Digging Deeply in Catholic Studies The CRRA's Collaborative Approach in Providing Access to Rare and Unique Catholic Collections

Abstract

This paper introduces the work of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA), a non-profit organization comprising fifty Catholic colleges, universities, seminaries, and religious congregations. In service to its mission "to provide enduring access to Catholic research resources in the Americas," the CRRA has launched two significant initiatives of freely available and collaboratively curated content: the Catholic Portal and the Catholic News Archive.

The paper includes a brief history of the organization and introduces the Portal and the Catholic Newspapers Program. Highlights include innovations in deep indexing and discovery through finding aids across aggregated content, digital content, text mining applications, and links to additional Catholic digital resources.