Introducing the Open Access Digital Theological Library (OADTL) Creating the World’s First Entirely Open Access Library in Religious Studies

Abstract

This article introduces the Open Access Digital Theological Library (OADTL), a new, fully open access digital library for religious studies. The OADTL, curated by professional librarians and employing OCLC's integrated library system, seeks to apply the principles of professional librarianship to make all open access content in religious studies fully discoverable to a global audience. The initial collections contain over 100,000 ebooks and over 200,000 full text, peer-reviewed, articles. The project is funded by a not-for-profit corporation, the Digital Theological Library, a 501c3 charity. Collections include recently published OA content, dissertations, public domain documents, and books from institutional repositories--as well content for Open Access journals. Much of the content is cataloged as e-content for the first time in this library. There are no fees of any kind for use.