading digital theology and digital humanities projects
- Electronic citation management instruction and assistance
- Supporting multimodal scholarship and instruction
Turning information into knowledge:
- Divinity Library staff scholarship in religion, librarianship, pedagogy, and digital humanities
- Metadata/cataloging
- Promoting and leveraging collections for instruction and research
- Working with faculty to ingest their scholarship into the Institutional Repository
Creating welcoming spaces for collaboration and contemplation:
- The Cheek Reference Room and on-going facilities renovation
- Increasing the number of and updating technology for dedicated study spaces
Communities, Collections, and Programs Supported
While available to serve the needs of the university and Nashville communities more generally, the Divinity Library supports the following programs of study and research at Vanderbilt University more specifically:
- Divinity School programs: Master of Divinity (M.Div.), Master of Theological Studies (M.T.S.), and Master of Theology (Th.M.) degrees of the Divinity School; and joint programs
- Programs of the Graduate Department of Religion: Master of Arts (M.A.) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees for these concentrations: Critical Studies in Asian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions; Ethics and Society; Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel; Historical Studies; Homiletics and Liturgics; Jewish Studies (M.A.); New Testament and Early Christianity; Religion, Psychology, and Culture; Theological Studies; as well as joint programs.
Beyond these primary commitments, the Divinity Library also supports the following:
- Undergraduate studies in the Religious Studies Department of the College of Arts and Science;
- A continuing studies service sponsored by the Kesler Circulating Library endowment, which extends use of Divinity Library materials to those involved in church-related vocations, both locally and across the country via postal services.
- Divinity School alumni, with local access and borrowing privileges, and limited remote access to relevant electronic databases in religion/theology.
Faculty, students, and staff engaged in the above-named academic programs form the main clientele, while the Kesler service enables the Divinity Library to extend use of its collection to the related professional community. The Divinity Library serves other programs of the university whose parameters overlap the disciplines of religion, and, overall, serves the university’s needs in the field of religion.